I am an international student and have been accepted to :
UIUC: Computer Science- College of Engineering- James Scholar
Net Cost : 57K per year
USC: Computer Science - Viterbi- McCarthy Honors College - USC Village(Scholarship: 20K per year)
Net Cost : 51K per year
UMichigan: Computer Science- College of Engineering
Net Cost: 60K per year
I wanted help selecting among these three.
Any help and opinion will be greatly appreciated.
UIUC is the top ranked school for CS, unless the 6k per year is a big difference I see no reason to go anywhere else.
Thanks a lot! @literallymarx The 6K per year wont be a big worry, but what about the Very Very COLD weather and not that great location and the not so great social life which i have read on other forums. Can you please tell me about these. Is it really so bad in these ways ?
I have also read that UIUC is only known for CS and its overall prestige is not that great. So can you please explain why that should be an important factor, shouldn’t only your majors prestige matter ?
You know, it’s not cold like Siberia;-) It does get below freezing with modest snowfall. Very cold compared to USC, but not quite as cold or snowy as Michigan.
Social life is not going to be that much different than any very large public university. There are enough students and things to do around campus and in Champaign/Urbana that pretty much anyone can find a niche. It’s only 2 hours to Chicago and not all that hard to get there for a weekend.
As for prestige, UIUC Engineering/CS is up there with any university in the USA, with a few possible exceptions like MIT and Stanford. If you’re looking for a tech job or grad school, you wont find many that are better regarded by employers or researchers. If you are thinking you may transfer to something outside Engineering/CS, Michigan may well have a more prestigious program in some areas. If you are interested in computer game design, USC has a very prestigious program for that.
I mean, cold is pretty relative, as someone literally from Siberia and the Chicago-area it’s not bad lol. Social life it depends, since a lot of international students tend not to interact with the American students, though that’s not true 100%. I’ve met many international students playing pickup basketball at CRCE for example. Otherwise, its not too bad finding a good group of friends in the dorms or in classes frosh year. And as @illinoisx3 has pointed out UIUC is a very prestigious CS school.
@TechI123456 I like Michigan and UIUC for undergraduate education better than U Southern Cal. They are both slightly more rigorous compared to USC, and engineering managers slightly prefer Michigan or Illinois grads in my circles. Michigan is much harder to get into for undergrad, but UIUC has the top PhD rank for CS. Michigan is the coldest if you are really afraid of cold. Central Illinois is nice, lots of things to do, and a great performing arts center at UIUC. Ann Arbor is an active college town. Michigan is easier to fly in and out of , if that matters. UIUC, you have to take a bus from Chicago airports, but not too hard. USC is in Los Angeles and well connected to good CA jobs, but you are going to end up with a good job if you try at Michigan or UIUC, so I would pick one of those better undergraduate programs. Even though USC is private, and engineering has come up in rank, its not quite as good for CS undergraduate programs as Illinois or Michigan. USC was a film school for years, and the top engineering colleges in California are U of California, including UCLA, Davis, San Diego or Berkeley. USC is also a very compact campus surrounded by a slightly dangerous area of Los Angeles. For safety, pick Michigan or UIUC. You will meet very smart students at all of those schools, maybe MIchigan has more east coast very smart kids than the others. Michigan has more OOS students than Illinois. Illinois has more students from China I believe compared to any US undergrad program.
@TechI123456 Illinois is well ranked for electrical engineering, a top five school for physics and chemistry , and well ranked for agricultural sciences. It has a very top accounting program, and the MBA is OK, not top but not bottom. My friends who are chemistry professors all do sabbaticals at UIUC, as chemistry is so well known and UIUC is so well equipt in all the sciences. Illinois has been ranked number one for condensed matter physics for years and years now.
Americans argue about which is the best midwestern engineering program overall: UIUC, Purdue or Michigan. They are all pretty close but Illinois has an edge in the SCIENCES and Mathematics is top too. Michigan is right up there for mathematics too though, so you cannot go wrong. Michigan attracts many out of state students, Illinois a bit less so.
@TechI123456 All 3 are very good programs that will have slightly different shadings.
Both Illinois and Michigan are very cold in the winter if you are not used to that. (Don’t be fooled. They get coooold.)
I don’t think the kind of parsing people like to do around schools here is really all that big a deal in the “real world.” All 3 programs are really well respected.
If you are leaning more to academics, UCIC or Mich are probably considered a bit more academically prestigous.
USC will be most interesting (from a career standpoint) if you want to get into games, design or entertainment at all. Also, with Snap’s IPO and some other moves there the “silicon beach” thing is becoming somewhat real. If you are planning, able to stay after you graduate. UMich and UCIC are also mini-tech hubs, of course.
My D picked Viterbi over Mich simply due to lifestyle. USC is really living right in the heart of a gritty big city (although the campus and esp. the Villiage is brand new and really nice.) She knew she wanted to be in SoCal after graduation and traded that network for UMich’s slightly higher rankings.
Michigan is like living in the nicest American small town around, with lots of the good vibes of American small town living, with less of the isolation and insular downside since it is so well populated with UMich folks. And it is a relative quick drive to Detroit.
Champign/Urbana, esp Urbana, are also a college town, but a bit further from Chicago and a bit more “midwestern” to me somehow. I have not spent as much time there as LA or Ann Arbor, however.
I would say if you were interested in an academic career, UCIC might have a small advantage. For overall engineering prestige internationally, I’d guess UMich has the best rep/most well known.
If you are looking to work in Silcon Valley or go right into a career, USC might be the best choice. There is a very strong advising component to Viterbi. USC is hyper-career oriented with job fairs etc. like every weekend it seems. Mich and UCIC will have that as well of course. USC’s network is focused very strongly in CA and esp. SoCal.
I’d say you have 3 great choices. Will come down to where and what you want to focus on after graduation.
CaliDad2020 has a lot of good information about the three locations.
I would only add that is snows much less in Central Illinois and its not that cold comparatively to Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor gets 50-100 inches of snow over 12 months. Urbana area gets 20-35 inches of snow annual.
In addition Ann Arbor campus closes for COLD, occassionally. I do not think UIUC ever closes for cold. Its not as cold.
http://www.isws.illinois.edu/atmos/statecli/cuweather/cu-averages.htm
Michigan is economically depressed compared to Illinois. For jobs Illinois is very strong in engineering, law, and business, due to a major city, Chicago and other strong cities all over Illinois, but Michigan is still
trying to recover from the 2008-2014 crash. Michigan got so bad that Detroit had no street lights for a few years.
Ann Arbor is not really close enough to Detroit to have a negative effect but most Michigan graduates , undergrad or graduate leave Michigan for jobs. Lots of UIUC graduates find jobs in Illinois.
As far as state funding, Illinois and Michigan have some issues in their state budgets, but Michigan makes up for that by offering many OOS students seats and charging a lot of money for OOS tuition. Illinois does that too, but maybe serves the students of Illinois a bit better, as the Chicago kids can afford Illinois more readily than Michigan families seems to be able to afford Michigan in state tuition. Thus, Michigan has become a “public Ivy” in the midwest, meaning that it has a lot of very smart kids from all over getting offers and coming to Michigan for the four years.
UIUC is favored by many Colorado and midwestern families as the “stronger engineering college”. East and West coast families for certain favor Michigan as the “better place to be a college student”.
Our S was very happy at USC, an EE grad. We have friends whose S got scholarships there and at UIUC. He toured both campuses with his dad and for himself chose USC.
USC campus and the area around it is safer than reports to the contrary, is fine and safe for most, as long as people use common sense. The warmer weather was less of an adjustment for our S than a colder climate would have been.
One thing that is particularly attractive about USC engineering is that they have 40% females, which is the highest % in the US. They devote a lot of funds to USC engineering, including a separate career counseling, job fairs and more. I suspect USC may have more international name recognition than the other Us, especially due to the Trojan family network. This may be useful when job hunting, depending on where you plan to live.
USC also encourages students to take courses from a variety of fields. One friend got a degree in engineering, one in finance and an MBA in his 4 years and a few summers at USC.
“UIUC vs USC vs UMichigan”
All are excellent. From an academic point of view you can’t go wrong (unless you intend to goof off and party, in which case all would be a disaster). All have well deserved strong reputations.
Winters in Michigan are COLD. Illinois is just as COLD (and harder to spell).
Personally if I were from anywhere significantly warmer than St Petersburg then I would probably go to USC and only spend an insane amount of money, rather than a slightly-larger-than-insane amount of money.
UIUC Computer Science is nearly 50% men/women now. That’s not true of the rest of Engineering, of course.
https://cs.illinois.edu/news/46-incoming-computer-science-majors-uiucs-college-engineering-are-women
Thanks Everyone for your help. Really appreciate it. 
I am an international student so will be eligible only for on-campus job.Does UIUC beings in the middle of nowhere, mean even domestics students will work on-campus and increase the competition making it difficult for international students to get on-campus jobs at UIUC ?
Secondly are there any opportunities for international students to get scholarships as international continuing students at UIUC ?
Thirdly I have heard that USC has a very very strong alumni network known as the Trojan Family. Can someone please give me an idea about how UIUC’s alumni network is ?
Thanks again for help