I think this all depends on the financial cost comparison and what your parents can bear. Rutgers costs about $33,000 per year for a resident student living on-campus and about $25,000 a year for a commuter student. NCSU is about $41,000 a year for a nonresident student living on campus. Penn State costs about $45,000 to $48,000 depending on your major for nonresident students on the main University Park campus.
They’ve got quite different settings: New Brunswick is a small city itself, but it’s a short train ride to both Philadelphia and New York. Rutgers has probably less of a traditional university feel than NCSU or Penn State for whatever reasons.
NCSU is located in a medium-to-large city - Raleigh - and is within driving distance of several other large universities (Duke, UNC, NCCU, NCA&T). The social life in cities/regions where there are lots of college students holding lots of different kinds of events can be a lot of fun! The weather’s also better - warmer in the wintertime, during much of the time you’ll be living on campus. It’s also relatively inexpensive for an OOS school, honestly - the difference is only about $8,000 a year if you were planning on living on campus at Rutgers, which comes out to about $32,000 total.
Penn State is in a more rural area - 3 hours from all the nearest major cities. But because of that, Penn State students make their own fun and the town life more or less revolves around the town. State College is a great little town! It’s going to be colder in the winter, of course. Greek life is really strong at PSU - I’m sure it is at NCSU, too, but I just know it is at PSU (I lived there for a year and witnessed it in action, haha). PSU also has tons of school spirit and a giant alumni network that has strong ties - one of my graduate school roommates was a PSU alum. One thing, though is that Penn State is quite a bit more expensive OOS than NCSU - it costs about $12-5K a year more than Rutgers and $4-7K a year more than NCSU.
I dunno, if I was going to go out of state I think I’d go to NCSU. The cost benefit is better, unless you get some financial aid or scholarships at Penn State. But I’m also biased because I’m Southern and I have friends who went to NCSU; they loved it.