My daughter is making the exact same choice. She received large scholarships from both schools. Lehigh is 58,500 net of personal and books, Tulane is about 62,500. After scholarships, Tulane is about $3500 more per year. Both were very generous but luckily my daughter worked hard for it.
NOLA is beautiful, has great fun and food and the Tulane campus is vibrant and the staff overall very warm and friendly. We visited for 5 days as we had never been there and wanted total mmersion. The professors we met with were terrific, warm, highly regarded, well published and from top schools. The school has a bit of everything, so switching and minoring is great. The drawbacks were small departments, in some ways shrunk after Katrina and only slowly rebuilding after being pilfered by other schools. Crime is indeed high and the population highly varied with a low overall graduation rate of about 75%. Med school acceptance was high at over 90% when ch is important to my daughter. Three undergrads have committed suicide in the dorms themselves this year alone, which is very high and thus unusual. A lot of big partiers with a lot of serious students. Minor points include that we are Jewish, so the 35% jewish is nice for us. The trolleys directly to shopping and downtown are great for convenience. I have hired and interviewed hundreds of new grads for the companies I’ve started and Tulane has a solid reputation but it varies by major, as with most schools.
Lehigh also has a very large campus, half a bit urban but mostly suburban. While the immediate area is far from being NOLA, you have plenty of great, award winning restaurants and are an hour to two hours on the weekends from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washinton D.C. King of Prussia Mall is one thing of the largest, most travelled shopping areas in the world with every single major brand. A pain as a freshman, but get one upper class friend and a car after that and it can be a lot of fun. Lehigh is first and foremost an engineering and sciences school with a very powerful reputation. I’ve hired plenty of Lehigh grads. Education and business are also powerful. Fact is at Tulane and Lehigh other majors in the liberal arts like Poly Sci are great, but never will compare to Georgetown or a Franklin and Marshall, etc… In that vein, it’s what you make of it and what you intern for plus great grades. the professors in general are great, helpful and outgoing as are the support staffs. Indeed, the ones in the smaller departments were the friendliest, like Poly Sci. The graduation rate is about 90% plus and job and grad school placement is over 97% by class. Other points include Lehigh bring consistently ranked as one of the “professional” party schools and one of the few left with actual fraternity and sorority houses where all members live and in their own “neighborhood” on campus like a real subdivision on “the hill”. Most are over 2000 sqft, but many are over 6000 sqft. Both very bad druggy ones and terrific ones.
My daughters choice? Lehigh. While both are great, in engineering, her major is bioengineering, Lehigh has a clear edge with much larger, more sophisticated facilities and reputation in general. It’s closer to home (7 hour drive versus a two hour flight and well over 1000 miles) and she loves the sorority thing with actual mansions and parking lot in front of them. We loved Tulane a lot and they loved her, but the edge tilted us to better academics in her space and the specific social life she wants in an environmental where she was more familiar with and that was safer. If she was an Architecure major, it would have been Tulane, who clearly has the better reputation and program.
Don’t know if that helps. I did go to Lehigh, but it’s nothing like when I went. Indeed, my daughter hated the idea of Lehigh because it was dad’s school. I was actually pretty shocked with her choice.
Big FYI - tours are ok, but not great - meeting the actual professors, major support staff as well as as major students is everything. We did this over freshman, sophomore and junior summers in progressively more detail and narrower by major and university type. The visits led to big files on her at each school she focused upon with every letter, thank you letter and professor interaction recorded. No one does that. It makes a difference below the ivy level.