Rowan is a great value – if you are an NJ resident. The downside is that Rowan (like most other state schools) has a significantly higher out-of-state tuition rate. For out-of-staters, Rowan may be just as expensive as a private school, yet it offers much less name recognition and prestige. Obviously this affects the value proposition.
So Rowan can certainly be competitive within NJ, but as yet it is not “catching on with the rest of the country and east coast”. College Navigator shows only 4% of Rowan students came from outside NJ in Fall 2016. For comparison, schools like Lehigh or RPI draw 70+% of their students from outside of their home states.
@njdadjets Your son plans to stay in the NJ area? He should choose fit. It’s a regional school. Just pointing out that Rutgers is in a different class. They have world recognition. In the top 70ish in the world. He just doesn’t like it?
Rutgers campus is terrible. Very large. We visited on a regular school day. Twice while we waited with others at bus stop, the buses were so packed the driver asked students to get off the bus. He wants a walkable campus that allows for more study time and time to hang out. He doesn’t want to ride buses and would prefer smaller class sizes. Two of his sports teammates that attended Rutgers as freshman this past year have transferred due to difficulties with registering for classes and lack of enough general ed courses to accommodate all the students. The largest campus he’s applying to is U Delaware which is large yet far more manageable than Rutgers
My impression from visiting is that there’s a lot of investment going on at the state level, like there is a push from higher up for Rowan to be the center for STEM education in NJ.
Rowan is regional and full of NJ kids. But I tend to think NJ colleges are always full of NJ kids, relative to other states’ public colleges just because NJ has such a high population with relatively few college choices. TCNJ would be comparable in that respect. Rutgers, too, really. I went to Rutgers undergrad and the few OOS friends I remember we’re from Staten Island and Queens or Pa, not counting international students.
But regional might be an asset, right? For a local companies like Lockheed Martin, for example, they will have a local connection.
I went to a younger kids event at one of the community colleges taken over by Rowan and many engineers from Lockheed Martin were there to work with the kids. It was really impressive, like maybe a ratio of 1:5.
I don’t really think Rowan’s cost is high for out of state. I think the COA is inflated unless you’re dealing with significant traveling expenses. You’ll have direct costs close to $35K. There aren’t that many engineering schools in that range. Aren’t Pitt and Penn State in that range for in-state? And a student with the stats for Lehigh or RPI should get very good merit at Rowan.
I’ve really convinced myself Rowan is the right choice for D. Lol.
@njdadjets , I’d still have your S go forward with other apps because you just don’t know what offer he’ll get. It seems like RPI can be surprisingly generous. I have no idea about the others. The NPC result for RPI was good for us but Lehigh’s was awful. We are not a full pay family but our EFC is still too high.
@MACmiracle Regional could be just fine. But notice how we are not talking about another regional college, WPI. Personally, I choose that over RPI for fit but you just need to be aware that WPI’s reputation is more regional and RPI, more nation.
Your school for engineering is mainly important for your first job for many engineers. Then no one cares really. Your performance is important. And he can always move up the food chain if he wants for grad school. Many students also do that. It’s your last school that they notice.
Does Rowan have a great graduate school and doctoral program? That would be a more important indication rather than campus improvements on whether or not the reputation improves.
Rowan undergrad with RPI like grad school might hit value, fit and prestige.
Oh please, pretty much any kid with an Engineering degree in this day and age is going to go to graduate school. For undergrad if this kid goes where he wants and they save some money, the student will be just fine. Graduate school can always be for the higher ranked school. Employers are well aware that today’s students are choosing schools wisely often for economic reasons rather than for name dropping.
You can make that argument for any degree / major.
@Empireapple - Vanderbilt has done a lot of research on the notion of graduate school upward mobility. There are a lot of folks who suggest you should save your money during undergrad days and then go to an elite grad school. In general, that doesn’t happen. There was earlier research showing how students rarely attended selective grad schools without attending selective colleges. The idea you could go to a State U and then an Ivy grad school is more difficult than most think. The newer research focuses on the financial mobility, which is limited.
My son moves to Rowan next weekend. We’re in state, and he got one the older dorms. Tuition includes up to 17 credits, I think. Based off our first semester bill, COA without books & travel (which I don’t really count since it’s just driving an hour or so) and the most expensive meal plan, we are under $26k for the year. The new dorm adds $1500 I think? Upperclass apartments would add about $3k, but off campus apartments are plentiful and much cheaper (although not fancy, brand-spanking new!). He’s not an engineering major so there may be extra costs attached to that major to factor in.
TCNJ is much closer to home for us, and that’s probably part of the reason we found it less appealing, The surrounding area isn’t great, but it’s certainly not the “Trenton” NJ residents think of. My kid liked Rowan because it was a much bigger school, yet none of his classes will have more than 30 kids. it was kind of like he best of both worlds for him. My husband got his Master’s at Rutgers, and my son wouldn’t even look at it because of the lack of campus feel and bus situation. It is a good school academically, but it’s not a place I would ever want to live.
@NJWrestlingmom Rowan sounds like the perfect choice, congratulations. Long after making my choice of RPI and reading through so much on these forums(a huge amount), I am now convinced Rowan really would have been my very next choice. It was only number 5 on my list but it has moved up a lot not only because of how good Rowan is, but also because I now understand that a good career isn’t so much about the school you went to but what effort you put into whatever school you go to.
I still am glad to say RPI would remain 1st choice because of how beautiful the campus and the ‘fit’ was for me. All of the get-togethers and events were great for meeting like-minded students. We got along so well together. But Rowan would have definitely been my next choice.
Most college graduates, engineering or otherwise, do not go to graduate school.
This study is extremely flawed because it defines its prestige tiers oddly. Basically, it assumes that its selected private research universities are more prestigious than its selected private LACs, and that the latter are more prestigious than the selected public research universities.
But few would suggest that Syracuse University (a private research university in the study’s “Tier 1”) is more prestigious than Williams College (a private LAC in the study’s “Tier 2”), or that Judson College (a private LAC in the study’s “Tier 2”) is more prestigious than University of Michigan (a public research university in the study’s “Tier 3”) or Harvey Mudd College and the University of Alabama (which are in the study’s “Tier 4”, meaning all others not listed).