Boston College, University of Michigan, Northeastern or Boston University

Please help us decide. Down to our Final 4. All Accepted.
Money about equal (approx half tuition) except Univ of Michigan may be 6000+/yr
Our major may be Biology at BC, may be Biology or Engineering combination at the others.
I don’t want to focus on the major, we will make it work. We live 3 hours from the Boston area.

I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of these 4 great schools,

Anything that can help us make a decision in the next 2 weeks.
We are headed out to visit all of them ASAP.

Our first thoughts are the order that I listed them in above.
We got into the honors program in BC and Northeastern.

We like the idea of a campus community.
The more detail the better, positive an negative.

Thank you so much in advance.

BC / Univ of Michigan / NE / BU

Dad

I would recommend Michigan, but if you’re planning on living and working in the Boston area after you graduate then you may want to consider the importance of alumni networks (BC’s is very strong around Eastern Massachusetts IMO).

@Collegbound1st First choice should be Michigan, BU, Northeastern… then BC

These are great choices. Wow…hmmmm…i’d knock out michigan simply because living in Boston just makes sense for lots of reasons.

Then…hmmm…honors students at Northeastern get to live in international village…and that is very cool.

Wow, i think it’s going to come down to the visit…you have, what, maybe 72 hours left?

“.i’d knock out michigan simply because living in Boston just makes sense for lots of reasons”

That doesn’t make sense, for a lot of reasons.

  1. NEU because of co-op opportunities. 2. Either BU or Michigan (Michigan --> good biomedical engineering/bio informatics). Is Michigan $6000 more expensive than the others, or is the cost of attendance roughly $6000/PA?

BC or Michigan but if you want a campus that is more of a community that is not overwhelming then BC wins. It is such a great campus. Michigan and Ann Arbor are amazing too but the scale is colossal.

Great to have those two to choose from.

“BC or Michigan but if you want a campus that is more of a community that is not overwhelming then BC wins.”

Or if you want a community that is not isolated and in the middle of all of the action, then Michigan wins. Michigan’s campus is large, but not colossal. After a few weeks, it won’t feel huge at all. You can’t make a small campus big, but you can make a large campus small; by joining groups and getting involved with friends and classes. I can’t imagine going to a campus that will eventually feel about the same size as high school. To me, that would be too confining.

BC seems like an outlier that doesn’t bring anything to the table, and don’t offer engineering.

Michigan: Probably the best academic option, beautiful rural campus, college town, go with it if it fits and you can afford it

BU: straight city school, good/comparable academics, has Boston over Michigan

Northeastern: Co-op, good/comparable academics, city school but with a campus, has Boston over Michigan, more of a campus than BU but less so than UM

Pick which one has the traits you want. The truth of the matter is that all of them are great schools, it’s about where you prefer to be here, or if location doesn’t matter as much as a slight edge on academics.

PengsPhils, Ann Arbor is not rural, it is a city, albeit a mid-sized one. And I would not say that NEU has "Boston over Michigan. Many would rather go to college in a college town that at a large city.

I didn’t say one was better, my last line in fact mentions that picking location is part of the decision. As far as rural goes, I was describing the campus feel. I mentioned college town after, though I guess that part could have been described better as a mid sized town that’s around the school rather than a college town. The whole point is that the locations are different, and that choice should be a part of the decision. Note I put the same tagline for BU.

I’ve never heard anyone call Ann Arbor rural. Amusing.

Michigan

Ann Abror is rural compared to Boston.

Yeah, BC doesn’t bring much to the table except being one of the top handful in the country if you consider all of the following: academics, sports, location, safety, beauty, transportation, alumni. Other than all those things, its terrible.

“Ann Abror is rural compared to Boston.”

Please. Enough of the northeast bias already. Ann Arbor is not rural at all. Perhaps a dictionary definition might enlighten some of you:

adjective
1.
of, relating to, or characteristic of the country, country life, or country people; rustic:
rural tranquillity.
2.
living in the country:
the rural population.
3.
of or relating to agriculture:
rural economy.

Ann Arbor is a medium sized city of approximately 115,000 people.

Informative, by your reckoning, Boston is rural compared to Chicago and Chicago is rural compared to Paris. None of those statements are accurate, anymore than your statement about Ann Arbor being rural, whether in the absolute or relative sense of the word. Rural refers to an area that is remote, sparsely populated, rustic/agrarian in nature and disconnected from the rest of the world. Ann Arbor is a mid-sized city located in a very densely populated industrial area. There are as many people living within a 60 miles radius of Ann Arbor as there are within a 60 mile radius of Boston. Ann Arbor’s closest airport, DTW, is located only 20 miles from its city center and is as busy and connected as Boston’s Logan. There are probably more Fortune 500 HQs within a 50-60 mile radius of Ann Arbor (16 in total, which is more Fortune 500 companies located in the entire state of Massachusetts) than there are within a 50-60 mile radius of Boston. There is nothing “rural” about Ann Arbor.

Perhaps informative overheard someone say something like, “Yeah, in Ann Arbor there was grass everywhere!”?

Hehe! Good one moooop!

What did you end up deciding?