<p>michigan, even it’s the same price. you’re a sports guys and you know you’ll have more fun there. don’t waste a fun college experience in order to secure a job four years from now when it’s possible (this sounds horrible) you might not even be alive then.</p>
<p>michigan will make you and your parents happier (since they don’t have to pay). only bad thing is you have to watch denard robinson crumble under every good defense he faces.</p>
<p>Son applied to Michigan and Princeton and will be attending Michigan next Fall. He was rejected from Princeton. But if you’re accepted to an Ivy, you’ve got to go. It’s like winning the lottery.</p>
<p>I agree with Sportsmom. If you get into an Ivy League school, you should go. Princeton rejects more than 90% of its applicants. You’re lucky to be apart of that minority.</p>
<p>I mean… you’ve decided by now, but I would have chosen Michigan. It seems like a much better atmosphere (you said you’re into sports) and UMich Engineering is NOTHING to scoff at. Plus, to be one of 15 to get that scholarship is incredible, and you shouldn’t pass up a free ride to one of the top whatever undergrad engineering programs in the country. </p>
<p>Aside from that, law school and medical school admissions have nothing to do with this topic because the OP is interested in ENGINEERING. The insane attempts by some on this thread to dismiss UMich by pulling completely irrelevant statistics was honestly pretty funny. People on CC are waayyy too concerned with prestige. Sure, Princeton’s more selective, so they have a higher percentage of top students. Michigan has amazing students too. Take a look at this list:</p>
<p>Notice Princeton’s not even on it, while Michigan’s pretty high up. I’d say since OP is one of the strongest engineering students there, he will be just fine. </p>
<p>I really am curious as to which one you chose! Please let us know :)</p>
<p>“But if you’re accepted to an Ivy, you’ve got to go. It’s like winning the lottery.”</p>
<p>Your statement is too simplistic. Not every IL school is as prestigious as Princeton. In engineering for example, only Princeton and Cornell are in Michigan’s league.</p>
<p>(I hope it correctly quoted the perosn above me.) With all but 2 of the IL schools sporting single-digit acceptance rates, I’d say not much else can compare. Those that do still have a double digit acceptance rate are barely there (10-11%ish). It really is like winning the lottery if you get accepted.</p>
<p>YaleGradandDad, top Medical Schools seem less prone to admitting students almost exclusively from top universities (public and private) or colleges. For example, at Johns Hopkins Medical school, ~50% of the MD students who graduated from US universities attended non-elite colleges or universities. The same seems true of WUSTL. Michigan medical school does not have a very detailed list of where its matriculants completed their undergraduate studies, but with the exception of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, no university seems to have placed that many of its graduates there.</p>
<p>1Rachel94, getting admitted into a university (even an Ivy League) is not “like winning the lottery”. Just because a university is harder to get into does not make it worth attending to the exclusion of all else. The Ivy League are among the best universities in the country, but so are a dozen of private universities (Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, MIT, Stanford etc…), handful of public universities (Cal, Michigan, UVa etc…) and several LACs (Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Davidson, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams etc…). Of course, there are different layers within the Ivy League just as there are different layers among the non-Ivies mentioned above. For example, Harvard, Princeton and Yale can only be matched by MIT and Stanford. Any other college or university would be a step down. The remaining Ivies have different styles. Columbia has far more in common with Chicago and Johns Hopkins than it does with Dartmouth, which has more in common with Williams. Cornell and Penn have more in common with Michigan and Northwestern than they do with Brown.</p>
<p>There are other factors to consider, such as personal fit, finances, academic interests, learning environment preference, student body dynamic, campus culture, setting etc… </p>
<p>In the case of the OP, had Michigan been a full-cost option, Princeton over Michigan would have been a no-brainer, unless he really loves Michigan and hates Princeton, in which case, Michigan would be the right destination. However, for the OP, on top of really liking Michigan, attending it would save him $100k. That adds another wrinkle to the decision. Is $100k manageable or is it a bing deal for the OP and his family?</p>
<p>YaleGradandDad, elite medical schools seem to consider undergraduate prestige in a different context than other programs. Schools like Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown seem to perform a lot better than universities like U of Chicago, Columbia, and Georgetown.</p>
<p>Wash U is the only elite medical school I know that has released the undergraduate background of its medical students for the past 15 years. Here is the breakdown as Alexandre has provided:</p>
<p>Harvard University: 88
Duke University: 79
Stanford University: 72</p>
<p>University of California-Berkeley: 51
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Northwestern: 48
Cornell and Yale: 46
University of Illinois-Champaign Urbana: 42
Princeton: 41
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 39
Johns Hopkins: 37
University of California-Los Angeles: 36
Rice: 33</p>
<p>Similarly, Vanderbilt tells us where its medical students received their undergraduate degrees from the Classes of 2006 through 2010.</p>
<p>Harvard University: 24
University of Notre Dame: 21</p>
<p>Washington University in St. Louis: 16
Duke University: 15
Yale University: 14
Princeton University: 13
University of Pennsylvania: 12
Emory University and the University of Virginia: 11
Johns Hopkins and MIT: 10
University of California-Berkeley: 9
Dartmouth College and University of Florida: 8</p>
<p>Some other schools like UGA, Georgia Tech, Brown, Cornell, and UCLA have enrolled anywhere between 5-7 students at Vanderbilt Med in the past 4 years but after that every other school on the list has enrolled 1-2 students max. Clearly, the prestige of an undergraduate institution matters.</p>
<p>If you adjust for the number of applicants to medical schools, then the top 15 research universities (the 8 Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, JHU, and Caltech) plus the top 5 LACs (Amherst, Middlebury, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Williams) absolutely dominate medical school placement.</p>
<p>
Duke and JHU are well represented at Michigan Medical School as well with an average of 3-4 students every year although there seems to be a lot of variation.</p>
<p>The most common recurring theme at Michigan, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Wash U, JHU, etc. seems to be that undergraduates of these schools are incredibly disproportionately represented so going to a school which has a medical school would be extremely beneficial.</p>
<p>That is why I would choose Duke or Penn over Princeton or MIT if I wanted to be a doctor in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>That was my experience looking at my classmates but this seems to be the minority opinion of those advising pre-meds on CC.</p>
<p>I do think having the opportunity to do research at a medical school may be a plus for admissions and for that you might ding Princeton. I don’t buy this grade deflation issue at Princeton as it might relate to medical school admissions. Those medical school adcoms know more about how Princeton students perform compared to their peers than any of us on CC. They know that a 3.6 GPA at Princeton may equal a 3.85 at another top tier school and can make those adjustments when they pick students. Does anyone think that the top 20% (by GPA) of the pre-meds at Princeton are any less attractive that the top 20% at Yale even if there is a statistical difference in the average GPA?</p>
<p>Wow! OP here. That escalated quickly. Goldenboy, you probably shouldn’t post anymore, mostly because I wasn’t interested in what you were saying and because you’re not good at writing arguments. I have decided to choose Michigan! Thank you to all the people who constructively posted on here. Posts about Law school were ok (although not really on topic, posts about medical school were a little more relevant as I have not ruled out that option yet), and the argument that you can compare schools on Law school acceptance was a little off-target as you can also compare engineering graduate school acceptance rates and industry starting salaries. I already knew that going to Princeton would give me the name, but in all honesty the reason Ivies have higher acceptance rates and starting salaries is because of the type of person they attract, not because they do things so much better than everyone else. Thanks again, Go Blue!</p>