Anybody have any opinions between these three?
Are you admitted? Did you visit? They are very different.
Admitted to all and have visited all
What kind of response are you looking for.
Northeastern - terrific for co-op. Co-op is a great way to mix theory and practice. Northeastern is also a research university, but the “culture” is predominantly co-op.
Lehigh - small research university. Has co-op but it’s competitive, not widely used like Northeastern. Many students engage in research, professors get to know students. Many students go to grad school.
Lafayette - NOT a research institution. Professors aren’t on the same level as the other two. Fine for getting a job, but IMHO, you really lose something doing engineering at a LAC. May be better than the other two if you really want to STUDY engineering for the quantitative training, but want a more well rounded education because you don’t want to actually BE an engineer.
^^^Disagree strongly with above. My D recently graduated from Lafayette. While she wasn’t an engineer she had many friends who were. A number of them were involved in doing research with professors and all have had great success in terms of getting jobs or getting into grad schools (whichever avenue they were targeting).
I have every confidence that Lafayette engineering is on par with the other two schools and would base your decision on which environment you feel best suits you – they are three different choices with Northeastern being an urban school with a big co-op program, Lehigh being a mid-size university, and Lafayette being a LAC.
Of course finances should also be a part of your decision – In another post you were considering Binghamton as a cost-effective option – is that off the table? In that other post Lehigh did not seem affordable (you stated you would have to borrow 30k/year) and Northeastern was twice the price of Binghamton. Did you get money from Lafayette?
I will respectfully disagree with @ClassicRockerDad on the reason why Lafayette is inferior, which I personally believe it to be.
The reason I feel Lafayette (and Bucknell, Union and Swarthmore for that matter) is inferior is that their facilities anD curriculum are both severely lacking. The depth and breadth to which a student can explore is greatly limited at all of those institutions.
Whether a school’s primary focus is research or not has little to do with the undergraduate experience. What does is the emphasis they place on undergraduate teaching and the facilities to support it. Wisconsin is a research institution going out of their way to make the undergraduate experience a priority. Caltech is not. In fact, two former Caltech profs told my son not to apply because the undergraduate experience was so poor.
You can sense this by visiting, especially facilities. Take a non-research school like Cal Poly. They have over 80 engineering labs, including wind tunnels, pressurized bearings, rotational dynamics and vibration labs, everyone dedicated to undergraduates. It was grossly apparent to our son the difference that having toys that were accessible by the undergraduates makes. Lafayette simply doesn’t have them. Lehigh and Northeastern do.
So, it’s not the research. It’s the facilities and curriculum.
To make matters worse, the purported advantages of going to Lafayette, a blend of LA and engineering, do not exist. The ABET accredited curriculum is so packed, there’s little room for other stuff. Students at any school will get as much or more history, arts and social sciences as they will at Lafayette.
If Binghamton is on your list, there’s absolutely no reason to not give it a strong nod. It’s a good school with a very good honors program.
At the end of the day, it’s much more about what you do than it is about where you go. Most companies and graduate schools will take a 3.7 Binghamton grad with good research or club experience, over a disengaged 2.2 MIT grad.
Why give Binghamton a strong nod? I feel like northeastern and Lehigh offer more opportunities
What is the cost differential? or is that not a factor?
Opportunities have to be worth the cost you pay for them. If you go to Binghamton, work hard, get good grades, and get involved with a club and develop into a leadership position and/or get involved in research, you’ll have plenty of opportunity. Look at where the most Fulbright recipients come from. Same for Rhodes. Same for NASA.
I’m not saying the experience will be the same, or that Binghamton will be better, or even as good as Lehigh. What I am saying is that IF Lehigh or Northeastern are better, it’s incremental. Neither are worth the debt you’d incur. Let me illustrate.
A loan payment on $150,000 ($30k/yr x 5) will be roughly $2000/month for 10 years. If you start investing $2000 per month every month for 10 years instead of paying a loan payment, and make 6%, you’ll have about $320,000 at the end of that time. Now here is where it gets interesting. Let it sit until age 67, adding nothing more, but making 6%, you’ll end with roughly $2,500,000. That’s how much MORE you’d have to make if you went to Lehigh just to break even.
From the other thread, it looks like the total loans for each would be:
Lehigh: 150K
Northeastern: 45K
Binghamton: None
Lafayette: Unknown