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Program Focus: Like New York itself, these two universities pretty much offer a dazzling array of courses and programs. While it's certainly true that NYU and Columbia are two of the best places in the world to study finance, it's also true that the most common misperception about NYU and Columbia is that they are finance schools. These schools are more like department stores with widely diverse offerings than they are finance boutiques. “Our single biggest challenge,” says Kim Corfman, vice dean of MBA programs at NYU, “is letting potential applicants know that we have areas that are just as strong as finance. We have a reputation in finance that we don't want to discount, but we also have great strength in other areas, especially strategy and marketing.”

Or consider that Columbia Business School offers more than 130 electives, an amazing array of choices. There's a private equity focus and a “value investing” focus, the latter with a curriculum of eight courses alone, from “Legends in Value Investing” to “Distressed Value Investing.” A “media” focus boasts 26 courses at Columbia's schools of business, film, law, journalism, international and public affairs, and arts and sciences. You can even do deep dives on such specialized areas as “social enterprise” or “healthcare and pharmaceutical management.” With a full-time faculty of 150 plus 50 more adjunct professors, Columbia offers extraordinary flexibility. The same is true of NYU with a full-time faculty approaching 200 professors and another 100 adjuncts.

NYU offers 20 different specializations for MBA students, from luxury marketing to supply chain management and global sourcing. Finance alone has a half dozen specializations: Corporate Finance; Finance; Financial Instruments and Markets; Financial Systems and Analytics; International Finance, and Quantitative Finance. There's also specialities in media and entertainment as well as social innovation and impact. Almost all of NYU's MBAs graduate with one specialization, though you can take as many as three. Some 49% of students opt for the finance specialization, by far the most popular, while 22% pick strategy, 19% go with corporate finance, 18% take marketing, 15% select entrepreneurship and innovation, and 8% go with social innovation and impact. “Regardless of how you count, we have more elective courses than any other school,” claims Kim Corfman, NYU's vice dean of MBA programs. “Schools that have only full time programs can't offer as many courses. Our full-timers will have part-timers in electives at night. But you also can take the program and take courses only during the day and never see a part-timer in the class.” There are an incredible 291 electives on the books at NYU: 72 in finance, 45 in marketing, 38 in economics, 33 in management and organizations, 27 in information systems, and 25 in accounting. The evening courses meet just once a week, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Not surprisingly, NYU's largest number of electives are in finance, followed by management, marketing, and economics due to the school's long-time emphasis on economics history.

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Facilities: Unfortunately, Columbia Business School has the absolute worst facility of any prestige b-school. That's no fault of the school's leadership. For years, several deans have been trying to get a new world-class building to replace the 1960s-built Uris Hall, but politics and highly limited space on campus have made this a long, and difficult quest. Meantime, all of Columbia's peers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new world-class complexes so the contrast between what Columbia has and everyone else is vast. Uris is an unattractive concrete slab of a building, over-crowded and sub-standard in every way. Truth is, even when the building opened in the early 1960s, it was considered so unattractive that architecture students picketed the structure's dedication. No wonder the school's elaborate website contains only a single photograph of the outside of Uris among numerous slideshows of the overall university campus and New York. It has been renovated, but has limited places to study and few classrooms. There is no business school residence hall. Instead, some b-school grads get to fight it out for the limited graduate housing with Columbia's other schools. Half of the MBA classes, including the core, gets taught two blocks away from Uris at Warren Hall, a building on 115th St. shared with the university's law school. Though the school has two other buildings, they are used for the Executive MBA and executive education programs. So all the action in the MBA program occurs in Uris and Warren on Columbia's Morningside campus which runs from West 114th St. to West 120th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. This will change, perhaps by 2012, when the b-school is supposed to move to the university's expanded campus, a 17-acre tract of land in West Harlem from Broadway to 12th St. between 125th and 133rd St. This new university campus won't be fully built until 2030.

Even though NYU has a more modern and attractive facility downtown, the single biggest complaint there is still about space. “It's probably a complaint that everyone has in New York in general,” says Anika Davis Pratt, NYU's director of admissions. “Space is something people feel we never have enough of.”

Teaching Methods: Both schools offer up a variety of teaching methods, from case study to lectures and team projects. There's really no major difference in the classroom approaches at NYU and Columbia with the exception of team projects. Columbia says that case studies and lectures each account for 40% of the classwork, while team projects make up 15%. NYU says team projects account for 30% of the workload, twice as much as Columbia, and that case studies make up 25%, while lectures account for 20% of the teaching.

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Culture: NYU and Columbia are big-city schools with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with that. Typically, schools in large urban settings tend to have more intense and competitive cultures. It's easier to escape school in a big city than it is in a college town or rural setting. While cut-throat competition may be exaggerated at Columbia (it has been said that MBA students once hid books from classmates), it's true that the Columbia environment is fairly competitive. A year ago, a graduating Columbia student penned an essay for the campus newspaper in which he he bemoaned the lack of a supportive and encouraging culture. “There is no community at Columbia,” he wrote. “There is no sense of solidarity. There is no creative energy. Too many people out for themselves.” There's more than some hyperbole in those comments, but they are directionally correct. NYU may have a slight advantage in being in the village and having superior facilities over Columbia.

NYU's Vice Dean for MBA Programs Kim Corfman has both a Columbia MBA and a Columbia PhD. Yet if she had to do it over again (yes, of course she's biased as an NYU employee), Corfman contends she would go to NYU. “I would not go to Columbia if I were an MBA student,” she says flatly. “Columbia does not embrace location. NYU completely embraces its location. We love being in New York. We bring the city into our classrooms and we go into the city. They (Columbia) would probably be as happy on the Palisades instead of Manhattan.”

Ouch. It's true that NYU integrates the city into its classrooms through a group called New York Initiatives which develops live cases on quintessentially New York institutions from the Metropolitan Opera Co. and Steinway Piano to Mets baseball. The latter is a case in marketing and micro-economics in which students explore ticket pricing issues and how to bring more families to the ballpark. But it strikes us as a little unfair to say Columbia doesn't take advantage of its New York location. For one thing, some 3,000 Columbia alums return to its campus every year for different events, including class lectures and conference keynotes. Thanks to its New York location, Columbia is able to get 300 alums to come back each year for its mentoring program for MBA students.

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Size: Total full-time MBA enrollment at Columbia is 1,293, about a third larger population than NYU's 826 students. In its September-entry class alone, Columbia brings in about 554 full-time MBAs as well as another 121 Executive MBAs. Columbia divides up its new students into clusters of 60 to 65 people who take most of the first-year core classes together. Meantime, NYU enters a class of 390 to 400 students and breaks that down to exactly the same size as Columbia: blocks of 60 to 65 students. Students within a block will often take many courses together, but the core curriculum at NYU consists to only two required courses: accounting and statistics. Then, you choose five out of seven other fundamental courses on a set menu. Most NYU students take three or four blocked courses in the fall and one or two in the spring.

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The more detailed differences between Columbia and NYU?

Geography: Columbia Business School and New York University are quintessential big city universities. Their location in New York, the business, financial and media center of the world, brings each school massive benefits: a living laboratory of markets and businesses, an endless supply of well-qualified adjunct teachers, and more visiting executives who gravitate to its classrooms to speak and lecture. “We have a big advantage being in New York City because there are so many opportunities for students to visit local alumni in their work offices and for alums to come back and coach students on campus,” says Ethan HanaburyHanabury, who heads up the school's EMBA programs. Columbia alone estimates that it gets more than 500 guest speakers a year on campus as well as 3,000 returning alums who come to recruit, to speak, and to attend conferences. That is a networking opportunity that is unique. There are few cities in the world that are as alive, exciting and dynamic than New York. The drawback to the location is also obvious: As one Columbia student put it, “It's easier to get a little lost in New York, to feel a little less rooted if you're from outside the area, and to be a little more anonymous.” The social dynamic is completely different as well. Because Columbia and Stern MBAs rarely live together but are spread throughout the city, they're far more likely to be more competitive with each other. It's easier to stab someone in the back when you rarely see them outside of class. While both schools call New York home, there's a vastly different neighborhood vibe to these institutions. Columbia is uptown, on the edge of Harlem, while NYU is in the heart of Greenwich Village. Both neighborhoods have funky attributes.

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Top Ten Reasons to Go to New York University?

You prefer Greenwich Village to Morningside Heights (we're not kidding!)
You want to specialize in one of NYU's 20 different specialties, especially an area that Columbia doesn't touch, such as luxury marketing.
You'd like a certain amount of your coursework to be taken at night. NYU's massive undergraduate MBA program allows you to take those evening courses, too.
You expect to work in New York and want to be part of an extremely strong alumni base in the city where every major company is populated with at least some key players who got their MBA ticket punched where you did.
You really want to study New York: the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Mets, even Steinway Piano. NYU has classes and case studies that integrate the city in ways that even Columbia doesn't.
You are highly competitive and want to go through a tough, competitive MBA program.
You want to be in a top ten MBA program and NYU just makes the cut on our ranking.
You don't mind traffic, people congestion, overpriced housing, and putting up with the hassles of big city life.
You love big city life, or at least badly want to try it out, and you tend to dislike small towns in isolated places.
You root for the New York Yankees, love museums and Carnegie Hall.

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Top Ten Reasons to Go to Columbia?

It's one of the six best MBA programs in the world.
It's all about location, location, location. That is, New York location.
You want a deep and thorough education, not merely in finance but a subset of it, such as investment management, private equity, value investing or something even more obscure.
You expect to work in New York and want to be part of an extremely strong alumni base in the city where every major company is populated with at least some key players who got their MBA ticket punched where you did.
You are highly competitive and want to go through a tough, competitive MBA program.
You thrive in a larger environment and enjoy being a smaller fish in a bigger pond.
You want to be part of an extremely diverse class, with lots of international exposure.
You don't mind traffic, people congestion, overpriced housing, and putting up with the hassles of big city life.
You love big city life, or at least badly want to try it out, and you tend to dislike small towns in isolated places.
You root for the New York Yankees, love museums and Carnegie Hall.

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These two business schools have an almost unnatural advantage in being located in arguably the greatest city in the world. Both New York University's Stern School of Business and Columbia Business School are all about the New York experience and the awesome resources these schools routinely leverage from what is the capital of the world. Columbia enters two MBA classes a year, in January for students who don't need or want a summer internship, and in September for a more conventional full-time MBA schedule. The diversity of exceptional students in both schools is mind-boggling: In Columbia's Class of 2011, for example, are students who have interned at the White House, managed hedge funds, published books, produced TV shows and launched companies in the U.S. and abroad. The class includes an army ranger and recipient of the Bronze Star, the founder of the largest organic vegetable processing factory in northwestern China, a finalist on American Idol (we're not kidding), and a three-time Grammy award-winning music producer.

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2010-10-22 21:15

As Frank Sinatra famously sang it, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. It's up to you, New York, New York.”