<p>I was accepted into both cu boulder and DU. Which one should I go to</p>
<p>How much does each cost, after scholarships/grants but before any loans?
What is your parents’ budget?
What would your major be?</p>
<p>We just got back from visiting those two schools. As a parent, I was surprised to like Boulder as it was sooo big. But it had a private school feel and the school was pretty well cared for. Being so big, I felt that my D would need to be able to handle issues on her own - which she can. There’s no way you don’t get lost to some degree in a school that big.Hard to grasp the education performance, but I was generally impressed.</p>
<p>Denver on the other hand may be the best school I’ve ever been to (includes Emory, Elon, BU, Northeastern, Syracuse…). The school was medium in size, in an urban setting (nice urban setting), and very updated - except for maybe the dorms. The admissions group did a great job over the last 6 months to get my D interested (from Boston). The most impressive things to me were the true feel of commitment to the students; the effort to show how the school will help the students grow through course work and world travel; the assurance that kids can change plans and they’ll still get them out in 8 semesters; and the strong accomplishments with internships for students - almost. They even won me over on the quarter system (I used to call it trimesters). This school is top notch and really on the move. The current chancellor is retiring and I’m guessing there’s a world-wide search to find someone that will get U of Denver’ reputation to catch up to its reality. If you can afford it - Denver is the choice.</p>
<p>I got a full scholarship to both schools, right now I am thinking about majoring in econ but I’m not sure</p>
<p>Boulder is cool - no doubt. Fun place, active, loads to do and lots of people to do it with. Denver has a smaller feel, but has the city at it feet with the train in campus. I can say with total confidence that Denver’s education and culture is all about what’s good for the students. Not many “fall thru the cracks” I wouldn’t think. Can’t speak to the business and econ programs - I’m viewing it more broadly. </p>
<p>UDenver then - more personalized experience and economics is a strong dept. 
CONGRATULATIONS!!!</p>
<p>I went to Boulder and did a lot of studying at UD because I lived nearby, and what others are telling you is true. You’re lucky to have them both at that price. I loved them both. Denver as a city has really come along, with a very live downtown now and great sports stadiums and teams. When I was there downtown was deadtown because everyone left after work and on the weekends for the mountains and foothills. Not so any more.</p>
<p>I did not consider Boulder big by any stretch; I came in, did my work, saw the same area of the campus each time, and went back to Denver. Never got to know the rest of the campus. That will tend to be your experience, too, unless you get housing on the other side of town and have to take the bus. Big deal. Compared to Penn State, where I grew up, UC was not big. One of the ways they achieve that is by making a lot of the open spaces on campus enclosed by buildings of 3 or 4 or more stories in height all in a rectangle or quad. You cannot look in any direction and see very far, so you don’t realize you’re at a big school. Check this out when you visit. The architecture is extraordinarily nice, and some of the new construction I visited this summer was spare-no-expense, flat-out magisterial. Boulder was a really fun place to do humanities, but my little bit of study in the sciences exposed me to a natural science research center that blew my mind. I was in a general astronomy (lite) course with 400 taught by the dept chair when the first raw footage came back from Voyager of its flyby of Saturn. He took us to the planetarium on campus and projected the video feed on the ceiling, and he started flipping out about what he was seeing and saying, “of course, of course, it has to be that way! why didn’t we think of that before we saw this? ohmigod, there’s a dozen years of work to be done just in this 40 minutes of feed you’ve seen!” It was funny and goose-bumply. And the baby physics class I had was taught by a nobel laureate. There are four at Boulder currently. They frequently bring their research from the nearby NIST (Natl Institute of Standards) into the classroom today just as they did when I was there in the early 80s. I had a great education in the humanities there with great poets walking in and out of classrooms a dozen times a semester. The late Allen Ginsberg was a regular visitor to American and British literature classes, and he’d bring his hipster and beat friends with him and invite other people like John Ashberry to join him. I had a classical history prof who wrote the Roman history textbook and spent every summer studying the old Roman harbor at Caesarea, Israel, with a gang of students in scuba gear and he’d come back in August foaming at the mouth, bragging about what his kids had found there. It was a dreamy place to be, and I was no 18yo at the time but a seasoned 25. The last blow-out of academic Jungian psychology occurred right in front of 400 of us every lecture day; the neuroscientists and psych faculty finally beat the Jungians into discredit while we watched. It was a great place to be alive and a student. And it was nowhere near Boston (which I returned to for grad school).</p>
<p>Oh, did I mention the nude beaches? Or The Hill? or the mall? Or the skiing, hiking, climbing, snowshoeing, biking, fishing, and motorcycling in a dozen of the prettiest counties in the world? </p>
<p>I do hope you’ll consider Boulder closely. But if you decide to go to Denver I’ll still tell you where the best powder is to be found in the back bowls at Vail.</p>