California is a big state. It will be difficult to tour all of those in one week. You could do Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, USC, UCLA, and maybe UCSB, in one week. Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz and SLO should be a separate trip.
Edit to add: I believe USC, UCLA and UCSB all offer engineering tours in addition to their general campus tour.
As a Californian, I wonder if you have planned out an itinerary for all of this? I can not imagine visiting them all in a week. I would choose a geographical focus - e.g. either NorCal or SoCal, and do what you can within those geographic parameters. Trying to do all of these seems completely exhausting - if not logistically impossible - to me.
For the UCs, it looks like you would be paying OOS full price ($72K+)? Although Davis and Santa Cruz are fine schools, Iām not sure whether they offer that much value compared to other OOS schools for you. So you might not be losing a lot by following @lkg4answersās suggestion of focusing on the schools in Southern CA.
I also agree that you should focus on either Southern California schools or Northern California schools for the week trip. LA traffic along with Bay Area traffic can be a nightmare and take you twice as long as predicted.
If you want to add another school for Northern California, I would add Stanford if you are looking at Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd.
If you decide on a northern California tour, you may want to throw in U. of the Pacific. They give very generous merit aid, itās ABET-accredited for computer engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering, among other areas, and Iām pretty sure that thereās no need to declare a major, so she could find what fits her best. With 3300 undergrads, it will be a much more intimate experience than at the various California publics.
If youāre looking at southern California, then you may want to consider Loyola Marymount. This school in L.A. has about 7k undergrads, so not small, but a big difference with the Cali publics. ABET-accredited for civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering and has a popular CS major. I donāt think your D would need to declare her major here either.
If youāre looking at the state of Washington, then Iād take a look at these ABET-accredited schools:
If expanding the geographic parameters, then these are some other schools you may want to consider (which echo several suggestions that have already been made):
Schools like Lehigh, Trinity, Union,and Lafayette are all smaller schools that have ABET-accredited engineering, but I have heard comments about a heavier Greek presence at some of them. They may be worth investigation to see whether the type of Greek life present (which is still a minority of the population and quite possibly very different than Greek life at SEC schools) would work for her.
All true, but Stockton is not usually a destination spot for OOS students.
You very much need to check whether your health insurance will cover these costs out of state (and likely out of network if they do). Having close medical facilities is only one piece of the pie. Having affordable medical treatment is the other.
Does this student want a school that focuses only on engineeringā¦and is on the smaller side? If so RH would be a great choice. If the student wants to explore other areas of interest, this would not be such a terrific choice.
I am sure she is more than capable of doing the work at the UCās and California schools. As a parent who did have a child who became very ill at her school (hospitalized), across the country from us, my concern would also be her timelines.
If she needs to miss school, for medical concerns, sheāll be missing a lot of information. Other students may share missed information with her but you cannot plan on that. She may need to go through the student ability centers to be in their system.
Most of the UCās are on the quarter system. That means that your child has 10 weeks to prove herself in some very Ć¼ber-competitive classes. If she has to miss any amount of time, in a 10 week class, her grades and comprehension, will be impacted. My child who attended her UC was always in group projects. Her friends in engineering required even more lab group projects that they couldnāt miss with their peers.
I also agree with the other posters that you need to do separate visits to Nor Cal and SoCal in order to cover all of those very large campuses, within a week. It is very exhausting, traveling by car, to get all of the tours, scheduled at very different times.
The tours of housing, at a lot of the schools, fill up immediately. Remember that the UCs are huge California public universities. If you try to do your own independent tours of the schools, youāll be locked out of buildings, given the security measures put into place.
The smaller schools, that may be in the suburbs, also have tight security measures and the drive to get to some of these places will be impacted by traffic.
California does not have great public transportation so youāll be stuck in a car for hours.
Plan accordingly.
Edited to add: I have to agree with @Thumper1 that you may need to check whether your out of state medical coverage is enough to cover the cost of California health facilities. Our Cost of Living is expensive. Not only are we extremely expensive out here, but also her wait times, at most facilities, are not very efficient for a student. Just to get an appointment, travel, and then wait for the lab personnel can be very trying.
She needs to have a lot of patience. Yes, a number of the UCs have hospitals associated with the campuses, but they may not directly be on campus. The hospitals try to be central to the local community and not necessarily for the students. For example, at UCSD, the campus is in La Jolla. A student can take a shuttle to the UCSD hospital in the Hillcrest area (closer to Downtown SD) which, without traffic, is 20 minutes by car. The UC Davis hospital is not in Davis, but itās in Sacramento which is also 30 minutes by car, if there is no traffic on the 80 going east. Berkeley doesnāt have a medical school, so those students can go to UCSF for their medical intervention. Getting around SF, To the Parnassus clinic is a bear.
Have done this many times. Bart to N-Judah line. Super easy. Not the fastest but easy.
Ucla hospital is walking distance from dorms, campus etc.
UC provided health insurance is good. Not free (canāt remember quarterly cost) but good.
Just my 2c.
Lisa, you already have children on both coasts, so Iām sure you have reasons for focusing on California. Iām interested in how your visit to Harvey Mudd goes. It would seem like a great match. Cal Tech is a reach for anyone, but it has the advantage of being closer to top medical facilities in LA. Although these are both highly competitive, she has the advantage of being female in an engineering world where more than 75% of undergrads are male. Colleges would like it to be 50:50, so doing the math , itās obvious that she can compete for admission at even the most competitive colleges.
Speaking only from my point of view, if I had a daughter with a rare genetic disorder, Iād want her to be in Boston because thatās where the best medical facilities in the world are and where they are doing cutting edge medical research. I am admittedly biased because my wife is in remission from cancer after being treated at Dana Farber over the past year or so.
Coincidentally Boston also has extraordinary opportunities in engineering. My list would start with Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Itās only 25 years old, but itās like no place else. Itās tiny (about 400 students), but itās not isolated. Itās campus is an extension of the Babson College campus and the two schools have shared facilities and cross registration. Combined, they have an undergraduate enrollment of almost 3000. They also have cross-registration with Wellesley College, 2 miles across town via campus shuttle, and with Brandeis University 20 minutes away.
Olinās collaboration with Babson was important from its inception although they have remained separate institutions. They share the same philosophy of integrated, hands on learning. Olin was founded in response to a call from the National Science Foundation for a reform in engineering education, which saw that engineers needed to have business and entrepreneurial skills, creativity, and a recognition of the social, political, and economic context of engineering. Their educational model focuses on students working in teams in the same way that engineers in industry do. All of what Iāve just described is also a hallmark of education at Babson College. You can find more here: https://www.olin.edu/about/history/founding-precepts
Practical details include the fact that Olin has a major in Electrical & Computer Engineering, all students receive a scholarship, and it is very difficult to gain admission (16% acceptance rate last year). Your daughter is a very strong student and as I said above, females are in demand at engineering school but are also in short supply. Supply and demand.
Another small engineering college in the Boston area is Worcester Tech (4700 undergrads) Not as difficult for admission and not as close to Boston (45 miles). We had a young woman from California post here last year, who turned down Cal Poly SLO in state in favor of WPI because she fell in love with it after visiting there. Sheās now a happy freshman there with no regrets. MIT (4600 undergrads) and Tufts (6500) are always better known engineering options options in the Boston area. Neither is large. An interesting contrast is that the engineering school at Tufts, the larger of the two, has about 600 students, only slightly larger than Olin.
Best of luck with your search. Your daughter sounds like an incredible young lady. Any college would be lucky to gain her interest.
My son ended up at Cal Poly, but he didnāt sign until right at the deadline. WPI was the one he was deciding between. Lots to like there.
Olin is unique. Any student who is interested should visit. It is smallā¦TINY small. For some thatās a huge plus. For most, it will be smaller than their high school. Itās an interesting program, but its niche isnāt for everyone.
To a lesser degree, the same can be said of HMC.
Thanks for encouraging a visit. I completely agree.
I would like to put this issue of size in some perspective because I too described Olin as tiny. Olin has about the same number of engineering students on campus as Dartmouth. More than Brown.
The campus is literally a 70 acre corner of the Babson campus. Combined with Babson, itās a 440 acre campus. This is important because the 2 colleges share facilities, there is cross registration, and there are almost 3000 college students engaging and going to class on this property. Olin is like a small engineering school on a single university campus - like Dartmouth, Brown, and a number of others.
Babson/Olin is about the same size as Wesleyan. But . . . It has something that Wesleyan doesnāt have . . . Another college of 2500 students 2 miles down the road on the other side of town with which they have cross registration . . . With a shuttle that gets you there in minutes. Itās a bike ride away. Combined, the Babson-Olin-Wellesley consortium (BOW) has slightly more students than the combined undergraduate enrollments of the Claremont Colleges.
Yes, small isnāt for everyone. But big isnāt for everyone either. And Lisa specifically stated that her daughter would prefer a small private engineering college. Which is why I posted about Olin. And also added other small to medium size colleges in the area. Like Tufts which has only about 600 engineering students on campus. Thatās tiny too. The interest in a smaller college is why I left out bigger universities with engineering in the Boston area - like BU and Northeastern.
As I said in my previous post, Olin is tiny but not isolated. Itās part of a larger campus with about 3000 total students and part of a larger consortium with about 5500 students all in the same town. (I know that Olin is technically in Needham.) And Olin has easy access to another 3500 students through a cross registration agreement with Brandeis. Thatās a total of 9000 college students in their orbit. And those 9000 are but a tiny fraction of all of the tens of thousands of college students in greater Boston, aka College Town, USA. And those students find each other. Yes, tiny, but not isolated.
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