<p>^^^but is it worth $40K? No.</p>
<p>@jkeil: the right question: but is it worth $10,000/year, tuition+R&B? I would say yes, especially since OP’s parents can afford it. Many students can only hope to go to college for $10,000/year and no debt.</p>
<p>And there are a lot of girls who think $100 for a prom dress is a bargain. I’m sure I’ll have my mind made up by April 
But if I end up going to Ohio, will all the good dorms be gone by that time?</p>
<p>Unless the ceiling is falling on your head or the elevator doesn’t work 5 days a week or the plumbing backs up regularly, all dorms are good dorms. You’ll be living with hundreds of people your own age, some of whom are freed from the shackles of their parents for the first time. It’s gonna be a lotta fun. And if it is a lousy dorm, you’ll all have that to complain about together. More important than which dorm is which room-mate, and that has nothing to do with when you apply.</p>
<p>You got into OSU Honors. You’ll get Honors Dorms as long as you deposit early enough.
If your parents can afford it you can always deposit and risk losing your dorm deposit if you change your mind…
<a href=“Honors Housing : Learning Communities : Housing and Residence Education”>http://housing.osu.edu/learningcommunities/honors-housing/</a>
Have you done an overnight at both?</p>
<p>I guess the number(s) that really matter in terms of student selectivity between the two schools as a whole at the undergraduate level is that tOSU 50% ACT 27-31 vs UCF ACT 24-28 as of last year.</p>
<p>Ehh. There’s also not a huge difference between those ranges, either. 27-31 is between the 87th and 97th percentiles; 24-28 is between the 74th and 90th percentiles. The standard deviation on the ACT is about 5.1; the differences between our endpoints and midpoints is quite a bit smaller than that (about 3 points). We’re talking about students who, by and large, are scoring in the top 25% of test takers across the country. The other thing is that what are ACT score supposed to mean?</p>
<p>Again, my point isn’t that Ohio State isn’t a better school than UCF - I think it is. It’s that I don’t like to see students using fairly small score differences on standardized tests (which are only weak to moderate predictors of first-year GPA; most of the variance in college performance is explained by other things) to make huge decisions about where to spend the next four years of their life, and what university is going to show up on their resume. Especially when there are far better things to make those decisions on. Like you pointed out, Sparkeye7, Ohio State is investing in the biomedical sciences with expensive brand-new science centers. OSU probably also has a better library with more holdings; more faculty members actively engaged in cutting-edge research; a better (or at least a better-funded) center; and more on-campus amenities like study spaces, food joints, etc. And of course the honors college is a huge draw. Those things are far more important than wondering whether your peers got a 26 or a 29 on the ACT.</p>
<p>It might be worth noting that OSU honors requires a 3.5 to stay in, while UCF requires a 3.2 UCF and 3.0 honors GPA to stay in. </p>
<p>It’s not so much of the question of which school is better; I think Ohio State is superior. The question is, is it worth the extra thousands of dollars for me on my path to becoming a vet/pharmacist? Could I still have my career if I pick the lesser school? Would it be harder to get experience to get into grad school if I go to UCF?</p>
<p>@julliet, With all due respect, I tend to believe that selectivity factors such as the SAT / ACT scores, high school GPA, class rank, course load, …etc. all reflect more or less how driven or focus your peers are/ will be academically - especially if one is to be a competitive pre-professional student in college such as OP. <a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube;
<p>STEM majors tend to be the strongest students at a school, so looking at the middle quartiles really doesn’t tell you much. You’d be better to look at what the upper quartiles are, because that’s where most of the STEM students will be from…especially after the first semester/year of weeding.</p>
<p>Honeymelon: no one can evaluate whether the difference is worth the price <em>for you</em>. If you had no other choice, UCF would be a fine choice. But you do have a choice, and OSU is a better school.OSu’s honors program will offer you more opportunities than UCF and if you change your major or plans, it’ll be good, and for professional school the professional opportunities will increase. Also, do you want to discover in another part of the country? College is a great time to do this. But some students would rather stay near home. While OSu is large, UCF is even larger. UCF is more commuter, OSU is more residential. The experience and the opportunities will be different. OSu will be better overall. But only you and your parents can decide whether you’re willing to invest that money in yourself or if it’s too expensive. In particular, make sure your parents can afford the difference without loans. But if they can pay out of pocket and you don’t especially want to stay near home, then OSU is the better choice. Everything after that comes to personal preferences, not objective data.</p>
<p>Why are the choices only between those two schools??</p>
<p>I have visited both campuses, and I would say UCF feels smaller than OSU. Then again, I visited OSU my sophomore year. 
@mom2collegekids: I had a bunch of criteria I had for picking a college (affordability, urban area, out of state) and that’s what it was narrowed down to. Paying all those application fees to schools I’m not even going to go to can add up, as well. </p>
<p>You might want to go to admitted student days at OSU, perhaps ask for an overnight, with sitting in on a class, etc.
This way you can compare both more easily.
For what it’s worth: UCF, with 51,000 undergrads, is the 2nd largest university in the US. Its campus is over 1,000 acres.
Ohio State has 43,000 undergrads and the campus is 3,000 acres which may explain why it “felt” larger.</p>
<p>UCF may be smaller acreage wise, but not student-wise. They may be cramming as many students onto a smaller piece of real estate. EDIT…just checked, they have about the same acreage and about the same number of students. Both are mega-size.</p>
<p>I can understand not applying to a bunch of schools and that app fees can add up, but it seems like two very different schools. What state do you live in?</p>
<p>What is your goal budget per year? Who would pay the higher costs to go to OSU? </p>
<p>How are you coming up with the $41k difference in price??? You don’t even know how much OSU will be charging for various things in the coming years. You don’t know what the increases will be. You really don’t even know what next fall will cost since rates aren’t yet set for next year. The published costs are for the CURRENT school year. Each year, costs go up a few thousand. </p>
<p>Are you instate for OSU? What merit did OSU give you to get costs down to about $10k for the first year. </p>
<p>"My parents would have to help pay for what my jobs and scholarships can’t cover, "</p>
<p>Ask your parents how much they can pay each year if you go to OSU? Then come back and tell us what the situation is. They may say that they won’t pay much at all.</p>
<p>I am out of state for both; driving distance to Ohio, have to fly to Florida. I am fine with both ways to travel. I plan to go to OSU again during spring break. Honestly, my parents want me to go to OSU, but I’ve been trained by them all my life to be frugal. It’s just difficult to find justification in paying $50,000 for an education that I can get for free elsewhere. I mean, where will I be 10 years from now? Will my job pay MORE if I went to OSU? </p>
<p>By the way, I miscalculated. My parents would have to pay $14,000 (at least for the first year). I broke it down thus- with my scholarships, tuition is $7,000, room/board/fees/books- $10,000. With my summer job, work study, and minor scholarships, they pay $14,000.</p>
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<p>Whoa, time out! UCF has nearly 60,000 students (51,000 undergrads) and a whopping student-faculty ratio of 31:1 according to its current Common Data Set, which is extraordinarily high even for a public university. Compare that to a 19:1 s/f ratio at OSU. If Ohio State is a diploma mill, UCF takes industrial-scale higher education to a whole new level. There may be reasons to choose UCF–the money, the weather if that matters to you, being closer to home if that’s your preference–but I sure wouldn’t go there for small classes, because you’ll be sorely disappointed.</p>
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<p>With all due respect, juillet, I think there’s a big difference between a student body where the median student is in the top 25% of test-takers and one where the median student is in the top 10% of test-takers. And Sparkeye was perhaps being generous by comparing ACT scores. Most applicants to UCF submit the SAT, and the middle 50% SAT CR+M for enrolled freshmen at UCF is 1090-1270 (average 585 CR, 595 M). That means the middle 50% SAT CR+M at UCF ranges from the 64th to the 87th percentile, a definite notch lower than the ACT percentile ranks you cite.</p>
<p>You’re right that standardized test scores tell us only so much, but this isn’t an isolated data point. You can also compare HS class rank. At UCF, only 30% of entering freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class, and 71% were in the top 25% (meaning the median UCF student was in the top quartile but not the top decile, and roughly 3 in every 10 freshmen didn’t make the top quartile in HS). At Ohio State, 58% were in the top 10%, and 92% were in the top 25% (meaning the median Buckeye was in the top decile, and only 1 in 12 weren’t in the top quartile). You may choose to believe that there’s no difference between students in the top quartile and students in the top decile, but I guarantee you there’s not a college or university in the country that will buy that argument.</p>
<p>Student selectivity is one thing; I certainly don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. But when it comes to things like faculty strength, Ohio State just blows a school like UCF out of the water. Believe me, I’m no Ohio State fan; my alma mater and OSU are fierce rivals on many fronts, and I don’t lightly speak well of the place. But I have to give it some grudging respect; as an academic institution, it’s just much stronger than a place like UCF, and it’s on an upward trajectory.</p>
<p>That said, I don’t think this is an easy call. A grand total of $41K for 4 years at Ohio State strikes me as a pretty darned good deal for a high quality academic institution (there, I said it, though I nearly choked doing it), but the OP needs to look at it in light of her own family’s finances, not mine, and it’s certainly understandable that a student who aspires to vet school would just want to get the diploma, get a good GPA, and save the money for graduate-level professional education, which is going to be costly.</p>
<p>I’d like to point out I got into both Honors programs, so I would have small classes at both. </p>
<p>Honeymelon: look at how many of your classes would be honors during your first two years at UCF. Being in the Honors programs doesn’t mean you only have Honors classes - at some places it’s just one class per semester and the rest of the time you’re in the huge lecture halls with the other students.
Based on my experience with other honors students, half to 3/4th of your first year classes at OSu would be honors. The number of honors classes you take each semester varies depending on the school.
You could email each university and ask 
this way you wouldn’t have to rely on internet strangers.
These are the Honors Classes for Fall 2013 and Spring 2014 at UCF
<a href=“http://ooha.honors.ucf.edu/c/fall2013”>http://ooha.honors.ucf.edu/c/fall2013</a>
<a href=“http://ooha.honors.ucf.edu/c/spring2014”>http://ooha.honors.ucf.edu/c/spring2014</a>
I didn’t find the links to OSu’s courses, but according to their website they offer more than 350 Honors sections a year, which seems more than what UCF offers.</p>
<p>it almost sounds as if you’d feel guilty to take the money your parents have saved for you to go to college? (If I understood right, your parents <em>have</em> the money to send you to OSU, right?)</p>
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<p>Absolutely not. It seems that the posters here don’t really know much about UCF other than what can be gleaned from numbers which is of limited value. Why don’t you go to the UCF forum and ask your questions? I really think you need to visit both schools and talk to the advisors in the relevant departments before making your decision.</p>