My daughter is considering both Johns Hopkins and Tufts for engineering, but wondering about the social life and quality of academics.
Is JHU is really all work and no play or do the students have a more typical college campus life? Also, how about safety at JHU?
What about Tufts? How is a Tufts engineering degree viewed by prospective employers and grad schools? How is the campus environment? Are students happy to be there?
Thanks!
As a rule, engineers are much less impressed with āprestigeā that CC parents. They are more impressed by what you can do than what other people who went to your school can do.
JHU takes campus safety very seriously, but Baltimore is not Medford. The Baltimore crime rate is 4x that of Medford, and the violent crime rate is 13x higher. I never felt unsafe on either campus, but felt the need to be more cautious around JHU than Tufts.
What kind of engineering?
To be honest (as someone who hires a lot of CS and engineering grads) Tufts doesnāt strike me as a top engineering school, and Iām āiffyā about JHU (theyāre good in certain engineering majors). What other engineering schools are on your list?
I think people sometimes miss the point on this reputation. JHU students have a social life- heck, thereās even a chapter of KKG on campus! But JHU students tend to be hard-wired as highly motivated / work oriented, so your idea of āsocial lifeā and theirs might be different. IME Tufts students are similarly inclined, but less intensely so.
Re: safety- almost all of the current/recent JHU students I know happen to be female, and anecdotally none of them have found safety to be a problem. In line with the above, they tend to be sensible and relatively mature, and their social life does not typically involve a lot of highly risky behavior.
Just out of curiosity which schools in your experience produce the engineering candidates/hires you find top notch?
Many state flagships, and some of the private usual-suspects. Not Tufts though.
Iād go with Hopkins, without knowing more (specifics like what branch of engineering). I think it carries much more respect in general. As for safety, Baltimore is a ridiculously dangerous place, but most of the horrible things happen some distance away from campus. Not saying that there arenāt some scary areas right outside of campus (there are), but the bulk of the activity is not that close to campus. Thereās a perimeter around campus, maybe a couple of blocks wide in each direction. Itās got nice shops and restaurants and is well patrolled by campus police. Definitely feels safe. Also, there are Fells Point and Inner Harbor, about 3-4 miles away. Those are fabulous for walking around, eating, drinking, etc. Quite nice. Youād have to drive or Uber through some nasty areas to get there, but itās never been a problem as far as I know. Medford may be safer, yes, but itās very blah and seems depressed to me.
I think this is natural - thereās far more kids in public - the large flagships have engineering and most who think Tufts will think arts & sciences.
I looked at their most recent career outcomes - less than 50 engineers and that includes mechanical and bio mechanical - so I just donāt think they have the volume for most even to see an engineer from there.
Have a close friend who went to Tufts for Engineering as did her kid and she works there as well. There is a decent social life and safety is no problem. I sent my youngest to a Summer Camp this year at JHU and kid now has no intention of ever applying due to safety concerns. The area around the campus is not safe. The campus is very well protected with lots of security and they make it safe while on campus. But living 4 years in a place where you canāt go beyond a small radius (they gave campers a map you could go a couple of blocks and beyond that no way). So this tells me, if they are worried about very young kids then students likely arenāt safe either. For us, this is a family no.
JHU has some excellent programs and the academics are top notch as was the Summer camp. Iām not going to have my kid Uber through the rough areas. There are just too many great colleges out there.
Iād also consider cost of Tufts for Engineering. To me, some of the state honors programs offer the same prestige at a lower cost. YMMV.
Have you considered Pitt?
About a mile south of JHU, itās not a great neighborhood (sort of sandwiched between downtown and the campus). North of campus is a gorgeous neighborhood with some of the oldest churches, private schools and colleges (Notre Dame, Loyola, the Friends school, Cathedral school and Charles Street goes all the way to the medical center near Towson University. Really gorgeous.
We were in town to attend a tournament at Towson but stayed downtown. The first few days we were taking a different bus though much more gritty neighorhood (but also by the cemetery where Johns Hopkins and Enoch Pratt are buried, along with the men who assignated Lincoln - very cool). When on the Charles street bus, I just couldnāt stare at the churches and homes enough (even though I used to drive that route to work sometimes years ago).
IMO, it is not a dangerous neighborhood and just beautiful, except for the construction going on at JHU that looks like an open pit mining operation - it is HUGE.
As for activities, Hopkins has a lacrosse stadium on campus that holds 8000 and is often sold out for both womensā and mensā games. There is a music conservatory and art museums. There are activities with the other colleges (Towson, Goucher, ND, Loyola) and there are other colleges not that far away (plus all the Washington and Annapolis schools).
Now for unsafeā¦Hopkins hospital is in a not so nice neighborhood.
Here is a homicide map of Baltimore. 249 homicides so far this year and counting. Boston has recorded 26 homicides and has a larger population than Baltimore. While the campus itself is safe you are essentially in a DMZ there.
Baltimore Homicides ā¢ Time frame = All of 2022 (baltimoresun.com)
A friendās daughter graduated from Tufts a couple of years ago with an engineering degree - she got a job with Amazon robotics right out of school. My mom grew up down the road from Tufts and the area is quite safe. Medford itself isnāt particularly hopping but Tufts also borders Somerville which has a lot going on for young people (bars, restaurants etc). Itās also a quick ride to Boston with all that comes with that - professional sports, museums, restaurants etc.
Yep, kid interested in medicine who would likely end up working late doing research etc in a not so nice ( I actually heard it described with different more impactful words).
I honestly think people view neighborhoods differently. And thatās totally great. I also think that being limited to a one mile radius according to your post and a couple of blocks ( per the student map) knocks out any school for us. College costs a lot of $$$. Safety is a factor for us. Kids need to be able to go to the grocery store, local restaurants and local places. My kids run. So having a limit of 1 mile would not work. At all.
We check the crime rates and have eliminated a handful of schools for our '22 and JHU for our '24 ( plus the ones we learned from '22).
Itās not a 1 mile radius. One mile south is a few blocks of row houses that arenāt for students. To the north? East? West? Run free. They are million dollar houses, the Catholic cathedral (and attached k-8 school), the Quaker school where the tuition is sky high. A boarding school, Gilman Boyās school (I canāt tell you how many lawyers went to Gilman/Princeton/Yale law), Loyola Maryland. There arenāt a lot of big grocery stores in those areas, but there are several neighborhood streets with shops and 4-5 restaurants.
If you have other choices, fine, but many people want JHU and it is in a lovely area. If you skip over the area about a mile south (which is only a few blocks long) you hit downtown and are right in the Monument hill area with art museums and some eclectic stores. I never felt unsafe on the bus and we were taking it very early am and after dark.
If I had a high school student unused to the area and there for a camp, I might want them to stay on campus especially at night, but that would be my rule for my 14-16 year old at almost any campus. My kids went to band camp on a college campus and they werenāt allowed to leave or mingle with the college kids.
Yes, Johns Hopkins is in a lovely part of Baltimore and although parts of the city are tragically poor and have a high crime rate the students are very much in a bubble there. Even the hospital area is quite safe as long as you donāt wander too far, but that is not close to the University. It certainly is not a one mile radius- North of the campus is the wealthiest part of the city, then Towson, and then bucolic farm land and wealthy Maryland suburbs. South is the downtown/harbor/cultural areas of the city. Things get bad as you head west, but it is not likely that would happen by accident. There is plenty of shopping close to campus (cvs, bookstore, small grocery) and regular suburban style shopping (target etc) is a reasonable bus ride or uber away. The area around Hopkins is more lively (restaurants and shops) than it used to be. I wouldnāt let the reputation of Baltimore be a deciding factor on choosing or rejecting Hopkins over another school. The kids I know there seem very happy.
I wonder how posters who describe how terrible the JHU neighborhood is would describe a neighborhood with similar rates of poverty, addiction and crime if that neighborhood were majority white and not black.
There are rural areas filled with crime and the colleges near them get described as āoff the beaten track and far from a cityā but the crime statistics donāt get mentioned- is it because they are primarily white towns?
Iāve wondered this on CC before and routinely get shouted down, but I think itās worth asking the question. Especially since folks who live on and near the Hopkins campus take ānormalā precautions like you would in any big city if walking alone at night, but donāt seem to live like prisoners behind the gates of the U.
There are dangerous white neighborhoods too, fyi.
Can you share one as an example?
Same way. Lots of really bad areas with Colleges and universities in the US, black and white, urban and rural. Gets discussed a lot on CC based on the school.
I havenāt run the numbers-- but U Maine, which shows up as one of the ten most dangerous campuses in America- quickly comes to mind. One of the whitest states in America; I cannot recall ANY Maine college EVER being described as a crime magnet on CC. I know the state reasonably well- there are desperately poor areas, high rates of addiction, rural blight, etc. But has any Ccāer ever used language re: a Maine college that compares with how JHU, Temple, Drexel, Yale are routinely described on CC?
Just an impression. Happy to be wrong. But I recall a few posters describing a public transportation route I used to take regularly as āIād never let my kid do thatā and it wasnāt just borderline racist- it went beyond. That route was filled with teachers and social workers and pharm techs and nurses and paralegals heading off to work in the morning (and returning in the evening) and Iād wonder if the racial composition of the mostly middle class, gainfully employed, professionally dressed riders had anything to do with the descriptionā¦