The story is that Columbia's Political Science Department didn't have an independent thesis writing option in the 1980s. Princeton, by contrast, made just about everybody do some sort of senior project or thesis.
Amazingly enough, somebody came up to me at work and said that she had read a copy of my thesis . . . not sure how she got hold of a copy, apparently through a friend of a friend of a cousin who got a copy from Princeton.
She liked it though. I told her, "I could do it better now."