I’ve been accepted to the following schools, but I’m having trouble weighing their pros and cons, especially regarding price. What would you recommend?
UIUC (Comp Sci)- No scholarship, OOS COA comes to 52 ish
-I really like UIUC’s comp sci but the price tag is a little steep (my parents are hesitant about paying that much for undergrad)
Ohio State (Computer Engineering)- Have a scholarship that makes COA around 30k per year
Texas A&M (Computer science and engineering)- Cost will come to around 17k a year if I make National Merit Finalist (find out about this in February)
Career Aim: I’d like to work in computer science as a software engineering or researcher focusing on artificial intelligence.
What would the Texas A&M price be if you do not get the NMF scholarship?
Note that Ohio State and Texas A&M admit to a pre-engineering program, and you must later apply to your desired major, using college grades and GPA in prerequisites for your desired major. (Be sure that you are in the engineering division, not admitted to a non-engineering status from where it may be more difficult to switch into any major in the engineering division.)
On the other hand, UIUC with direct admission to CS would be a high extra price to pay to avoid uncertainty about getting into your major (if you were admitted to UIUC without direct admission to CS, chances of getting into the CS major are very low, so do not bother, especially at the higher price).
Do you have any other admissions, including net prices and whether you have direct admission to CS or if CS is non-competitive at that school?
@ucbalumnus Without the NMF finalist scholarship, TAMU will come to around 54k, so I would most likely eliminate it from my list. I’ve applied to UVA and Virginia tech, which are in state schools for me. The net price at these schools is around 34k for UVA and 26k at tech. I applied for general engineering at Tech and Computer engineering at UVA.
VT has a similar system of pre-engineering (general engineering) followed by admission to major as OSU and TAMU. However, VT has a 3.0 college GPA threshold for automatic admission one’s first choice major, and the selection process for others based on space available is by GPA. https://enge.vt.edu/content/dam/enge_vt_edu/undergraduate/com_requirements/COM_GE.pdf
With the above requirement, if you decide on TAMU, you need to be very careful with your freshman class selection. You need to build a buffer in your GPA.
How much can your parents pay without borrowing? If they haven’t given you a budget, ask them. Then drop any schools whose net cost is higher than the budget. Did you apply to any financial safeties?
@austinmshauri My parents can pay for UIUC without borrowing but it will be a stretch. They are unsure if the price is worth it when I could potentially go to another school for much less. My financial safeties are OSU and my in state schools (UVA and Virginia Tech). Texas A&M will also be a financial safety if I make National Merit Finalist.
You could potentially save some money with AP credits at UIUC (and elsewhere).
At UIUC, you also pay whatever each program costs for study-abroad and oftentimes, those are cheaper than the OOS rate, so you may be able to save a little that way as well.
But UVa is a fine school. UVa CS alums actually do pretty well.
LinkedIn did a couple rankings once (since taken down) where schools were ranked by how desirable a company their CS grads end up at: https://m.slashdot.org/story/208691