UNC Chapel Hill vs Dartmouth College vs Georgetown University - help me decide!

College Search & Selection
1

I have recently gotten decisions back from all of the colleges I have applied to, and I have whittled my top choices down to UNC, Dartmouth and GU. In this post I’m going to outline my goals and expectations for what I want out of my college education, along with my personal pros and cons for each school. So with that, let’s get started!

The first consideration I have is which school would have the best programs for me. There are a lot of different subjects I want to study in college and I’m really not sure how I will organize my major, but for now these are the main areas I want to focus on in my studies:

  1. Russian
  2. French
  3. Arabic/Middle Eastern Studies
  4. Persian (Dartmouth doesn't have this)
  5. International Affairs/Politics
  6. World History and Cultures

Language programs are the most important part of my major, so I would like to know which school objectively has the best language programs. Study abroad opportunities are also crucial for me and any on-campus language immersion activities are a plus. I should also mention that my career interests are: UN/UNESCO, James Bond stuff, international media organizations like RT or Euronews, international business…all of them involve translation or interpretation.

There are several pros and cons which each school offers me. I’ll list them below:

UNC
pros: I was accepted to Honors Carolina and the EURO-TAM program, which provides excellent connections to the EU political landscape and sets a solid framework of courses for me to take. I also got excellent financial aid from UNC and their language programs sound great. The deal breaker with UNC is that I have a good chance of getting accepted to their Global Gap Year Program, which would give me $7,500 to do a service project abroad. I would be thrilled to receive this scholarship, but it would lock me into UNC if I accepted it.

cons: The location doesn’t seem like the most internationally/politically connected place in the world, and I also desperately want to get out of North Carolina!

GU
pros: I got accepted to SFS, which is usually ranked number one for international affairs and language programs. The international connections DC has to offer aren’t matched anywhere else, so my internship and career possibilities would be limitless. DC is also a super fun location for college!

cons: It’s my most expensive option

Dartmouth
pros: It’s an Ivy League school and it has dozens of study abroad/international service scholarships I could apply to. I’m not sure how great their languages are, especially because they don’t have Persian. They do have a great international environment on campus though, especially with their Global Villages and their focus on global learning.

cons: The location is pretty rural and Dartmouth is also a fairly small school

The most difficult issue for me to consider is prestige, which is why an outside perspective would really be useful for me. Are all of these colleges at the same level of prestige for international affairs? Is Georgetown my most prestigious option because of SFS, or is Dartmouth more prestigious because it’s in the Ivy League? I know this is a petty issue and it shouldn’t be the basis of my decision, but I still need an opinion about this because I have no idea!

2

Prestige doesn’t hardly matter among three schools of this quality, but since you asked:

I think in terms of overall undergraduate prestige, Dartmouth > Georgetown > UNC. Barely greater than…

But…

SFS at Georgetown is kind of like Wharton at Penn – slightly more prestige than the school as a whole enjoys – So you might say that G’town SFS is as prestigious as Dartmouth.

The really important things are cost and fit. It sounds to me like UNC wins on cost, but is your least favorite fit because you want to leave the state. It sounds like Georgetown makes the most academic sense, but it loses the cost battle. And Dartmouth is second in both fit and cost.

I think if you can swing Georgetown financially, the fact you’re basically in love with it makes it your #1. It’s basically #1 in that field and even if you changed your mind, you’d still be at Georgetown.

If G’town is just too expensive, you have to decide between cost (UNC) and fit (Dartmouth).

I don’t think you can make a wrong choice here, as long as you feel the cost/fit combo is acceptable.

3

SRS is tops for IA, and the DC connections are unmatched. If you think you’ll want to pursue a career in that area, then go to GTown. Whether it’s worth the extra cost over the others depends on how much and what that means for you and your family - no one can answer that but you.

If G’Town is too expensive, then UNC has an edge over Dartmouth because while the latter is more “prestigious”, the former seems to have more of what you want (besides being cheaper). I understand you want to get out of state, but being at UNC will be a bit like being “out of state” anyway. Besides, you’ll have study abroad, etc. But you can’t go wrong by choosing Dartmouth either!