The Ivy League schools not only enjoy a resounding reputation in the United States itself, they also attract the best and brightest from countries around the world. And Columbia University, located in the heart of New York City, America's Big Apple, appeals all the more highly to flocks of budding young scholars bent on joining the ranks of the world's movers and shakers thanks to its geographical advantages.

Even though it borders on crime-troubled Harlem, Columbia University, with its elegant classical architecture, stands out amid the splendor and squalor of tony, high-priced Manhattan with grace and dignity. Bolstering its dignified character is St. John's Cathedral, the second largest Catholic cathedral in the world and the largest church in the United States, which rises to the east. People who visit it are always surprised to discover that such a famous school, in such a huge city, is actually so small.

"The campus may be small, but it's well put together!" says Professor C.T. Hsia, who retired from the department of East Asian studies on May 4th after teaching there for more than 30 years.

And it's the only member of the Ivy League with no ivy. "The air pollution is so bad, ivy is more ephemeral than perennial," quips Wei Shih-chin, a former president of the Pine Society, the Taiwan student association on campus.

No matter. Greater New York City, a political, economic, cultural, artistic and media center for the world, makes up for these deficiencies. Central Park, which stretches--verdant green in spring, snowy white in winter--for some 50 blocks to the southeast, is a veritable "satellite campus."

A Potent Mix of Town and Gown: No wonder Columbia has always touted itself as "offering New York City thrown into the bargain," and no wonder that gimmick has so often worked.

Given its location and credentials, even though it leads the other Ivy League schools in tuition and living expenses and is mocked by some for being so "money oriented," there are still scads of people stumbling over each other to get in.

A newly arrived freshman will sooner or later be led by an upperclassman on a "pilgrimage" to the bronze statue of Alma Mater, donated by an alumnus, that stands in front of the administration building and is considered a symbol of the university's spirit. Hidden away on the statue somewhere is an owl, representing wisdom. If you can't find it, they say, you probably won't graduate!

At the beginning of each semester, there are always a clutch of students standing in front of the statue craning their necks trying to spot the owl. This sort of behavior, characteristic of freshmen, brings a smile to the faces of the older students, who sometimes go over to help.

Once past that hurdle, there are plenty more to come.

Su Chi, a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia and a professor of foreign affairs at National Chengchi University, recalls that when he enrolled as a graduate student in political science in 1976, the department head made things clear right off the bat: "It takes 8.4 years on average to get a degree." Not only that, but "there's a very high 'casualty rate." Less than half actually succeeded, Professor Su says.

Wei Cheng, director of cardiac surgery at Tri-Service General Hospital, says that students in the school of medicine have the habit of trying to guess which questions will be on the exams beforehand, but their instructors always keep one step ahead.

Past exam questions have been bound together in a booklet as thick as a textbook, and reading through it actually takes about as much time as reading the textbook. The advantage of studying the questions is they give you a grasp of the essentials. But the teachers always manage to throw in a curve ball, and you won't get by if you try to rely solely on rote memorization.

Cradle of Super Achievers: The Chinese students at Columbia call somebody an "old hero" if he has the following credentials: first, he has to have studied for a long time without graduating, and second he has to know a lot of people and be single. Since a doctoral degree, especially in literature, history or philosophy, really is difficult to earn, graduate students have a good chance of becoming a hero, and some of them remain one for years.

Just because its standards are so high--because it's so hard to be admitted to and so hard to graduate from--Columbia holds the enviable place it does in the world of academia.

Alexander Hamilton, one of America's Founding Fathers, was a Columbia alumnus. And the prestigious Pulitzer Prize is conferred by the School of Journalism. Joseph Pulitzer, a renowned American newspaperman, founded the school, which has trained more than 4,000 leading workers in the news media. The seriousness and scrupulousness with which the prize is awarded have raised its status and that of the school it is associated with.

John Dewey, the dean of American experimental education, the famous psychologist, Edward L. Thorndike, and many noted educators, all came from the Teachers College. Fourteen mayors of New York City and 10 governors of New York State are Columbia alumni.

High employability is another of Columbia's selling points. MBA holders are fought over by Wall Street banks and leading corporations. Journalism graduates are core elements of the New York Times and the major television networks. Law school alumni are the darlings of New York legal circles. According to informal figures, almost one in three of the school's graduates lives and works in the New York area.

Ivy League All the Way: Columbia University was founded in 1754, somewhat later than Harvard, the oldest of the Ivy League schools, which was founded in 1636, but it's still the genuine article, an institution in tradition, with a history longer than that of the United States itself.

Back then, when America was still a British colony, King George Ⅱ donated funds to the citizens of New York to build "King's College," aimed chiefly at providing instruction in languages, humanities and science. After independence, the school was renamed Columbia College in honor of the discoverer of America.

In 1857, due to financial difficulties, the college was moved from lower to central Manhattan. During the 40 years it was in central Manhattan, it added departments in medicine, law, engineering and architecture and graduate schools in political science, philosophy and theoretical science.

The college moved to its present location in 1897. By 1912, the schools of journalism, oral surgery, library sciences and education had been added one after the other, and Columbia was formally named a university.

At first, Columbia was a four-year college and only took men. With the rise of the women's movement, a separate college was set up exclusively for women, Barnard College. When Columbia finally broke precedent in 1983 and started accepting women, it was big news at the time.

The 16 graduate schools and 69 departments at Columbia aren't all mutually integrated; some are completely independent in terms of administration, personnel and finances. Registering freshmen are often surprised to discover that the same credit may entail different fees and different requirements in different schools and departments.

Among the 20,000 or so students currently enrolled at Columbia, graduate students make up the majority, or about two thirds. Some colleges, such as journalism, law and education, don't take undergraduates at all. Generally speaking, most of them are small in size but high in quality. The schools of arts and letters, history, philosophy, law, management, journalism and international relations are especially renowned. Comparatively speaking, the school of engineering, which was set up later than they were, is not as well known, a common characteristic of most Ivy League schools.

First-Rate Faculty and Internships to Match: The faculty includes 42 Nobel Prize laureates, seven winners of the National Medal of Science, ten members of the National Academy of Engineering and 89 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. X-rays, the long distance telephone, FM radio, lasers . . . are all inventions of Columbia professors.

Cheng Chieh, who earned a master's degree in educational media at the Teachers College last year, took a class in producing children's television programs and gained a lot of experience by following her teacher to work and watching and doing: her teacher was a producer of the program "Sesame Street."

Since her minor was journalism and the department maintains good relations with the broadcast media, TTV newscaster Chang Ya-chin was able to work as an intern at the three major U.S. networks, an enviable opportunity for someone in her line of work.

Thanks to its prime location and sterling reputation, Columbia not only carries out all sorts of research projects for the United Nations and major multinational corporations, it manages to draw statesmen and world leaders in business and academia who are visiting New York to give lectures and seminars. From noon to two each day, students can be seen happily rushing off to catch the lecture or speech of their choice: former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the U.S. Congress, the Russian dissident Natan Sharansky on Jews in the Soviet Union, former Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on his country's political situation . . . as long as you're in the mood to listen, you won't come away empty handed.

In the spirit of New York City itself, freedom and openness of expression define the Columbia school tradition.

Freedom and Openness of Expression: Columbia played a leading role in the yippie movement. Its students and faculty advocated detente with the Soviet Union during the Cold War . . . And Columbia is the only Ivy League school that was racked by student unrest and upheaval.

Chuang Huai-i, chairman of the Central Daily News and a Columbia alumnus, considers Columbia a traditional, academically oriented university that at the same time keeps up with the social pulse. As an example, he says that Columbia did a study for the U.S. State Department during the sixties on how to eliminate armed revolutions in Third World countries, and it studied how to prevent riots for the U.S. government.

In addition, like Harvard and its core curriculum, Columbia is known far and wide for its stress on offering a well-rounded education. The undergraduate program stipulates that students must be familiar with the four core fields of philosophy, literature, history, and music and the arts, no matter what their major is. All four are required for students in the College of Arts and Sciences, and at least two for students in the College of Engineering. After four years of rigorous training, a graduate is produced combining a knowledge of the humanities and cultivation in the arts with specialized expertise.

Hsia Ming, a doctoral candidate in physics, says that in literature they went from the works of ancient Greece and Rome to Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels and Crime and Punishment. In music they started with Gregorian chants and continued through Haydn, Beethoven and so forth. The teacher played recordings for them in class and analyzed the style of each piece. In philosophy, the required reading list covered the Greek philosophers, the Bible, Marx, Kant and Nietzsche. They usually read a book a week, and if you ever slacked off, you'd never catch up.

A Well-Rounded Education: Electrical engineering student Yang Cheng-hsien says that for quizzes in his literature class the teacher would pick passages and ask who wrote them and where they came from. In music class, they had to hand in papers and attach a ticket stub from Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center to prove that they had done their "extracurricular assignments."

In a cosmopolitan metropolis like New York, people of every skin color can be seen wherever you look. Foreign students make up more than a fourth of the entire student body at Columbia, quite a substantial number, and the professors don't coddle them or discriminate against them either. In Su Chi's experience, students with scores of less than 600 on the TOEFL test will have a very hard time handling the reading load of l,000 pages a week. When Chang Ya-chin wrote her first paper, she assumed that foreign students wouldn't have to bother about grammar and style as long as the contents of their papers were good. But when it came back covered with word-by-word corrections, she grit her teeth and determined to improve.

Bringing together the best, Columbia makes high demands of its students but at the same time provides them with an excellent environment for research and study.

When a political science student wants to know what's going on in Moscow, she or he doesn't have to wait for the evening news, because Columbia's Russian Institute receives direct, immediate transmissions from the Soviet Union. This is another area that the school boasts about in attracting students: see what strong support systems we have!

Hitting the Stacks: Its library resources are another point that Columbia prides itself on. Consisting of 26 individual libraries, the library system houses more than 5.6 million volumes, the seventh largest collection in the U.S.

Each library has its own special features. The journalism library, for instance, contains file clippings from the New York Times over the past 20 years and categorized information on every conceivable subject. Besides serving students and faculty, it also attracts people from the outside, especially reporters mining for information. The library of the Teachers College contains textbooks from elementary schools and high schools in the U.S. and important countries around the world dating back over the past 70 years.

The C.V. Starr East Asian Library can't compare with the Library of Congress or Harvard Yenching Library in the size of its holdings, but since New York is such a cosmopolitan city and the library is open to the public, "we must have the highest lending rate of any East Asian library in the country," according to Marsha Wagner, the head librarian. She says that local gazetteers and family genealogies are among its important strengths. The library's first Chinese-language acquisition was a set of the Ku-chin t'u-shu chi-cheng (Complete Collection of Graphs and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times), a gift of the Empress Dowager of the Ching dynasty.

Columbia is supposed to hold three precious treasures for Chinese people. One is the oil paintings of Hu Shih, another is a tree planted personal ly by the Ch'ing dynasty statesman Li Hung-chang, and the third is a plaque presented by Li Yuan-hung, an early president of the Republic of China. The latter two have disappeared whether from neglect or from ill keeping, but the oil paintings that Hu Shih presented to the university as an alumnus still hang on the walls of the philosophy lecture hall and silently look down on the students engaged in abstruse discussion.

Outside the classroom, Columbia students enjoy a marvellous array of choices--not considering costs, of course.

High Life in the Big City: In New York, everything is convenient--food, clothing, transportation, entertainment--as long as you have the money. In fact, housing is a pretty big headache for Columbia students. Dorm rooms are hard to come by, and crime is a concern for those living off campus. University guards patrol the environs at night and do their best to protect the students.

As for food, "everything you might want isright here, except maybe dog," a Chinese student tells incoming freshmen. And that's no exaggeration.

In terms of entertainment, Columbia offers opportunities comparable to those of New York University, located in lower Manhattan. Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Broadway, SoHo, Little Italy, Greenwich Village . . . the shows and performances are countless. Although some people compare living in New York to being locked in an "urban jungle," most Columbia students are only too happy to find themselves in the midst of diverse creative, free and avant-garde extracurricular activities. "It was more than worth it!" exclaims Teng Chieh, who has earned two master's degrees at Columbia: New York is a blast.

Sounds of Home from the "Voice of China": Chinese students have formed a "Voice of China" club that broadcasts a Chinese-language program centered mainly on music over the univer sity radio station. Plagued by skipping needles and a lack of funds, undergraduate biology major Li I-hung says helplessly: "This was the first FM radio station in the world, but now it's the most backward in New York."

The program's audience extends beyond the student body and includes many overseas Chinese and even non-Chinese as well. A special program they produced to mark the 100th day after the Tienanmen massacre was very well received. An older American woman calls and asks them each time to play songs by Tsai Chin's, and a student from the mainland doing time in prison called just to chat . . .

After receiving such a warm response, the members have worked even harder at what is. after all, just a university radio program produced by students. "Everyone goes back to Taiwan during winter and summer break to stock up," biochemistry major Lin Meng-ching and music major Lu Chao-ying say, explaining that the demand for recordings is so high. In New York, where the competition among radio stations is so fierce, even shoestring-budget programs have to constantly strive to improve.

True indeed, New York is subject to all the defects of a big city: crime, traffic congestion, poverty, pollution and alienation . . . but the charm it offers combined with Columbia University is a call that many budding young scholars seeking a global perspective can't resist.

Resting on a sunny stone bench is one way to take a break from course work.

The School of Journalism is renowned far and wide.

Drawn by its reputation, college applicants come to Columbia for a tour.

Classical architecture is one of the school's special characteristics. （photo by Wang Chih-cheng）

Free hot water for tea is available at the center to attract "visitors.".

Even the student activity center has a classic grandeur.

Thanks to its advantageous location, the East Asian Library draws patrons from all walks of life.

One of the three attractions at Columbia related to China. Two trees behind it were planted personally by Li Hung-chang, a noted Ching dynasty statesman.