<p>Which school do you think is better?
I don't care about the weather, location, number of students.
What I care is how I will be after graduation.
It includes not only how much I'll be intellectually grown,
but also how many job offers or internship opportunities I will be granted.
I might seem snobbish but I hope to have your honest opinions!</p>
<ul>
<li>I'm admitted by Arts and Science school (though the name is different for each school) at all three!</li>
</ul>
<p>Rice than Michigan</p>
<p>I am biased, but UVA is my choice of the 3. I think you have to decide based on the factors you mentioned that you don't care about, because the 3schools are about the same in the factors you do care about, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Your intellectual growth and internship and job opportunities will be about the same because all 3 schools are top notch.</p>
<p>So, you should use the seemingly meaningless factors to decide.</p>
<p>UVA has the best weather of the 3, and the prettiest setting of the 3.</p>
<p>i'd say rice is best. umich and uva both have great reps though..</p>
<p>personally i would choose umich or uva because of location (although you don't care too much about it). i just find houston miserable except for the oasis that is rice.</p>
<p>All three schools have great reps. Internships may be better nearer to each school so think abut which location pleases you most.</p>
<p>Choose the one where you will be happiest and have the best courses in what interests you. If you are socially and academically happy, you will perform best in courses, have better grades, better professor's recommendations and better options for the future.</p>
<p>Those are three awesome schools. They are pretty even in most respects. Pick based on personal fit.</p>
<p>Pick based on FA packages/fit. Can't go wrong with any of those choices</p>
<p>While you indicate that you don’t care about size or location, I would strongly suggest that you think a second time about this. I also suggest that you consider the student quality at each school and think how this might affect your experience. </p>
<p>From a size standpoint, this is a major difference and there is likely a relationship between size and the amount of assistance/attention you can expect as an undergraduate. Rice has just over 3000 students, U Virginia has just over 13,000 students and U Michigan has over 25,000 students. This size difference does have consequences in what you will experience as an undergraduate, eg, class size in the first year or two, faculty attention (and possibly faculty recommendation for grad schools or internships or postgraduate job opportunities) as defined by student/faculty ratio, and breadth of academic offerings. </p>
<p>Clearly, Rice would offer you substantially greater personal touch, A revealing data point on this might be the USNWR Faculty Resources rank (Rice-15th, U Virginia-35th, U Michigan-69th) and the Financial Resources rank (Rice-24th, U Virginia-56th, U Michigan-35th). These numbers indicate the amount of monies that the schools spend to support the faculty and the students. Rice would appear to be the clear winner. </p>
<p>On the other hand, U Virginia and U Michigan have greater breadth of academic offerings and have strong reputations among academics. This is shown thru the USNWR Peer Assessment scores (Rice-4.1, U Virginia-4.3, U Michigan-4.5). While the differences are relatively small (and I personally have grave misgivings about the value of the PA score), if you desire a more research oriented experience, it is likely that U Virginia and U Michigan will provide you with more opportunities than would Rice. In this instance, their greater size is an asset. </p>
<p>I believe that the locations of these schools also should be considered more thoroughly. I see from your other posts that you hail from Korea. Without knowing your intentions about postgraduate work or geographical desires, it is hard to greatly assist with this, but which school you choose is going to influence this. All three of these schools have good placement reputations and their graduates generally do just fine, but the postgraduate opportunities will definitely differ. All three of these can meet your needs, but it really will be up to you as the student to make this happen. What you do as an undergraduate will have the most resonance and this overrides the brand value of all of these schools.</p>
<p>While Rice is a very fine school, its small size and location in Houston limits somewhat its national placement ability. People who know about Rice value it greatly, but it has a relatively low national profile and a relatively modest-sized alumni base. That being said, Rice is recognized as the top school in the Southwest and ranks with Duke, Emory and Vanderbilt as the premier schools in America’s southern Sun Belt. </p>
<p>U Virginia and U Michigan each have national placement ability and are on the list of the top 30-40 schools in America that are targeted by many high profile employers (Rice is also on the list). In NYC, U Virginia and U Michigan have many alumni, but each school would be regarded below the Ivies and the top privates and many of the top Northeastern LACs. For U Virginia and U Michigan, their greatest strength by far is in their local regions (the Mid-Atlantic/South for U Virginia and the Midwest/Northeast for U Michigan). Outside of their home regions, especially for non-technical grads, these two have decent brand recognition, but have no more (and in some regions less) appeal than local state universities and local private colleges. However, in non-US locales, the two state universities (and more so U Michigan than U Virginia) would provide greater name recognition than Rice and that could lead to greater job opportunities. </p>
<p>A last word about student quality. While U Virginia and U Michigan are excellent state universities with many fine students, the student body at Rice is considerably more academically talented and much more consistent. Using SATs for comparison, the average score at Rice is 1435 (same level as Brown, Columbia, UPenn, and higher than Cornell), the average at U Virginia is 1325 and the average at U Michigan is 1315. Also, 172 Rice matriculates (5.40% of the student population) were National Merit Finalists (2005 results) while U Virginia and U Michigan each had only 0.29% of their student populations at that level (41and 75 respectively).</p>
<p>Nice job, hawkette.</p>
<p>I am biased, as I have a child at Rice (btw, today is beerbike!) He selected it because of the small size, residential honors program, reasonable distribution requirement, excellent career placement and entrepreneurial leadership opportunities, etc. It has the benefit of a university wityh the feel of a LAC. If that is what you are looking for, Rice is a better choice than the bigger Universitys.</p>
<p>It is definitely a nice problem to have, deciding between these 3 schools.</p>
<p>so much thanks to you all who answer me!!
i'll be greatly helpful for me to decide. =D</p>
<p>hawkette's post is excellent. I'll echo much of the graduates are placed in their respective region. In Texas where Rice is very (or extremely) well-regarded, most of your internship and job offers will most likely in state. While that may seem "limiting", consider that Texas is larger the Michigan, Virgina and their surrounding states combined, and houses three of the largest metropolitan areas and 56 of the Fortune 500 companies. </p>
<p>If you value career mobility, go to Michigan since a good numbers of their graduates go outside Midwest.</p>
<p>One minor point: Houston area has a vibrant Korean-American community which may or may not be of importance to you.</p>
<p>I agree with much of what Hawkette says except one point. In NYC, Michigan and UVa are very highly regarded. With the exception of Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, no university in the country is more highly regarded or more well represented on Wall Street than those two public elites. </p>
<p>In other parts of the East Coast, I agree that the Ivies and other East Coast Elites have an edge, but not in NYC, where Michigan and UVa have a dominating presence.</p>
<p>poor Rice--
However, since the current Rice prez is the previous pres of Columbia Law school, do you think it is getting a little more well known up there, Alexandre?</p>
<p>I personly don't question Rice's reputation. Where it matters, Rice is very highly regarded.</p>
<p>Thanks, Alexandre.
Side note-- still trying to find out waht happened at Rice today. they apparently cancelled beerbike due to rain and the death of a student.</p>
<p>I believe 23% of Rice's undergrads are NMF's. (The stats for this year are only for incoming students and don't include the continuing students.) If you look at the internships and job ops, the Houston companies recruiting at Rice are global and multinational as well as local - Houston is a major city and major port, so many companies have offices there! The problem with the Prof. Rep of the ranking scores has to do with visibility and size. Since Rice is so small, it doesn't figure as prominently as the large U's in publishing, etc. But for research ops, there are PLENTY at Rice.</p>
<p>any other opinions?
i still cannot decide where to go in spite of your great advice...</p>
<p>Congratulations on your acceptances!</p>
<p>My vote would be for Rice. The residential colleges are hard to beat.</p>
<p>anxiousmom, thanks for your clarification on the NMS numbers. My number was for a single class and thus understated the quality of the entire student body. Extrapolated for four years, the results would be as follows:
Rice 21.6% of the student body are NMS finalists
U Virginia 1.15%
U Michigan 1.18%</p>
<p>re alexandre's comments re NYC placement for U Michigan and U Virginia, it is true that their business students (Michigan's Ross schools has about 350 graduates annually and Virginia's McIntire has about 250-300) do fairly well in the recruiting process. However, they are far from "dominating" as Wall Street draws from many sources. And, of course, the overall graduating class sizes are signficantly larger (U Michigan has about 5800 graduates annually and U Virginia about 3200) so the % of their students going to NYC for Wall Street is not exceptionally high.</p>