Better Reputation - TCNJ or Rutgers?

<p>If TCNJ was 14,000 a year and Rutgers was 4,500 a year is there any argument to go to TCNJ over Rutgers in that situation?</p>

<p>This question is really one of whether you, as the undergraduate student, want to be an actual person to your professors or just a number? TCNJ has the added benefit of having the professors engage with their students on a more interpersonal level than Rutgers students. The average classroom size at TCNJ is about 23-26 students, not a crazy 100+ student filled lecture hall. There is a reason why TCNJ students are more competitive than Rutgers students and that is because they have a great faculty that take in the students under their wings in order to challenge their students do their best. Rutgers may be known as a research school with a “wide variety of faculty” but what is the benefit of all that if the opportunity for the student to interact with the professors is minimized with enormously sized lectures and teaching assistants. At TCNJ everything relating to any particular course involves the professor and only the professor whether it be lectures, recitations, labs, and office hours. TCNJ faculty is very diverse with many different backgrounds that cover interdisciplinary areas of study, allowing students to get a dynamic undergraduate experience. All students will find at Rutgers is a over-populated city full of distractions for students to take part in, making it much harder to focus on the reason why you are going to college in the first place, TO GET YOUR EDUCATION. This is great for the university because you eventually do worse in courses to the point where you might have to repeat courses, hence pay them more money. If you want to play up that TCNJ is boring, well be smart and focus on school at school and party hard after at other schools! Parents: word to wise…send your kids to TCNJ over Rutgers ANY DAY!</p>

<p>Plus if anyone thinks TCNJ is boring, they’re straight-up wrong. </p>

<p>Greek Life FTW</p>

<p>As a graduate of both schools, here is my opinion.</p>

<p>TCNJ is cleaner and safer. Look at where the RU schools are: New Brunswick, Newark, and Camdem. </p>

<p>TCNJ has smaller class sizes.</p>

<p>At TCNJ you walk a short distance to classes, at RU you take a bus between campuses.</p>

<p>RU went the big-time football route over academics, and it didn’t even get that right. Some professors don’t even have working phones, while the football coach at RU was the highest paid State employee.</p>

<p>Any HR person in the know is now aware of TCNJ. RU has a better reputation out of NJ.</p>

<p>I have lived in NJ for the past 40+ years, not too far from Rutgers. The general perception of Rutgers by NJ residents is that it’s a GOOD school that most average students can get into. However, nobody is really impressed if you go there because nobody considers it a GREAT school. </p>

<p>I am amazed at how much people “fluff up” Rutgers and call it “world class”. The overwhelming majority (93%) of students who attend Rutgers are in-state. And I’ll bet a good portion of the remaining 7% are international students. If Rutgers is so “world class” with a well-known reputation, why aren’t out-of-state students flocking to Rutgers?</p>

<p>I’m not trying to put Rutgers down because it is in fact, a good school. But come on, it’s not ALL THAT! Otherwise, it would attract tons of talent from out-of-state. To be fair, 93% of TCNJ students are also in-state, but nobody is going around calling TCNJ world class. Both are solid state schools with a different feel.</p>

<p>tcnj all day errrr day</p>

<p>TCNJ is like the William and Mary of the northeast. honestly even though its name is out there as much as rutgers , its still a better school as far as academics are concerned</p>

<p>William and Mary of the northeast? Better than Rutgers? What flavor is the cool aid you are drinking? I understand you guys want to stand up for your school but no one outside TCNJ feels this way. It seems a lot of schools have this same debate about Rutgers (I like to ■■■■■ around different college forums) which shows that Rutgers is the measuring stick for quality.</p>

<p>Yeah, it’s not as well-known but I’d say academically, it’s as good as Rutgers. Which one you choose depends mostly on the kind of environment you’re looking for and the cost of attendance.</p>

<p>TCNJ for all undergraduate programs. Rutgers for Masters and Doctoral degrees, as rutgers in a University, and therefore concentrates more on research.</p>

<p>As a graduate of the College of William and Mary and as someone who teaches at TCNJ, I can say with some certainty that TCNJ is a fine school with excellent students and many opportunities to study with great faculty, participate in a variety of activities (curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular), and enjoy campus life. I wish it had been around when I was a graduating senior at a NJ high school…Rutgers was simply far too big for my taste then, and Wm and Mary was the perfect fit for me from the perspective of both size and academics. My parents had to shell out a lot more money for me in Williamsburg, but they felt it was the best place for me and I’m eternally grateful for their support. (The big decision for me was “UVa or W&M”…I didn’t even give my acceptance to Rutgers a second thought, since these two fine - and smaller - Virginia schools had both accepted me.)</p>

<p>I bet there are graduating seniors like me who feel that Rutgers is just too big of a place for them…they have an alternative in TCNJ. For students who want a big school, Rutgers is there and is a great place. Both schools offer their students fantastic opportunities, and applicants who have received offers of admission from both schools can choose the school that fits them best. </p>

<p>TCNJ is not William and Mary - at TCNJ we don’t have a colonial village next door (or the two million annual visitors it brings to Williamsburg). TCNJ is, though, a very good place to go to college. We hope those students we accept give us every serious consideration. At the same time, we have great respect for Rutgers - it is our state’s flagship university, after all. Both schools are worthy of your respect, and both schools get students to where they want to go - Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Columbia, NYU, et al. - at the grad/prof school level. Students accepted to both schools should relax and pick the one that feels right for them on all levels.</p>

<p>TCNJ is NOT William and Mary. W@M has a fabulous history and is part of the fabric of American History. Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary .Please please stop the comparisons and stop drinking the TCNJ kool aid. Yes TCNJ is a great institution of higher learning but to compare it with WM is not close.</p>

<p>How do you even begin to compare the reputation of two schools that are so vastly different in size and name recognition?</p>

<p>Reputation wise I doubt one will give you a significant advantage in most cases. Just visit both and go to the one you like more/gives you more money.</p>

<p>Rutgers comes off as more commonplace but you can definitely do some great academic work and get a wonderful education there. It just may not be obvious when you say “I went to Rutgers.”</p>

<p>I’d say Rutgers, mainly because it actually has a reputation outside of NJ period. I’ve lived in New Jersey my whole life, and even I had never heard of TCNJ until I was in high school and my mom found out the tuition was so low there. Rutgers, on the other hand, was one of the universities I’d known about since I was a kid. I think Rutgers is more likely to be recognized as a major, well-respected university by employers and graduate/PhD programs throughout the country, and it’s often even recognized internationally. I just don’t think TCNJ has that kind of recognition.</p>

<p>Rutgers is a much larger school though, which never appealed much to me, so in the end I didn’t go there. Still, if you’re more interested in the name, Rutgers is definitely a bigger name school than TCNJ, and it has a positive academic reputation.</p>

<p>TCNJ was meant to be the honors college of NJ colleges. It is definitely much better than Rutgers in terms of the quality of education, faculty, and students. Although it may not be well known, its reputation is quickly growing. </p>

<p>Fun facts: About 86% of the students who are pre-med get into med school each year. Also TCNJ has the #1 business school in NJ.</p>

<p>I agree with the others who state that you cannot compare the two. They are vastly different on so many levels, the common ground being NJ state school. My son is going for civil engineering and chose Rutgers over TCNJ because he liked the larger, more diverse campus. He felt that TCNJ was small and much like high school and the population was not very diverse. We also felt that for engineering, Rutgers has a more established well respected curriculum. The TCNJ civil engineering dept is only a few years old. That mattered to us. May not to others. So it matters to go there and get a feel for what you like.</p>

<p>@sologirl528
The statistics about 80%+ pre-med students getting into med school is misleading. Only 80%+ of faculty approved pre-med students are getting into med school, meaning that faculty filters out the weakest studends, they may still apply to med-school but they are not part of the statistics (kind of weird, and absurd, making the stats artificially higher)</p>

<p>TCNJ stayed higher on our priorities list when D was applying last year. But after additional research and several visits, Rutgers won hands down with the variety of options and choices it could offer.</p>

<p>@CollegeFobia
It is true–like any school with faculty advisors who get to know their students well over four years, TCNJ faculty from any department would not support their students wasting their time, money, and effort trying to get into medical school when they have no chance (this is easy to figure out). So those students who have no chance at med school are supported to find other careers that will fulfill their same goals: helping people, working in the medical field, whatever it is for them. This is high-quality advising by faculty who know their advisees. So the 80+% is what it is, and it isn’t a secret–of those TCNJ students who apply, that many get in. A lot of those students would have gotten in without support from the faculty and the college’s medical careers advisory committee, but a lot would not have (or maybe they wouldn’t have gotten in to their preferred school or when they wanted to go, etc.). The rest had no chance anyways, so it doesn’t make sense to include them in a stat that is being used to attract great students to the college. Think about it this way–if you were someone who had a chance to get into med school, and you were choosing between colleges–would you want to know what your chances were among <em>all</em> people who apply from those colleges, or among all people <em>like you</em>, who actually have a real chance? The latter stat would be a lot more meaningful.</p>