@slimmy - Have you applied to Stevens and gotten an acceptance? Stevens students - 97% of them - receiver substantial non-loan financial aid. If you are simply looking at the “sticker” tuition listed in the catalog, that is not what your actual cost of attendance will be in general. Typically, Stevens students average more than half of the tuition and fees covered by scholarships. Before you dismiss a particular school as “too expensive”, you really ought to see what the final offer of financial aid is (you should do this for all the schools you are considering). With respect to the faculty, instead of listening to second hand hearsay regarding the professors, why not take a campus tour and sit in on a couple of classes (again, you should do this at all the schools on your list) before you make that determination? The faculty comprise some of the most world renowned experts in the fields they teach, and the opportunity to learn from them is something you won’t get at the vast majority of universities. Stevens is not a place to party for four years, you have to work hard, and in my experience having attended Stevens and two other universities the students who complain about the faculty anywhere are those who didn’t put in the requisite work in their classes and in turn didn’t get the grades they expected. The fact that Stevens’ graduates have the tenth highest starting salaries and the sixteenth highest mid-career earnings of all United States institutions of higher learning attests to this. Finally, have you ever visited Hoboken? Hoboken is called the “jewel of the Hudson River Gold Coast”. It is a gentrified, sophisticated, city that has one of the highest per capita incomes of all New Jersey municipalities. Stevens itself was recently ranked as the fifth safest campus of all in the United States, and the safest in NJ. Hoboken is a very safe city, it is by no means “slightly bad” in any sense of the word (in contrast for example to Newark, the home of NJIT, which truly is a bad location).