Soo Emory will be around 45k while UT Austin will be around 22k.
Anyone have suggestions? Is Emory worth the cost?
That’s a huge difference in tuition savings; you don’t know what the future holds in terms of grad school. Emory is a strong match for the first four points mentioned but if finances are an issue, UTAustin is a great option. UTA is a highly respected public university, offering many graduate school options should you elect to go that route later.
@PiccoloMom : The thing about that though, except when you’re talking about professional schools, it is recommended you attend graduate school away from the undergraduate institution.
@bernie12 : O oh I had no idea! Can you explain why that is? Because Emory also has a 5-year program where you can attain a master’s degree + undergraduate.
@PiccoloMom1995 @bernie12 Thank you for the input! Do you think there’s a significant difference in education/ opportunities/ quality of instruction for my major between UT Austin and Emory?
Frankly, we did not do much research on public universities except for the public university honors programs website and their recently published guides. That is one way to make a large university feel more like a private school with smaller classes, honors curriculum, merit scholarships, etc. You can check up on UTAustin there.
If your family is able to afford Emory without hardship, their English, CW and foreign language departments, small classes, and the Carlos Art Museum are all great reasons to consider Emory. Bernie12 has a point about grad school, although I imagine schools such as Iowa, Cornell, UVA, Columbia and Brown with MFA programs see many of their students defying that point since they offer paid TA positions for grad school.
@ploof123 : When I head “graduate work” I think of ultimate goal as PhD. Usually it is not recommended that one does their PhD in the same school (maybe not even Masters perhaps because of the opportunity to get more networking and exposure. Part of becoming an academic or other professional is having a wide range of experience or sources of references. It is difficult to achieve that if you complete grad. school at the same place as undergrad. In addition to this, typically one considering graduate school will consider the strength of individual programs or facets of research so often the UG institution may not be ideal for whatever interest is being developed. Like my friends who were quantitative biology and biophysics were certainly not trying to attend Emory for graduate school. They went on to places excellent and more well-known (mainly have much more research faculty in those areas) in those niche areas.