Hi! I’m an international student from South Korea. I recently got accepted to both UF and UW Madison, and I’m struggling to decide between those two schools.
I know that UF’s US ranking in both US News and Forbes is higher, but for Education Studies, which is my intended major, UW Madison is #3 or similar to that in the US, while UF made that major in 2018 fall(so it is a totally new major).
UW’s tuition is about $10000 higher, but money doesn’t really matter for me.
Both schools are really appealing to me(and I especially like Florida’s weather), but I’m unsure which college I should go because I’m not sure if UF will provide me nice education since the major is new. I hate cold weather, but UW’s excellence in the major is really appealing to me.
Do employers in Korea care which of these you attend? That is the only thing that matters. You need to plan ahead so that when you have finished your education, and return home, you will be able to get a job.
@happymomof1 Well… I want to get both master’s and doctorate degrees after I graduate from college, and I don’t want to work in normal firms. In that case, which college would you recommend to me…??
Both of these can get you into a grad program in your field of study. Don’t worry about that. If UWM has the better reputation at the grad level, then an undergrad degree from UF might be the better plan.
Also, even though the major is new at UF, it is unlikely that all of the faculty members are new, or that even most of the individual courses would be new. Look at the courses requirement for that major, and check back to previous year’s course catalogues (there shoukd be several years’ of catalogues linked on the website) to see which classes are new and which have been around for a while.
Quantifying quality is very tricky. You can easily rank the size of colleges’ student populations, or their average SAT scores , because those are quantitative. But even then those types of rankings rankings don’t necessarily translate into accurate or significant QUALITATIVE rankings (e.g., one is BETTER due to having more students or higher SAT scores).
So all this talk of one college or one program being BETTER (qualitative) because somebody slapped together some criteria & put some numbers next to the college names is not as absolute as many people think.
Is undergrad education “better” at UF or UW? Come on, none of us can truly claim to know, even if there is an answer to that question. There are countless variables that would result in one school being better for an individual, almost none of which we know. The best we could say is that for a lot of reasons they appear to be roughly similar. Nobody says, “Wow, this person went to UW, while this person (sneer) only went to UF” (or vice versa). But you know what isn’t roughly similar? The average temperature November through April. Some people might not care about that. Others will.