<p>OK, so let's say I want to major in engineering and live in Maryland. Which of these schools would you recommend I drop/aren't worth the time and effort to apply to?</p>
<p>Brown
Stanford vs Princeton (neither? both?)
UVA
Northwestern
Duke
Chicago
Washington
Virginia Tech
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Case Western Reserve
Yale
UPenn
Harvard
USC
McGill, Toronto, Waterloo</p>
<p>Also does anyone have a good recommendations, whether or not I might already have them in mind, based on the absolute lack of information I've given you about me?</p>
<p>All of these are out-of-state. How far do you want to travel? Have you factored in the travel time and cost for each of them? For example, if your mom wants you home for Thanksgiving each year, You will want to eliminate anything that would require a flight because of the cost and the hassle, as well as the Canadian Us because you won’t get that weekend off.</p>
<p>These are all OOS publics or private institutions. Sit down with your parents and run the Net Price Calculators at each website. Any that cannot be made affordable can be dropped from your list.</p>
<p>The ones good for engineering on your list are-- Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, Duke, and Case Western. There might be some more, but these are the ones I do know are pretty strong in engineering.
But they are all OOS.</p>
<p>It is really important to know your basic stats(GPA, STAT, ACT, Rank) and more importantly how much your family can afford, all of these are expensive privates and expensive oos publics.</p>
<p>If you are from Maryland certainly look at UMD, it has a great engineering program. Also look at JHU if you are interested in BME although the price wouldnt differ its private.</p>
<p>Disregarding these facts based off of your list I would get rid of :</p>
<p>The Canadian schools
Brown
Chicago
Yale
USC
Harvard</p>
<p>It is really important to know your basic stats(GPA, STAT, ACT, Rank) and more importantly how much your family can afford, all of these are expensive privates and expensive oos publics.</p>
<p>If you are from Maryland certainly look at UMD, it has a great engineering program. Also look at JHU if you are interested in BME although the price wouldnt differ its private.</p>
<p>Disregarding these facts based off of your list I would get rid of :</p>
<p>The Canadian schools
Brown
Chicago
Yale
USC
Harvard</p>
<p>Which disciplines of engineering is JHU highly ranked for?</p>
<p>Another consideration is flexibility; I would be wary of attending a college that is only known for its engineering program and mediocre at best at everything else.</p>
<p>A ranking that is radically different from any other list in the subject I’ve seen, and uses a rather dubious methodology IMO. Am I right to disregard it?</p>
<p>OP said, “And as for cost, I’d rather just worry about that after admissions (is this a bad idea?).”</p>
<p>I don’t know. In the last 2 months, have your parents said they have no problems dropping a quarter mil on your education? If they haven’t, then, yes, it’s a very big problem.</p>
<p>If they haven’t, you cannot count on going to any of these schools next year–even if you get into every one of them! You got a problem with that?</p>
<p>You’re a bright person evidently; go talk to the people paying the bills.</p>
<p>Yes the cost should be a consideration from the start. For instance, f you don’t qualify for need based aid, and your parents can’t/won’t pay full price, then there are some colleges you shouldn’t have on your list at all.</p>
<p>jkeil, first of all thanks for the flattery, and secondly I have enough, um, college savings to pay for UMD (as in, at the least). So the question becomes “does this school’s quality (considering I want to shoot for graduate) compensate for the distance and cost?”</p>
<p>It’s a very bad idea. You need to run online net price calculators on some of these schools. Your need to talk to your parents about whether they can afford the Expected Family Contributions. Many families fall in an income “donut hole” (too rich for FA, not rich enough for full sticker). If yours is such a family, you might not be able to afford any of these colleges.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago has no engineering programs (other than a new Institute for Molecular Engineering). Brown, Yale and Harvard don’t get as much respect for engineering as they do for liberal arts.</p>
<p>Not really. You can find engineering schools just as good back east. But since you put it on your original list, I was wondering if you wanted to come out to California for college.</p>
<p>I was just curious as to why invader71 said to ignore USC. Did he/she think it didn’t have a good engineering school? Did they think admissions standards were too high? Too expensive? Not enough of a reputation back east, or what?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know about Princeton, but I’m familiar with Stanford, and all of their engineering programs are pretty good.</p>
<p>Thank you for the advice. Based on what I’ve heard here and some external research, I’m thinking of striking these colleges:</p>
<p>Brown (no engineering cred)
UVA (no engineering or physics cred)
Chicago (no engineering cred)
Washington (below UMD…so why bother?)
Virginia Tech (too specialized)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (too expensive, too specialized, demographics)
Yale (no engineering cred)
USC (I’m not going all the way to California for it…)
Rice (Texas, no)</p>
<p>On the chopping block:</p>
<p>The Canadian schools
Harvard
Case Western Reserve</p>
<p>Does this make sense?</p>
<p>The problem is that I’m a mild hoarder, so I have trouble getting myself to not-apply to, say, Brown or Chicago. My reasoning is that I don’t know if I want to do engineering or physics and chose the former essentially for career prospects, but if I get into an ivy-level school I might find it worth it to go there, especially if I can get financial aid, and will therefore have more flexibility (ie. not just a good engineering program and mediocre everything else). Most of these colleges are common app anyway and the only issues therefore are the 150 word or so extra writing I have to do for the supplements, and (the biggie) the application fees, which really stack.</p>