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Note that the costs would be the same for the OP.</p>
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<p>??</p>
<p>How do we know that? The OP says, “after scholarships”…how do we know if the OP will be awarded scholarships or the amounts needed?</p>
<p>@Mom2collegeboys Same price as in 0. I didn’t want to brag but now the cats out of the bag.</p>
<p>@tk21769 What exactly is that worth? (No sarcasm, I really don’t know how much it matters)</p>
<p>@mom2collegekids, we know that the OP will get the money needed, even if you don’t.</p>
<p>You’re evidently unaware of Evans Scholars.</p>
<p>To the OP: if you stay an engineer or work with people from an engineering background for the rest of your life, there may be no difference between the reputation of NU and UofI. But outside of engineering, there’s virtually no one who thinks that UofI engineering is highly-rated but is unaware of NU’s prestige, while the reverse is not true. There are people who highly regard NU who are unaware that UofI engineering is highly-rated.</p>
<p>In other words, prestige may not matter much in engineering, but it does in other fields, and NU has the edge there.</p>
<p>Outside of reputation, it would come down to whether you desire a smaller student-faculty rato & NU’s Engineering First curriculum.</p>
<p>Also whether you care about being in Evanston, on the doorsteps of Chicago, vs. being out in the middle of cornfields. I know which I would choose.</p>
<p>If the cost was the same, I should add.</p>
<p>if the cost is 0, then just go where you want and where will be the best fit.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan Thanks for the solid insight. Pretty much for all of the reasons you mentioned I will choose UIUC. I plan on sticking to engineering (lots of engineering/ math/ science classes taken and I love them, plus my dad was an engineer so I know what it entails), I like the state school vibe with larger classes and etc, and I’m honestly not a big fan of Chicago and Evanston. I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs all my life and I just feel like Chicago is grimy.</p>
<p>@mom2collegekids I also like your point that a few years down the line when going for management no one is going to care about the prestige of my undergrad.</p>
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<p>Does the scholarship require you to decide before you have all of the admission offers? What if you tell the scholarship that you want to attend a school that later rejects you?</p>
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also like your point that a few years down the line when going for management no one is going to care about the prestige of my undergrad.
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<p>This is soooo true, and not just in regards to UIUC vs NU. Some colleague could be a grad of UI-C or a CSU in Calif, and when considering who to promote, it’s the PERSON who will be considered…where he/she went to undergrad will not.</p>
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<p>It’s hard to say how much a graduate program ranking is worth in trying to assess undergraduate program strength.
You’d have to delve into what factors are being measured (and how), then decide whether those factors matter to you (and whether you trust the methodology). <a href=“United States National Research Council rankings - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Research_Council_rankings</a></p>
<p>Graduate program rankings tend to emphasize research productivity. Are the faculty (and their grad students) making significant contributions to the field? The NRC (and some other graduate program rankings) measure publications per faculty member, citations per publication, and research grants per faculty member, among other factors, rather than relying only on “peer” opinion polls (as the USNWR graduate program rankings do).</p>
<p>In other words, a strong graduate program ranking probably indicates that the university is attracting and supporting some of the best researchers in the field. This may or may not tell us much about the quality of undergraduate teaching, or about the extent and quality of research opportunities for undergrads. However, the combination of a strong graduate department ranking plus relatively small average undergraduate class size, plus a good overall reputation for undergraduate program quality, leads me to wonder:
what is the counter-evidence that Northwestern’s engineering programs are “weak”, or even not as strong as UIUC’s? </p>
<p>Another data point would be the payscale.com salary reports.
For average mid-career salaries of engineering majors, payscale ranks Northwestern #9 and UIUC #63.
These average salaries are based on self-reported data. The averages deliberately exclude salaries of any alumni who earned graduate degrees (to focus the measurement only on the impact of undergraduate degrees). And keep in mind that NU tends to attract students from all over the country, not just Illinois. Therefore, the NU average may be driven up by more alumni going back to higher salary markets than Illinois and surrounding stats.</p>
<p>**So, I wouldn’t base a college choice very heavily on either the NRC assessment or the salary reports. But again, what is the counter evidence (other than hearsay) that UIUC’s engineering programs are so much stronger?<a href=“Although%20…%20if%20the%20price%20really%20is%20the%20same,%20and%20you%20happen%20to%20strongly%20prefer%20UIUC%20for%20personal%20reasons,%20we%20may%20be%20over-thinking%20this%20problem.”>/b</a></p>
<p>@ucbalumnus, Evans Scholars has been around for generations and they have been awarding scholarships to each of the schools where they are active every year. Obviously they have a relationship with the adcoms of those schools. Don’t know what goes on, but I’m quite certain that the scenario you described doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>But does the student need to decide on a school this early to get the scholarship?</p>
<p>PurpleTitan, Evans Scholars has been around forever - the dad of one of my NU friends went there on an Evans Scholarship, sometime in the late fifties! It’s a nice program. But don’t they also have a relationship with UIUC? </p>
<p>Anyway, OP, don’t count your NU chicken before it’s hatched. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl, yes they do with several Midwestern schools (and a few elsewhere as well, which is why the OP has a choice).</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus: I have no idea how their process works; maybe the OP can enlighten us.</p>
<p>They do selection in rounds. I’m one of the earlier scholars to be selected. I want to get my school set early while the housing hasn’t been filled already. If I decide in Feb. that I want to go to U of I, there might not be space in the house.</p>
<p>It would be difficult to turn down the scholarship at NU if you like the school. Sounds like you can be successful at both places. Is it that difficult of a decision? If it was my s/d, I would have to look at the neg list of NU and positive list at UIUC - I am personally not that impressed with UIUC but also haven’t visited their eng dept/programs. You may have a higher concentration of bright people at NU and perhaps an edge with smaller classes and the program more in sync with bright students of same caliper. UIUC is pretty selective with eng from what I gather, but what are their other positive features?</p>
<p>@SOSConcern Basically the whole big 10/state school atmosphere I find it more exciting than NU. UIUC also has more in terms of labs/ facilities and extracurricular activities.</p>
<p>Ironically, OP, Northwestern is a B10 school.</p>
<p>If I’d never worked in the midwest* I probably would have thought Northwestern of course.
But actually the UI grads I worked with over the years were extraordinarily successful.</p>
<p>I worked at a large engineering firm there that was basically stocked with UI grads.Including its top management. There were people working there who were getting MBAs at Northwestern at night, but I can’t recall a single Northwestern undergrad who worked there. I wonder if they even interviewed there.
Does Northwestern really produce many working engineeers? Or do many of them just use that as a platform to go to dental school, etc. like at Columbia? I ask because I never encountered one, when I was right there.</p>
<p>Years late I worked in finance. I encountered several former UI engineers, who went on to get MBAs. I don’t know that it’s true, but it seemed as if they have some sort of pipeline to U Chicago MBA, as a number of those people had them. Those people were also extraordinarily successful in their field. The last firm, a midwest fortune 500, recruited at Illinois, but not Northwestern, for quant-oriented undergrads. We had some great hires from there,</p>
<p>I can’t comment on whether the sample of UI grads I was exposed to was representative, probably not. Or how much they liked their undergrad experience. But those multiple UI grads I did encounter did well for themselves, that;s for sure, and were not at all harmed by their choice of undergrad school.</p>
<ul>
<li>actually a few of those people were at the investment bank in NYC, too. But the bulk of them were in the midwest.</li>
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<p>@monydad, keep in mind that the undergraduate population (both overall and in engineering) at NU is a small fraction of the undergraduate population of UofI, and yes, I daresay that a greater percentage of the engineering majors at NU enter in to finance or consulting (or go on to med/dental/law school) than their UofI counterparts. However, agree that UofI engineering has a pipeline in to quant finance (though my experience is that it isn’t hard for a NU grad to break in to that field either, but there are simply far fewer of us). That would explain the tie-in with the Chicago b-school (as quant finance is Booth’s top strength).</p>
<p>Those particular MBA grads I was referring to were not doing quant work.
The tie-in may well have played a part in admissions, but coming out we considered Booth mostly for people who wanted to manage something.
When that last firm in the midwest wanted quants they’d look to, eg, ex physicists, and quantitative finance programs like CMU. Along with various grads of UI and elsewhere, as underlings.
FWIW.</p>