Purdue offers around 100 Trustees scholarships per year, hardly a lot. They offer 830 Presidential scholarships per year, a fair number but the total comes to about 15% of their incoming freshman class. That is for both instate and OOS. They do a good job of describing the things they look for in awarding those scholarships (see Zinhead’s attachment). If They have not raised tuition since 2013 and actually decreased the cost of room and board a bit. How long that will continue remains to be seen. IU is typically the school that gets the most attention because of it’s business school. Krannert at Purdue is still a good school.
While Miami University (in Ohio) isn’t a Big Ten school, it’s a large public school with a lot of spirit that’s known for having a strong business program. Might be worth checking out.
Northwestern is the best Big Ten school but you can’t go wrong with Michigan, or Illinois.
You’ll get the best earning potential coming out of Purdue.
GnimInTx, I am not sure you can easily distinguish between Northwestern and Michigan. They are usually considered peers, at least according to academia and industry. UIUC and Wisconsin-Madison aren’t far behind. But it also depends on one’s academic interests. Most Big 10 schools have stand-out programs, like Chemical Engineering and Economics at Minnesota, Business at Indiana etc…
The ROI is primarily a function of industry. Any engineering, business or nursing school, regardless of where it’s ranked, would have a better number than most top schools overall. So any school with a significant fraction of students in those fields are going to do well.
OTOH, Northwestern’s number is dragged down by the fact that 1/3 of the student body are in schools typically associated with relatively low-paying fields (schools of communications, music, journalism, education) and they don’t have business or nursing schools for undergrads.
Minnesota has the lowest cost OOS, but UIUC in-state is the top value here, unless you were able to get a bunch of aid at Mchigan (highly unlikely) or Northwestern (need-based, if applicable).
UW is a great school, awesome campus and city, but while it may have a greater number of highly ranked programs than UIUC overall, it’s not $15,000 better per annum.
Others have said that it’s usually foolish to go OOS, to even a highly ranked state school, if your flagship offers the program(s) in which you’re interested. I tend to agree. The exception in the B1G is, of course, Northwestern, if you could get some need-based aid. Johns Hopkins is also now affiliated with the B1G and the U of Chicago is loosely affiliated. (two other top private schools with pricing and aid similar to Northwestern.