@mathmomvt Our chemE son went to a small regional public and has a great career. I wouldn’t focus on rankings form engineering.
Our current college student is attending Alabama. He is part of their CBH program which is an elite honors research program which focuses on teaching them the computer skills required for research, providing them research mentors, and training them to give research presentations. He loves Bama. He is a very advanced kid (taking grad level physics as a jr bc he has already finished all of his UG requirements for his degree) and he has had no problems finding a great group of peers.
Honestly, the mantra on CC about needing to attend a certain type of school to find “intellectual peers” falls flat here based on my kids’ college experiences, high-achieving kids attending avg universities on scholarship.
I don’t disagree that you can be hugely successful from a regional university, perhaps even attending a top-10 graduate school. But the differences in the quality of faculty, peers and resources make a difference. At the regional school, you almost have to be the very best in your class to be considered for the same opportunities of the top 10% of your class at a better university. I work at a large software company, and a huge percentage of interns do come from the top 30 CS programs. At Cornell or UIUC, your peers who are perhaps even average or below are applying to Google and getting internships and full time jobs. Through the struggle to keep up with better students and perhaps learning from failure, many of these students end up somewhat stronger than they would have from a lesser university.
The regional schools offer great opportunities to those who can’t afford better and are not as bad as what people generally think. Lots of smaller schools still try to maintain the rigor of their problem, but it’s difficult because of the preparation of the students. The professors at average state universities often are capable of teaching top students (after all, they did their PhDs and postdoctoral research/teaching at top schools), but the incoming students are not that strong and the material needs to be dumbed down. I often suggest people to attend bigger, more rigorous schools because they do present more opportunities.
Also, Alabama is not a bad school. I think the state flagships, the top 50 USNWR private universities and the top 50 LACs (among other schools) are often good enough opportunities for good students to prove themselves for their appropriate next level.
I think that depends to some extent on the kids. My kid #2 would not have found himself high-achieving peers without the Honors College program at UVM. He’s just not that outgoing.
University of Vermont has only its flagship, no “directional universities” to choose from. And the flagship ain’t cheap, except relative to everything else
@frontpage I think the number of really bright kids attending the state publics or lower ranked schools on scholarship is underestimated. (the one my chemE ds attended was the state tech school; it just happened to be way smaller than the flagship.). My kids have no choice but to follow scholarships. They don’t have any other financial option. They are far from being alone. There are a whole lot of kids doing the exact same thing. It is why UA is over 50% OOS students and “More than 40 percent of UA’s 7,559-member freshman class scored 30 or higher on the ACT.”
Looking at the honors programs at lower ranked schools is definitely a good choice. One of my sr’s top choices puts her in the top 4% of applicants. But they have a great honors program and their dept has the absolute best professor we have met. She was recently hired from Stanford and was excited about working with our Dd on independent studies. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. But on a R&B budget, you have to filter down to what to what is absolutely vital. A lot of things get sacrificed along the way. But, for kids who know what they want and have depts behind them, there is a lot of opportunity from these schools.
Our D’s was looking for math/engineering programs in the west and her financial safeties were.
Montana State (there was automatic merit but it might be specific to students in western states)
Univ of Idaho (NMF full-ride)
She wanted to stay in the west with good outdoor opportunities (mountains)—and ended up in the midwest in corn fields, lol.
There are better schools for NMF, but she was dim on Nebraska and Oklahoma and didn’t want to look south.
Colorado State and Oregon State have automatic merit for NMF but it’s like 10K and out of state cost is ca 40K. I think MSU might have been similar but we qualified for had WUE, so it wasn’t full OOS.
If there is no other choice than to follow a big scholarship, then the lower ranked school is absolutely fine. I’m assuming that professors at small schools do go out of their way to ensure that their good students have appropriate opportunities and there are REU for students at regional schools to have research opportunities and compete with students at bigger schools for grad school admissions. But I do think that for a lucrative field, it’s worth taking reasonable loans (within $30,000 or so) and considering summer income for better quality. I agree with your second paragraph completely.
Thanks everyone. I thought we knew the landscape from doing this with our first 2 kids, but then realized it has changed – looks like we will need to reacclimate. The one silver lining to the drop in NMF programs is that it sure reduces the pressure on that one one-time-only (that counts) test.
@mathmomvt: Forget about California publics (UC’s/Cal States) so you would want to focus on the privates: USC, Santa Clara, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd but none are guaranteed.
MSU (Bozeman) has unfortunately picked this year to start pulling back on both WUE and merit. The requirements for WUE there have always been academically quite high, but this year you actually have to apply for it. Last year they only gave 120 WUE scholarships even though around half their students are OOS, many from WUE states. My DD should be getting the 15k achievement award based on the stats from last years chart. They no longer have the chart up, but do say they go to 60k (15k/year), however the letter she got yesterday was a disappointing 12k /yr. offer. We will call on Monday to see if it was a mistake (hopefully - may have been calculated before her recent high ACT score). We were pretty impressed with MSU CS department and honors college. They also have both honors dorms and engineering school living learning communities. We also visited WSU, but it wasn’t near as good a fit for my DD and more expensive for us. The merit at MSU, less automatic apparently than in years past, is not just for WUE students.
I don’t think Oregon State has CS, but is known for it’s engineering and has a great campus/college town.
Does Baylor still have good merit? My DD isn’t interested, but I know they’ve had good merit in past years.
I’m finding many schools are pulling back merit quite a bit. I heard Temple did, though I’m not sure on that. We will keep looking because we are trying to get down closer to 10k, though might be able to stretch that if needed. Any opinions on Auburn for Engineering/CS?
As for CA there is not much of anything for instate high stat students at the publics who aren’t considered to have financial need. CSU Long Beach might have a scholarship for NMF/Valedictorians. I don’t know of anything else at the publics. I’ve read on CC that USC has a highly competitive merit scholarship. The other issue at the CA publics is that it is very difficult to graduate in 4 years or even 5 because of how difficult it is to get the classes you need.
@frontpage - I stand corrected. At the time we visited DD wasn’t looking at CS, but for some reason we came to the understanding that the CS programs were at the U of O. Maybe DD should put OSU back on her list, although they don’t do WUE they did send her a packet about their honors college, etc.
From the yolasite listing posted here, I see that WPI and Northeastern now offer competitive full tuition scholarships. but those look extremely competitive (only a tiny number offered).
@noellecf’s post about Baylor brings up another point to consider when looking at merit scholarships–terms for keeping the scholarship. What are the GPA requirements? Is there a probationary period? Baylor’s GPA requirement for their NM scholarship renewal is a 3.5. It all depends if that is within the student’s comfort zone. http://www.baylor.edu/admissions/index.php?id=873096
The one silver lining to the drop in NMF programs is that it sure reduces the pressure on that one one-time-only (that counts) test.