Hello! I am a student who was accepted into both SUNY Oswego and SUNY Oneonta for the fall 2023 semester. I’m transferring from a small community college and I need help figuring out which option would be right for me. I’m looking to get an English major.
Money isn’t something I’m factoring into my choices, as I have a scholarship for both colleges that covers most of the tuition. The rest of the money owed will be paid off.
I’d like to know about what people think about both of the colleges around certain aspects (basically a comparison between the two colleges).
Guess what - it could be you’d excel at both. There’s not necessarily one right fit. Pick one and run. Or look at the English curriculum and the profs rate my professor pages.
Oswego is on the lake so that’s gonna be worse weather.
Hopefully you’ll get some comments from people with firsthand experience at one school or the other, which I’m sure is the kind of insight you hoped to gain by posting!
From the outside, the two schools seem more alike than different - both have robust English departments with multiple focus areas available - literature, creative writing, publishing, etc. Oneonta seems to have more blending between its English and Education programs, so that might be a point in its favor if you’re interested in teaching. Oswego overall has a bit more emphasis on co-op education, plus they have their student-curated literary magazine, so it might be that there would be more ways to get your foot in the door in publishing there, if that’s of interest. (But dig deeper if that’s of interest - are there actually good co-op opportunities in publishing?) Both schools seem to have robust creative writing programs.
One thing I’d note about the campuses overall is that even though Oswego is slightly more competitive to get into, Oneonta has higher graduation rates. Usually, the more selective the school, the better the grad rates, so the reversal of that correlation makes me feel that Oneonta must be doing something right. Then again, the student population at Oneonta is a little more affluent (based on 2017 data from the NYT Chetty College Mobility - The New York Times ) so that may drive the difference in grad rates more than anything the two schools are doing.
Any factor - even a non-academic one, like an athletic or performing arts program you’re interested in or whatever - could sway the decision, as there’s no wrong choice.
The other oft-recommended approach to close decisions: Flip a coin. Then see if you’re happy or disappointed with what the coin told you to do
