Johns Hopkins vs Rice vs Case Western Reserve

“Houston, Austin and San Antonio are very accessible and also world class cities, for instance you could attend SXSW”
And Mardi Gras. Dallas. South Padre. Houston is of the best restaurant cities in America. Houston is great.

Disclaimer, I am a Case parent, reasonably familiar with JHU and Rice.

Rice or Case over Hopkins for having a fun four years with lots of smart kids but not stressing out all the time. . Hopkins is more of a pressure cooker in a reasonably unsafe part of Baltimore, that is recovering.

East Cleveland is also a recovering neighborhood, adjacent to Case Western.

Case students are bit more chill/layed back compared to the higher ranked schools (Rice and JHU) . Very nice students at Case hail from Michigan, PA, NY, NJ, Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, MA and Texas, with a sprinkling from the west coast. Case offers mellow Greek life with service built in.
Case asks all students to take three seminar style English classes and those lead to more service projects and
also some pretty interesting discussion classes.

Rice has a lot more students from the south and Texas and Case is more midwestern.

On what to do in Cleveland, it is smaller than Houston, but packed with interesting neighborhoods, and activities like
amusement parks, Little Italy, Coventry, downtown, and lots of Case student do go dance downtown, plenty of going out places as its a medium sized city with good public transportation.

My son went to the Cleveland Orchestra with dates, took trips to apple pick, went ice skating, went out for pizza
in Little Italy a lot and went downtown in the summer for Cav’s games broadcast on big TVs in Cleveland, if you like basketball.

Case has great advising for all majors.

You can walk from dorms to Cleveland Clinic, Seidman Cancer Center, and University Hospital and a VA hospital, so
you have a lot of clinical options at Case. Case offers an undergraduate nursing program and the nurses go to all of those hospitals to work as part of their training. So I think the hospitals in Cleveland are used to having a lot of undergrads there at all times in many different roles.

Case also has a brand new Health Sciences campus, that integrates social work, low cost dental care, nursing training, biomedical engineering and MD training. This is right next to the Maltz Temple music stage, and Cleveland Clinic, so walking distance to dorms.
https://case.edu/nursing/about/health-education-campus

@melvin123 Conversely Melvin, I know people at Rice who hate the houston weather and don’t think the science programs are as good as Hopkins. I also know premeds at Hopkins that breeze by (including 4.0 Biomedical engineering majors that are on the football team). Anecdotal data is just that.

@stevensPR you are right about anecdotal evidence being just that. I was attempting to compare 2 students that, in my opinion, are equally qualified and studious, and share their experiences. So I should have just said that based on my knowledge of these 2 kids, the rigor at Rice is no joke, and the rigor at Hopkins is more intense than Rice. As for the kid you know on the football team, all I can say is WOW.

Rice has a fantastic quality of life (without the pressure-cooker intensity and grade deflation that plagues undergrad premed at JHU), and it is located quite literally across the street from the largest medical center in the world.

Don’t be afraid of Houston; it’s is a great city that flies beneath the radar on the “cool” scale. My Rice-senior daughter, who grew up in cosmopolitan SoCal, has opted to settle in Houston post-graduation, and she is excited about the prospect.

Of course, JHU has better national name recognition among the general public, especially for all things medical, but that won’t provide you with any substantive advantage in med school admissions. A higher GPA, by contrast, will.

Unless money is not at all an issue, if you are going to go to medical school, that $30K from Case is a huge deal.

If money is not an issue, I’d pick Rice in an instant. The 3 years of housing issue is not a big deal. Most kids seem to be eager to do a year off campus, so that there is room for those who do not, certainly for those who cannot.

I did inquire about opportunity to live on campus for all four years and all biased and unbiased sources have a consensus that even though it’s not guaranteed to get a spot at same residential college for all four years, more students do get that opportunity than not. Everyone is guaranteed at least three years at same college and you can always find a spot at one of the other residential colleges for one year. You don’t have to live off campus if you don’t want to.

It speaks well for Rice that students want to live on campus all 4 years. Everyone is guaranteed a spot freshman year, senior year and another year. Each residential college has a housing lottery. In some residential colleges it is the tradition to live off campus (OC) junior year and in some it is sophomore year. Students that are in leadership positions at the colleges get to stay on. If a student wants to stay on campus there is usually a way to do so in another dorm, etc. There are many apartments and houses near Rice that Rice students typically live in/pass down from year to year. My daughter and 5 other girls are renting a house off campus for junior year. The house is is within walking distance of he campus. Living in the house may be cheaper than paying for a full meal plan, housing on campus, and on campus parking. She is looking forward to living in off campus for a change. @sealotus and @riversider let us know where you/your student decide to attend.