Hi everyone! I am wrapping up my college decisions and am currently trying to decide between CMU and Michigan. A bit of background, I live in Michigan so I receive in-state tuition for UofM and am planning to study civil/enviro engineering at both schools.
Also, I am not receiving fin aid for either however my parents said to consider CMU :,)
Does anyone have any opinions? Thanks!
I assume the CMU you’re referring to is not Central Michigan U? 
Ahhh haha noo Carnegie Mellon sorry I forgot they have the same acronym!
Both excellent schools (tied at #6 by USN, for what that’s worth). With the tuition difference, I can’t imagine not choosing Michigan without some very special circumstance.
(true story - back when I was an undergrad, we were very restricted from using “CMU” because Central Michigan had some type of copyright/claim, or at least that’s what the administration would tell us. That seems to not be an issue anymore. Perhaps this happened around the same time they got rid of the hyphen).
Hard to justify CMU with that huge cost differential, especially since civil/env aren’t one of the high paying engineering majors.
I can’t imagine turning down Michigan for any other school in the world. It’s not just the academics – Ann Arbor is an amazing college town. The combo can’t be beat, IMO. I’d give ANYthing to repeat those years. Lucky you.
Go Blue!
Instate Michigan is one of the best values and ROI out there especially for engineering. Why pay more? Opportunities are just waiting for you to take advantage of them.
Doesn’t CMU have 2-tiered admission to College of Engineering?
i.e. you can be admitted for ALL engineering, or All but EE and CE?
Presumably you are comparing ALL @ CMU vs ALL @ Michigan?
But regardless, IMO, Michigan is a much better choice for you
Thank you all for the advice! The more I look at it, the more Umich is more appealing 
I’m super excited ad ty again !
Not that I’m aware of. Or that Google can find. (fwiw, they have no EE program (ECE=Electrical and Computer) and have ChemE and CEE (Civil and Environmental).)
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Also, CMU is aware of those trying to “backdoor”: Admitted student FAQs - College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University 33
“About one-third of our students are admitted to Engineering as “unrestricted,” meaning they can choose from any of the 5 traditional majors (Chemical, Civil and Environmental, Electrical and Computer, Mechanical, and Materials Science) without restriction. And two-thirds are admitted as “restricted,” meaning they have access to any of these traditional majors, excluding ECE.”
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Sorry I didn’t mention, I was accepted unrestricted!
CMU isn’t known to be very generous. Significant FA gapping is a real possibility with CMU.
I don’t want to hi-jack the thread, but I would like to keep it alive as I was looking for some information comparing CMU and Michigan as well.
My daughter has been accepted into the engineering school at Carnegie Mellon and Taubman’s Urban Technology major at Michigan. If it was not obvious from those two schools, she is somewhat undecided on a major. She has applied to various programs with an eye toward a future contributing to solutions around Food Security / indoor Farming / Sustainability. She is considering programs in liberal arts, Ag/Life Sciences and Environmental Science / Policy and one other engineering school (Cooper Union), but seems to be leaning toward Carnegie Mellon.
Any information comparing the two schools is useful, but I am particularly curious about how easy / difficult it is to take courses, or even change majors, outside the area one starts at in either school. I can see her ending up in comp sci, robotics, biomedical engineering, math, philosophy, data science, policy or . . . something else.
I don’t know enough in detail to say much other than:
Switching to SCS for a CS major will be almost impossible at CMU but CMU has a bunch of CS-adjacent majors in different other schools that seem easier to switch to.
Anyone can declare for CS in LSA (I believe there’s not much in restrictions as of now). I don’t know much about transferring from Taubman to LSA.
You dont necessarily have to transfer between colleges to get the experience. Engineering majors have flexibility to take CS courses and there is a strong interdisciplinary focus. People from Dietrich college in stats and ML are doing an 4th years masters in human computer interaction which is part of SCS. so i dont think its a problem. Also CMU vs Mich if youre considering internships and ug research esp in robotics or automation then basically CMU is #1 in that field
^^^^…and Michigan is #2 in Robotics and just built this:
Thats like so cool omg
CMU Robotics has 200,000 square feet of space across the city, with 40 acres of outside test facilities. 
All going back to when I worked in Red Whittaker’s lab, with the team testing early machine vision/sensing systems on the Frew St. sidewalks. Which ended up inside Three Mile Island After TMI accident in ’79, this Carnegie Mellon team pitched a novel idea for cleanup: Use robots. It was just the beginning. | StateImpact Pennsylvania
Having said that, Michigan’s engineering tour certainly was the most impressive of the ones we looked at when my D was looking at Engineering colleges. They may just be very good at planning their tours, but it certainly left a great impression.
Again, it’s hard to go wrong picking between the two.
Really, the only really difficult transfer internally within UMich schools is gaining admission to Ross Business School. And even then, you have roughly a 37% chance of being admitted as a transfer.
You can get a UMich CS degree in either LSA or you could transfer to the CoE, if that’s what you want to do.