Over the next month, high school seniors across the country will find out whether or not they got into their first-choice college. But for some students who had dreamed of going to Columbia University, acceptance suddenly doesn’t sound so hot.
“If you were to compare Columbia with virtually any Ivy League, virtually any other Ivy League will win [in terms of desirability with students] — and even non-Ivies like Duke, Emory and Washington [University] in St. Louis,” college admissions consultant and Command Education CEO Christopher Rim told The Post.
As President Trump has cut Columbia’s federal funding in an effort to squash chaotic pro-Palestine protests, applicants are weighing whether to accept an offer of admission from the school or to go elsewhere.
Hopefuls applied with the knowledge that the campus had been shut down by a pro-Palestine encampment last spring, but Rim says they generally didn’t expect things would still be so crazy.
“Lots of my clients thought things would be back to normal by now,” he said. “And by the time the school year starts in the fall, who knows? One thousand things can change again.”
The non-stop drama has Rim predicting that many of the families he works with, “unless they have a very specific reason they want to go to Columbia,” will happily throw an acceptance letter aside for an alternative school.
While regular decision admissions results haven’t been released yet, early decision offers — which require binding commitments from students — were made over the past couple of months.
Rim said he has has several parents desperate to back out of those deals. One family is trying to wiggle out because funding cuts might shutter a lab their child was planning to work in on campus.
He added that some locked-in early-admission students feel a sense of relief watching the president crack down on their future school.
“They’re actually liking what Trump is doing,” Rim said. “They’re like, OK, maybe things are actually going to change.”
Admissions decisions for Columbia’s School of General Studies, which admits non-traditional students with a break in their education, have also been released.
One 21-year-old from Sydney, Australia, who asked to withhold his name for fear of retribution, is on the fence over whether or not to attend Columbia. As an Israeli citizen, he originally applied so he could represent his community.
“I thought that being a Jew on campus could be empowering in a sense, kind of like sticking the middle finger to some people, by advocating on campus and demonstrating for Israel,” he told The Post.
But as illegal protests have continued to ramp up, he’s grown increasingly concerned, to the point that receiving his acceptance letter on March 1 wasn’t the thrill he’d envisioned: “I guess what has me second guessing is, How dangerous is it on campus? Will professors grade me differently if I’m outspoken about Israel?”
His family is strongly opposed to his attending Columbia. “They are like, ‘Why would you want to go there? It sounds like hell. It’s not worth the money to be discriminated against,’” he said.
He’s still waiting to hear from several other universities, including Yale, the University of Washington and schools back home in Australia —and hoping an alternative will arise.
Meanwhile, Rim said some of his clients are seeing the chaos on campus as an opportunity.
“I just had one mom tell me, ‘We should have applied to Columbia, it must be so easy to get into now,’” he said.
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