<p>I have been admitted to the undergad programs of each school. I know Tech is more prestigious, but NC State offered me $6k in scholarships and Honors Program admission. Ideally, I want to attend MIT/Stanford for grad school (engineering). However, Tech is about $80k more expensive. </p>
<p>Which school is the better choice?</p>
<p>You take the NCSU offer in front of you, unless there is some other compelling personal or financial reason to go to GATech (outside of the perceived “prestige”). </p>
<p>Then while at NCSU, become an over-achiever in your Engineering Program, and network like crazy with the Professors doing the research you want to do. If you change your mind in the first year or two, and discover NCSU is not the place for you, then transfer.</p>
<p>Go to State and save 80K. Isn’t GA Tech supposed to rank pretty low on the “student happiness” scale? At State you can get a good education without breaking the bank and have a great college life.</p>
<p>Opposite situation here:
Georgia Tech in state or NC State honors out of state?
For Industrial Engineering undergrad programs, I see that GT is ranked #1 and NCSU is ranked #10 on most recent U.S. News list. Son can go to either one, and may also apply to Michigan which is ranked #2 and Purdue which is ranked #5 for this major. He is not accustomed to those tough midwestern winters. It is very important to him to attend one of the top 10 ranked IE programs and one which will receive instant respect and name recognition nationwide, as he wants to be recruited for a great IE job on the west coast after graduation. At GT, it seems he would just be one of the masses, but NC State is making him feel special and has invited him to apply to their Honors program. I would love to hear any opinions or thoughts out there…</p>
<p>For us, both GT and NCSU are out of state. You have a bonus with tuition and if GT was in state for us, it would be a no brainer for him. For me, I’m not sure I would like the environment for my son. He wants to be positioned in the top 30% of his class in college, likes the competitive atmosphere but I hear many GT students are not happy. Every time I think of this situation, I reflect back to Jack Welch’s (GE) comment about his opportunity and final choice. He had the options of top schools and then UMASS, Amherst. He chose UMASS because he felt he would have too much pressure with the competition of the other schools and miss out on other opportunities to explore and grow as a person. We researched in depth NCSU again this weekend and came to the conclusion that it is among one our top schools to consider and there are other top reputable schools on the table.</p>
<p>I don’t know if you can make the blanket claim that one school has happier students than another. What people usually use to determine “happiness” is freshman retention rate (basically, what percentage of students dislike the school enough to transfer out). Last year NCState had a 90% retention rate, whereas GT had a 94% retention rate. </p>
<p>GT used to have a very unhappy student population in the 1990’s / early 2000’s. The reason was that the state government required GT to accept in-state students that weren’t an academic fit for the school. So GT had a high fail-out ratio and low GPA, leading to many unhappy former and soon-to-be-former students (the school gained the reputation of a “weed out school” - easy to get in but hard to get out. This was corrected over time, and GT has seen the freshman retention rate jump from low 80’s to mid-90’s, and the average GPA has risen from 2.6 to 3.1 (not because of the inflation but because of an increase in the quality of students admitted, as you can see from SAT scores). The graduation rate for GT is over 80%, whereas it’s exactly 70% for NCSU.</p>