<p>For those familiar with South Jersey and southeastern PA -- any thoughts or comments on how West Chester (PA), Millersville (PA) and Rowan (NJ) compare for UG? Particularly as to the culture of the campus and the character of the UG life? Suitcase schools, big party schools, etc.? Surrounding community a help or hindrance, and in which ways? The student is thinking of majoring in computers, business or phys ed. Thanks!</p>
<p>I also would like to hear about Rowan, as D begins search for school with at least the possibility of some business majors she might be into!</p>
<p>There are over 20,000 ug between the three schools. There must be some insight out there.</p>
<p>West Chester is in a great little college town and is a great state school. It has good sports teams to follow and the kids can walk around with ease. Very safe. If you are a Pa resident the tuition can’t be beat. I would send my kid to West Chester. </p>
<p>I have heard that they are very specific and non moving in their requirements. Changing majors could make it difficult to graduate in 4 years. Check it out.</p>
<p>Like any school the drug culture is not what a parent would hope. I’m not sure if I would send a “big risk taking” kid there. Again check it out.</p>
<p>Good to know. Among southeastern Pennsylvania college-oriented parents, how is Millersville’s reputation different? It seems like the kids at West Chester might have access to what Philadelphia offers culturally, internships, etc. Lancaster County (Millersville) is traditionally agricultural, although there may be growth in the area in the past 10-20 years that I’m not aware of.</p>
<p>From parents who have children in PA State schools, West Chester has a much better reputation…Millersville is considered a ‘Teachers’ college,many attend there to study education…</p>
<p>Hello! I live a few towns over from Rowan. I am very familiar with the area and know many many people who go there. Academically, Rowan is satisfying for the average student. The surrounding community is disappointing at best though. There really isn’t much around the college. Rowan is in the town of Glassboro, and is close to the more-historic Pitman. Neither town possesses much of a culture. That being said, it is only about 20-30 min from Philly, so with a short commute there are a lot of business and cultural opportunities.
Take a visit!</p>
<p>My daughter almost went to Rowan. She’s a theatre major, I don’t really know much about the rest of the school. She liked the size and the proximity to Philadelphia. The school has shuttle buses that go to Philly on the weekends. And it’s a short drive if you have a car. They had lots of activities on campus, and a really nice new gym with indoor pool (D was a swimmer). The town of Glassboro was really building up the area around the campus and trying to make it more of a college town. It was still under construction two years ago when my D was looking at it, it’s probably all done now. The freshman dorms were typical dorm rooms, but the apartment dorms were brand new and really nice. I think that Rowan had a reputation as a suitcase school, but that’s not really true anymore. We visited on a weekend and there were lots of students there.</p>
<p>I’m in Eastern Maryland and Westchester is popular with kids in our area. If I remember right, the tuition is not that bad for out of state. I don’t know that much about the campus. I know a recent grad, he had no problems getting a teaching job in Maryland after graduating.</p>
<p>My husband does a lot of architectural work at Rowan, so I know they’ve made quite a few improvements to the campus over the years. He designed the new student center a couple of years ago that flooded only a week or two later. It’s been fixed since then. He worked on the President’s house (he’s since been fired), a conference room, some bathrooms, dorms, etc.</p>
<p>Rowan seems to be growing and trying to become a better school. I think they’re in the process of combining with a couple of other state schools - I don’t know much info on that, but I can find out.</p>
<p>We’re in South Jersey, shore area. Rowan seems to be on the move. Cooper, a teaching hospital in Camden, is building a medical school to be affiliated with Rowan. Also, Gov Christie has announced plans for Rutgers Camden to be usurped by Rowan, including Rutgers Camden Law School (apparently Rutgers students are not happy about losing the Rutgers brand). Plus, Rowan has a decent engineering program…I think, give Rowan a few years and it may be compared to Rutgers rather than Montclair or Stockton. I haven’t been to the town for years but I’ve heard it’s improving. 20 or 30 minutes to Philly, but also less than an hour to Ocean City or Margate.</p>
<p>West Chester…it’s popular here too, favorable out of state tuition since our NJ school aren’t cheap. There’s a lively even upscale town and I’m guessing you’re 30 minutes to Phila. You’ll get a more urban/Phila suburban student body compared to Millersville. West Chester, to me, overlaps with LaSalle, St Joe’s, Temple.</p>
<p>I’ve toured the Westchester campus courtesy of some faculty neighbors of a friend I visited this past summer in that town. Campus is nice and spacious…a good picture of an ideal residential college. They are also in the process of building up new dorms and tearing down older ones that look worn down. </p>
<p>As for some cons I’ve noticed, it does seem many of the students emphasize dressing in expensive clothes, prices in some walkable town restaurants/shops seem on the high side…surprisingly not much different/worse from/than NYC*, and I actually spotted two barely 18 looking college-aged kids driving Lamborghinis around the campus/town. Unless a student doesn’t care to keep up with students like the above and doesn’t eat out very often…the student may need a lot of money/feel put out at being excluded from activities by students from better financial backgrounds. </p>
<ul>
<li>$3.50-$4 for one measely slice of pizza that’s not even authentic NY pizza…no thanks.</li>
</ul>
<p>FWIW - Here is our families take. Millersville and West Chester are both on my 11th graders radar. Rowan is not with the OOS cost for us. My son goes to school in NJ (private) and Rowan is high on the list of classmates who are interested in Engineering - an amazing program for the price IMO.</p>
<p>Millersville - We haven’t met any student/former student who has not enjoyed the school and surrounding area. But, the only students I’ve met who find employment within 12 months from graduation have been in teaching/education. Others were waitresses, worked as bar tender, retail sales, etc before finding a “real job.” One graduated 4 years ago and has yet to find a job outside waitress. I am hesitant for my son to go there because of lack of internship/career office. It will only be used as a financial safety if need be. FYI - we know students from a large range of majors, including comp sci, so the difficulty in securing a job is not the major.</p>
<p>West Chester – West Chester has worse physical facilities IMO - my son did not see a difference. West Chester has higher off-campus housing fees. Yes, it is a great college town, but with that comes parent concerns for much larger drinking culture and parties. Even if the kid does not partake, many neighbors will. Little escape from the culture on weekends. The former students we know from here, got out what they put in. Those who weren’t aggressive in finding opportunities (internships, getting to know professors) had little success in landing a job at graduation. The business majors seem to easily get sales jobs. Plenty of recruiting for entry sales jobs.</p>
<p>All of these schools are plagued with lower grad rates. I attribute this to the level of college and to the cost. Some kids we know just went because it was the next step. After a year or two, it was apparent some of these kids just wanted an “away” experience and not necessarily an academic experience. When push came to shove, it wasn’t worth the academic effort and they dropped out. I also think both PA & NJ have high costs. Then add the costs increases each year. It just become too much. We are finding private colleges whose tuition rates are not increasing at the same rate as PASHHE schools. With merit, they COA is similar. Don’t limit your search to public schools only.</p>
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<p>Very good advice for the family when the student’s EFC is lower than the cost to attend. We visited Rowan but not the other 2 schools mentioned here. Our kids did not apply to Rowan. It seemed okay, but it looked like one needed a car to be happy (we were not providing one). We were not thrilled with the surrounding area. The on campus facilites were okay.</p>
<p>FWIW, I have read good things about all 3 of these schools. We are instate for Rowan and other NJ state schools. Our son joined the “NJ brain drain” and is attending an OOS private college and it is not costing us more (merit scholarship plus very modest FA).</p>
<p>I’ve visited Millersville twice and West Chester once. My youngest son and I went to WC last year when he was a senior in HS. We made the mistake of going to an open house. It was terribly crowded and they were not set up at all for the amount of people. By this time in my son’s search he was pretty clear on an information technology/systems or computer science major, depending on the school. For WC he wanted CS.</p>
<p>We battled the crowds to talk to the head of the CS department. My son asked about majoring in CS and without asking my son about his background, this guy decided it would be good to make a speech how programming is extremely hard and CS was not for any but the very best student. Nothing at all about the program or why son should attend WC. He was strangely insulting. My son had had two programming classes by then and was at the time taking Calculus. It was weird. Off the list it went.</p>
<p>I visited Millersville with my daughter (ed major) and my older son who was looking for CS. Both had been accepted when we visited and my daughter was accepted into their honors college. My daughter sat in on a class, found the teacher interesting but the students were non-responsive and half asleep. She crossed if off her list. </p>
<p>When I went with my older son, we met up with a friend of his and she introduced us to some CS majors who did a wonderful job promoting their school. They said the classes were challenging but do-able and the Professors very good. This son changed his mind about the CS major and decided he wanted a small LAC instead.</p>
<p>I know several students who have attended Millersville and graduated and a couple that are there now. All really enjoyed their time there. I have a good friend whose son is at Millersville (I recommended it to her!) and she can’t say enough good things about it.</p>
<p>I also know current and grads from WC that say the same thing.</p>
<p>Because neither of these schools are within an hour, and freshman are not allowed cars, they do not come home on weekends.</p>
<p>Very legit assessment…i am not fond of Millersville or Rowan,and West Chester is only ok…visited all three 2 years ago</p>
<p>This is all interesting, and I thank everyone. A few familiar themes are emerging:</p>
<p>Students get out of college what they put into it, and what the program’s reputation will support. Some schools are really known as teacher factories.</p>
<p>Tours are important, but you are still left wondering if what you saw is a reliable indicator of what your experience would be like.</p>
<p>The residential schools that enroll 2.8 gpa kids will have some freshmen who are looking for sleepaway camp. I always wonder if a year or two at a good county college will clarify whether the 2.8 gpa kid is ready to work, before making an expensive mistake (and keep him from falling in with the sleepaway campers on his first semester – they will be gone by the 5th semester.)</p>
<p>I should also have asked about Stockton College, the NJ state school near Atlantic City. Any comments?</p>
<p>I visited Stockton recently and was not impressed. It is a very functional school, if that makes sense. Offers what it needs to offer but nothing to draw you in. The academic campus is really one very very large building with wings A-N or something like that; all the classes, library, theater, dining, etc, are in the one building. Convenient on rainy days, I suppose. Not to my liking. The freshman dorms were fine–functional. I described them as barracks like. They are 3-story loooong buildings divided into wings. Laundry may not be in your wing; you might need to walk over to another wing with your laundry. Lots of cars on campus. Since my D won’t have a car, this is a concern to me. Upperclassmen apartments are supposedly nice, but we didn’t see them. When I asked about the health center, I inquired as to whether they dispense basic antibiotics for things like strep throat or conjunctivitis. (Strange question perhaps, but OD caught a very contagious strain of conjunctivitis her freshman year at college.) I was told no, the kids would be given a prescription and they had to fill it in town. If they didn’t have a car, they would need to find someone who could drive them or hop on a public bus. I was appalled that the school’s policy for kids with infectious diseases was to force them to use public transportation to get a basic antibiotic prescription filled. Seemed like a suitcase school as well. Our tour guide lived an hour away and said she went home almost every weekend.</p>
<p>Bottom line–I really wanted to like the school, but just couldn’t. My impression is that NJ doesn’t have enough seats for its students who want to stay in state so they put together a college system (not including Rutgers, TCNJ, and maybe Ramapo and Rowan) that is functional, that does the job and gets the students their degrees, but doesn’t offer much else.</p>
<p>Thanks for this input on Stockton. It can be hard to tell if a school is a suitcase school. Do you know if any of the NJ state schools break out their enrollment on a county-of-origin basis? That would give an indicator of how many kids stick around on the weekend. I’m sure the dining service and the security people know the percentages well, which means the administration could easily speak to this, but I wonder if they are willing to be so clear about it.</p>
<p>I think most students at the NJ directionals are commuters; I’d have to check on each to be sure, but that’s my sense so far. And yet if there are 3,000 kids living on campus, and they stick around for the weekends, that is plenty of people for the school to have a vibrant social life on the weekends.</p>
<p>Long ago, I was pretty much stuck at a school that became a suitcase school by junior year, and it was not a lot of fun.</p>
<p>I may be a little off in this, because I don’t know enough kids who went to Millersville or Rowan. West Chester come off as very affluent. The town itself is the hub of a bunch of wealthy suburbs, and the college is fairly popular with kids from those and other affluent suburbs within a 20-mile radius, as well as for city kids who prefer a suburban environment. There definitely is a sense that in terms of academics West Chester is a notch above Millersville (and most of the other PASSHE universities), but that may just be self-congratulatory local folklore.</p>
<p>Millersville gets name-checked in The Roots’ excellent, emotionally searing track “The Water,” which talks about a former member’s descent into addiction. Frontman Black Thought (Tariq Trotter) raps:</p>
<p>I met Slacks back in '91, rapping
We went to Millersville to get away from guns clapping
It ain’t last – I’d be in class, dreaming
'Bout 50,000 fans up in the stands, screaming</p>
<p>Rowan I know the least about. One former admin of mine had a kid who went there to play football, and it seemed to do what college often does, which is to say keep a kid off the streets until he matures enough to function as an adult. But not much more than that, at least in that instance. I wouldn’t count chickens before they’re hatched regarding Rowan’s proposed absorption of Rutgers-Camden and the Cooper Medical Center Medical School. There is pretty fierce opposition to that.</p>
<p>I hope you check out my post, “Why Rowan”. I’m a recruiter and have visited all of these schools, and I have a son who’s attending Rowan Engineering. With his grades (4+ w) and SATs (700+ in all sections), he could have been accepted just about anywhere. He chose Rowan for value; it had all that he wanted educationally, lots of activities, and he got a “ride”. My point isn’t to brag, it’s to tell you that there are dozens of people just like him at Rowan engineering. He’s not “slummin’ it” by any means.</p>
<p>Those are quite divergent majors he’s considering, but Rowan is top-notch in all three areas. Like Millersville, it started as a teacher’s college. Rowan still has a teacher’s college (the Education building is worth a check), and has added a top engineering college, a business college, and a medical school. Like West Chester, it has something for all, but I think it’s better in the specialties. Rowan, especially in the specialties, is more selective than West Chester.</p>
<p>In your case, I would recommend choosing a major before selecting a college. A lot depends on your residence; you pay significantly more if you are an out-of-stater. For phys. ed., I can’t tell you the difference. For business, Rowan is good, trying to be great. For computer engineering, it is tops among those three schools. If your student takes the latter, he’ll have fun, but will be working quite hard in and out of the classroom. Engineering majors, and to a lesser degree business majors, have a pretty set curriculum. Switching from one to another is difficult if not impossible and guarantees a “5-year” plan.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be that concerned with grad rates. As state schools, they all have a core of committed students that know what they want and graduate in four years. They also have part-time non-traditional students and others who are there because Mom & Dad wanted them to go, and others that couldn’t cut it financially or scholastically. That’s the flip-side of being more “open-door”.</p>
<p>Open houses and guided tours are fine, but why not (when the HS schedule allows) just do a pop-in and tour it yourself and talk to the professors, observe a class, talk to the students, and eat the food? And pick up a copy of the school newspaper which might shed some light on student concerns.</p>