I’m trying to decide whether to apply early decision to northwestern or penn. I want a school in/near a big city and with a strong academic reputation(which they both have). I do not need a huge party school but want parties/Greek life to be available. I’m also trying to up my admissions chances to either (I am a legacy at northwestern) with applying ED. Which school should I pick??
Similar admission rates, but I think Penn is a bit tougher to get into for the same student.
You will get a world class education either way. Both have Greek life.
It may depend on what you want to study. Northwestern does not offer undergrad business, for example.
Penn is in Philly, but you can also take an 1 hr 14 min train to NYC.
If you don’t care about whether you’re in a city versus being near a city, then both seem to satisfy your desires. As a legacy I imagine Northwestern ED would give you your best chance at acceptance.
If you do want to be in a city, then Northwestern will be a very disappointing experience because Evanston is definitively suburban and at least 20 minutes from downtown Chicago (that doesn’t seem like a lot of time until you have a ton of reading on a Tuesday night but you really want to swing by your favorite banh mi place for dinner before going to the library and you can’t because heading into the city isn’t realistic or an intelligent way to spend your time).
And it could also depend on what you want to study. Penn doesn’t have an undergraduate school of music, just a music major. Northwestern’s law school isn’t on campus so you won’t be able to take classes there/do research with the same ease you would at Penn (i’m not sure if Northwestern allows you to take classes in their grad schools at all, but Penn does thanks to the One University Policy). Some departments like the English Department at Penn are full of the best faculty members in the field and the quality of the research you might participate in and the quality/breadth of classes offered might be better in those departments.
Sports culture is going to be different. Northwestern is not going to be Ohio State but sports are way more popular at Northwestern than at the ivies. They have a real football team and a real marching band and they really play in a competitive league. Penn students rarely know when there’s a football game and they really only show up for the Penn-Princeton games in basketball and football.
Finally, Northwestern is more fraterinty/sorority focused. About 40% of Northwestern students are in Fraternities/Sororities (http://www.northwestern.edu/fsl/). In contrast about 25-30% of Penn students join greek life. Additionally because Northwestern is in a suburb, greek life has a more central social role for partying as compared to Penn which is in a city and partying is more evenly distributed between bars, greek houses, cultural events in philly, etc etc.
Good luck. Feel free to reach out about any questions you might have about Penn or how I chose Penn over other schools (in the RD round). 
Given you like both, and both kind of fit your criteria, I would go with Northwestern…one, it has a higher ED acceptance rate; two, why not take advantage of the legacy. There is nothing you can’t achieve at Northwestern that you could at Penn, except if you’re interested in Wharton.
Not knowing your background only very general advice can be offered. Both schools fit your criteria. So in general – If both are affordable, you like them equally, and if Northwestern takes legacy into account then I’d imagine your odds would be better at Northwestern.
My son faced same NU vs UPenn decision a couple of years ago - WHAT? It is actually 5 years?! - & decided on NU. He said he was “all-tested out” refused to take Sat IIs - and at NU they were recommended, not required. So, he chose NU, got Masters in Engineering in 4 years, met his fiance on first day at school, and had a job before graduating.
However, as I am sure you are well aware, anecdotal evidence is only 1 data point, and I am sure your decision will be more thought out! I would wish you “Good Luck”, although you obviously don’t need luck - just a decision… and fortunately for you, you can’t make a bad decision!
It’s hard for me to think of two schools that are more alike. Add Duke, and you have the “pre-professional atmosphere trifecta” nailed down pretty well. If you like one, you would be happy at the other, and they are going to open many of the same career doors. And they both love their ED applicants.
Northwestern is obviously an incredible place and if it is where you want to go, I encourage you to apply ED. However, I caution you to avoid buying into the CC belief that these schools are SO ALIKE that you should just go to the one that is most likely to accept you. Just because students at Duke, Dartmouth, and Princeton are all super intelligent, have amazing professors, and are in quiet neighborhoods doesn’t mean that they’re all going to make the same students equally happy. Yes, Penn and Northwestern are pre-professional. And so are Dartmouth and Harvard and Stanford. Yes, Penn and Northwestern both have multiple undergraduate schools. And so do Columbia, and Georgetown and Duke, and Vanderbilt. But I can tell you right now I wouldn’t have been equally happy at all of them and they would not all have led me to where I am today, even if the other schools might have led me to other wonderful places as well.
Having participated in a multi-month program through Northwestern, I can promise you that liking one of these schools does not mean you’ll like the other. And it’s not just suburbs vs city; the atmospheres within the schools are different as well. Yes, partially because of the bigger sports atmosphere at Northwestern (people actually go to NU football games, tailgate, and care if they win or lose- not everyone, but way more than at Penn. It’s just not really a thing at Penn outside of homecoming and Penn-Princeton), partially because of the suburban nature of Northwestern, partially because of Northwestern’s greater emphasis on Greek Life, but also because of the way students are dispersed at Northwestern. Northwestern pulls out certain programs like Communications, Music and Social Policy oriented work from their arts & sciences school, disciplinarily differentiating them from the liberal arts students and approach to education. And Arts & Sciences students make up only about 47% of Northwestern undergrads. Whereas, at Penn, the College of Arts and Sciences in 2016 made up 71% of the undergraduate enrollment.
http://www.registrar.northwestern.edu/academic_records/enroll-grad_statistics/enrollment/fall_2016_enrollment.pdf
http://www.upenn.edu/about/facts
People who have never attended Penn don’t actually realize that the School of Arts and Sciences and the liberal arts in general actually compose Penn’s core. The College is housed in the geographic center of the campus, it enrolls far and away the most students, and students from all four undergrad programs inevitably take classes in the liberal arts & sciences offered through the College as each school’s requirements overlap with departments and professors housed in the College.
Additionally, the number of grad students and professional school students at Penn are nearly equal to the number of undergrads. Northwestern’s Evanston campus, however, is majority undergrad. Some people will love not connecting with students from the law school and the med school, which aren’t on the Evanston campus. For me, that would have severely detracted from my undergraduate experience as graduate and professional school students and professors ended up being mentors to me as I traveled through my undergraduate career and post grad options with an eye towards returning to get a professional/graduate degree later on.
Northwestern undergrads don’t seem to be eligible to take classes at Northwestern Law School and they can only take four Kellogg Business School courses. With Northwestern’s medical and law campuses both in Chicago, away from the undergrad campus, it’s also unlikely that many undergrads will be able to participate in serious research at either institution. In contrast, Penn’s One University Policy and centralized campus for all its undergrad/grad/professional schools allows students to take classes, do research, meet professors, sit in on lectures, attend speaking events and more across the entire university, as well as at Penn’s many other institutes on campus. I was fortunate enough to take classes in the Law School and Wharton as well as do research through the graduate school of government all without leaving Penn’s campus. Students at Penn also aren’t limited in the number of classes they can take in the other programs (you are limited in how many can count towards your degree but you are free to enroll in as many wharton, nursing, law, fels institute of government, etc. etc. etc. courses you want).
http://www.registrar.northwestern.edu/registration/Cross-School_Registration.html
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/certificate/
Housing options are also different. Penn only has College Houses with Faculty Deans in each College house. Almost every freshman at Penn is in the Quad houses, Hill House, and Kings Court English House, making for a pretty uniform experience. In contrast, Northwestern has a majority of normal dorms that are mixed with some residential communities and then some residential colleges like those at Penn. Northwestern dorms can also be as small as 40 students and some have hundreds of students in them, making for a more diversified array of on campus housing options.
There are also certain recruiters that will only recruit at Penn, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, which one should be mindful of if they want to pursue such a career. Yes, these employers are drawn to Penn over other fantastic schools because Penn has the Wharton School on campus-- there’s no question about it. But Penn’s One University Policy ensures that students from all four of Penn’s undergrad programs have access to EXACTLY the same career services and on campus recruiting activities. Consequently, students in engineering have the same exact chance as a student in Wharton or the College to get a job with a firm that isn’t even stopping by Northwestern. As a student in the College who took one of these jobs after graduation, I was a major beneficiary of this unique advantage.
Penn’s location on the east coast also makes it easy to get to New York or DC for any number of educational, social, professional, etc. activities. And its membership in the Ivy League places its students in an incomparable network of similarly excellent students and alums. The Ivy League Alumni Clubs all host ivy-only networking events for alums and Penn, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and Yale all have actual alumni club houses within a few blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan (Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth all colocate in the other ivy clubs as they do not have clubhouses of their own). For example, I have personally attended Penn-Princeton alumni events held on the same day as Penn and Princeton play each other in basketball. I have also gone to the Columbia-Penn football game in Manhattan with members of the Penn and Columbia Alum clubs. I have gone to a young alum wine tasting event for ivy alums. Additionally, I have not attended these but I saw them advertised in the membership emails/instagrams/websites: alums from Penn, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and MIT got together for a panel on “The Current State of #Digital #Media” and the Penn Club and the Brown Alumni Club cohosted an event for alums on shifting trends in childhood education. Access to this network has been invaluable for me as I’ve relied on it for professional advice and I was even assisted by a Princeton alum I met while networking as I made some tweaks to my career path not too long ago.
Northwestern is an incredible school and one I really, reaaaally like. That being said, it is not going to provide you with the same experiences that Penn would because I’m sure Northwestern also offers a million things that Penn doesn’t that I didn’t list here. You need to decide for yourself how much each experience matters. And don’t be fooled by the broad brush of CC painters who like to say “they’re all pre-professional!” There are genuine differences even between great schools- consider them carefully.
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@carobm15 They are indeed similar schools., but they have distinct differences as outlined above. Also, in general Penn tends to rank higher in most fields and most general rankings and in general most people choose Penn when faced with the choice.
This is not 100% accurate, but shows you the dynamic:
http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Northwestern+University&with=University+of+Pennsylvania
However, that shouldn’t be the main consideration for undergrad. You will get a top education and opportunities at NW as well.
You chances would be slightly higher at NW even without legacy, and it will be def higher with your legacy status, so NW would be a less risky option.
I think what you want to study and what career you are interested in would also help inform your decision. For example if you are interested in a business career, Penn would make a difference, even if you were a non-business major at Penn.
They are more or less the same school, especially if you’re interested in A&S (one is Philly, other based in Evanston/Chicago). If I were you, I’d leverage the legacy advantage, and apply ED to Northwestern.
I’ve never been to Northwestern. But I would choose it site unseen after visiting Penn.
Penn was not a pleasant place. Depressing. The environment noisy, grungy. The building layout packed. The din of cars and the traffic stressed me out just walking around. The guide’s attitude didn’t help. The student guide was arrogant, pretentious and boasted about their activism.
Whole family hated it. Can’t imagine what it’s like when Philadelphia becomes overcast and cold.
You may want to see the relative strengths of the major(s) you are interested in. For example, Northwestern is higher ranked in engineering, and two of the engineering departments (industrial and materials) are in top 5 nationally. I don’t think any of the Penn’s engineering departments are in top 10. More specific to undergrads, there isn’t anything like Northwestern’s Whole Brain Engineering at Penn.
NU is also very strong in Chemistry. For biology, Penn is clearly stronger.
They’re not “more or less the same school” even if you’re interested in arts and sciences. They don’t even offer all the same majors!! 8-| And certain programs at each school are stronger. Consider Theatre-- if you are interested in the academic study of theatre, I hope you would consider NU’s program heavily before signing up at Penn. Similarly, if you’re interested in English language and literature, Penn’s department is going to be discernibly stronger. If your goal is sociology then perhaps they’ll be alike academically but the schools will still differ in all the ways listed above that matter a lot for quality of life!
When I was going through this process I was primarily considering offers from Penn, Yale and Columbia. A lot of well meaning people offered me advice that papered over the differences between these three schools and told me to pick the one with the best name recognition since they were all urban ivies with strong programs in the disciplines I cared about. And while it’s true that all three are more similar academically than they are different, the nuanced distinctions between them (housing arrangements, campus size, majors offered, location, location, location, research institutions on campus, proximity to family and friends, campus social activities, importance of extracurriculars to the student body, importance of greek life, etc.) can make an undergraduate experience that much better. Do yourself a favor and find what makes a difference to you and make sure the school you choose possesses those qualities.
I think the Penn alumns on this board (we know who they are) have an interesting way of comparing UPenn to the tier 1A including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and then to the tier 1B likes of Cornell, Northwestern and Duke.
I think if you took a poll of anyone who really matters (with the exception of the Penn alumns themselves), I’m confident you would find that Penn is a meaningful notch down from the big 5 in terms of reputation, selectivity, etc. In fact, Penn is closer to a peer of Northwestern than it is to Harvard and Yale. I think Wharton is in a different league but Penn CAS is definitely a peer to Northwestern, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, etc.
And for the Penn alumns that love to use US News Rankings, let’s not forget the following and this is directed at Penn95 (assuming that’s when you graduated there). Based on this archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20070908142457/http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/ - let’s look at the 1990 to 1995 US News Rankings for Penn and Northwestern:
UPenn | Northwestern
1990 20 | 19
1991 13 | 23
1992 13 | 14
1993 14 | 13
1994 16 | 13
1995 12 | 14
So I must ask Penn95, when you were at UPenn, Penn wasn’t in the top 10 in a single year. So, when you were at Penn, did you also think that Penn was ‘superior’ to Northwestern, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, etc.? Or has this sentiment just changed recently?
My point - rankings come and go but reputations are made over decades (not years). It takes many years for reputations to change.
And last but not least, I think it is incredibly silly (even ludicrous) to use Parchment to support cross admit battles. I do not dispute that Penn ‘on average’ wins against Northwestern for cross admits but I do not think the disparity can be measured with Parchment. The sample size is unreliably small. How do you account that Wash U wins 47% against Penn, 40% against Princeton, and 57% against Columbia. If you are going to use Parchment to support Penn’s ‘superiority’ to other schools, then I assume you are okay admitting that Penn loses about 1/2 of admits to Wash U. My 2 cents. And P.S. - I didn’t go to Northwestern or Penn.
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That wasn’t my experience at Penn at all. I thought it had a lovely and surprisingly quiet campus. In fact, I took a break and read on a bench on the quad for a couple of hours when I was there last for a research trip. This is in spite of my general dislike of urban campuses! It really is interesting to see how people can form such different impressions of the same school.
One difference that hasn’t been brought up yet is the semester system (Penn) vs. the quarter system (Northwestern). I’ve experienced both and have found that the semester system aligns better with summer research and internship programs, but YMMV.
My own experience with Penn was somewhere in between @Greymeer and @warblersrule but slightly more on the negative side, probably because of my dislike of urban campuses. Didn’t care for being ticketed for a legal campus parking, either. Learned afterward that Philly’s wrongful distribution of parking tickets is of national fame. As far as the location goes, I like NU, except during winter times it can turn into Siberia with the bitterly cold wind blowing in from Lake Michigan.
I would avoid applying ED without visiting, especially urban colleges like Penn. Similar to @TiggerDad, I too was a little disappointed when I visited Penn. It felt too impersonal, especially for an undergrad education. We visited many other colleges that week…so may be I had a high expectations going in. I also spoke to a friend whose daughter went there. He felt the school was too pre-professional…a little too much of preparing resumes, going to interviews and talking about jobs, starting from freshman year. Again, his words. There is nothing wrong with it, but an individual preference.
@StanfordGSB00
That is a great topic.
Which universities really hunt with the big dogs in major programs across the board?
Consider the big 5 degree programs that are critical to making a universities reputation:
- Undergrad
- Graduate engineering
- Medical school
4 ) Business school - Law School
If you want to be the best university, I believe you need to be ranked highly in all 5.
I used US News rankings.
I pulled the rankings for each university in all 5 programs.
I weighted 50% for undergrad rank, and 50% for the average of the four grad school ranks.
The results are that there are 2 schools, that are clearly the Big Dogs.
- Stanford 3.75
- Harvard 4.5
There are currently three in the group behind Stanford and Harvard.
3. Columbia 6.6
4. Penn 8.0
5. Yale 8.6
- Duke 11.2
- Northwestern 12.2
- Cornell 15.0
- Michigan 17.6 10.WashU 21.5
Other top schools don’t have all 5 programs or are not ranked in one or more.
Chicago does have 4 of these programs and I believe they are beginning an engineering program, so they seem to be on the cusp of joining this group. If I had to guess, I think they may join the second group soon.
Basically, I agree that Penn, is a clear notch below Stanford and Harvard, but they do compete effectively with all other universities across major programs.
I may have missed, but I thought OP was applying to undergraduate.
And was not applying to an amalgam of: undergrad, graduate engineering, medical school, business school, and law school.
If I’m mistaken and OP has found some sort of program that combines all these different programs,
then by all means consider #17.
Otherwise: suggest go to the undergrad that "fits’ best. Then if you do great, and want one of the mentioned graduate fields, apply to those for graduate school.
That would be my suggestion, anyway.
@monydad “If I’m mistaken and OP has found some sort of program that combines all these different programs,
then by all means consider #17.”
I was responding to @StanfordGSB00 's comment that “I think if you took a poll of anyone who really matters …, I’m confident you would find that Penn is a meaningful notch down from the big 5 in terms of reputation”
Based on the overall the ranking of the 5 major programs it looks to me like her/his assertion is true as it relates to Harvard and Stanford, but not all 5.