You need a 3.5 to be awarded a UA merit scholarship as a freshman admit. Once there, you need a 3.0 to maintain it.
Tough choice, OP, but I don’t see how you can go wrong either way. Make sure you’ve got the $$ sorted out, though, before you make your final decision. Also, you don’t say what region you’re coming from. My son had no issues with cold weather and actually thought he preferred it to hot weather, but visiting the Twin Cities in 2014 after a brutal, brutal winter made him see the upside of attending school in the Deep South!
A bit more information:
I did indeed get the presidential elite package from Alabama, and I did indeed get a seperate $2500 yearly scholarship from their COE. I was wondering before why they would just give me free money that I can’t use to pay for school…I guess it makes more sense now. Thankfully, my family is in a decent enough economic condition that paying off the other $2000~ish yearly it would cost to cover the rest of Alabama housing (if I stay in a suite dorm) for the other three years won’t be a problem.
About the Minnesota scholarship: it is indeed full ride in every sense of the word. It’s technically a third party scholarship, but it is specifically made for the University of Minnesota by the George W Taylor Foundation. I’ve sat down and talked to people from the Foundation, and an admissions counselor from UMn, and there is no catch to this one as far as I’m concerned. It covers my cost of attendance.
Also: I’m from northern Illinois, right by the Wisconsin border, so I’m used to cold winters. But warmer weather would be pretty nice in the winter, I’m just not sure how much I’d like the weather in Alabama during the other seasons.
@michaelb373 , seems like an easy choice to me. UMN is $30K (assuming $10K for yr 2,3,4) less expensive with your scholarship and 5 hrs closer by car or $200 cheaper each way by air when you include shuttle costs. If you consider that you will probably come home 2-3x per year that will add up. If you plan on settling in the midwest or plains states after college that is a bonus too. The Alabama economy is a lot stronger through.
@michaelb373 I didn’t follow everything you posted, but I suggest calling UA’s admissions office to clarify. My ds does not have to live on campus to receive his scholarship $$. He can use his $$ for off-campus housing and buying groceries, etc.
A lot of people are discussing weather and housing, and those things matter. I think you might also focus on the academic differences between the schools.
A quick check tells me that Minnesota is more highly ranked by every measure. The average SAT at Minnesota is 1935, which means that its average student is in the top 10 percent in the nation. At Alabama it is 1660, which means that the average student is only a little above the national average. That is a very significant difference, and I am of the opinion that you learn as much from interacting with other well prepared and academically motivated students as you do from your professors. Minnesota has a better student to faculty ratio, a better graduation rate, a much larger endowment, and on average its graduates do much better financially.
To its credit, Alabama is making a push to up its academics, and more power to them for doing so. But right now, there is a pretty big gap there.
The UA numbers are taken to represent the entire student body. The OP would be in the Honors College, where the test scores and GPAs of those students are much higher. AL has a very strong manufacturing economy, and has the largest concentration of space and military missile engineering work in the country in Huntsville. Auto manufacturing is also very strong with the Hyundai plant outside Montgomery and the Mercedes plant outside Tuscaloosa.
To me full ride includes room and board. DS got five years tuition, plus one year room/board, engineering and some other scholarships as NMF and high stats. Even that isn’t full ride:-)
Can’t remember if I mentioned this but what part of the country do you want to settle in? Most college graduates stay in their region as that’s where most companies recruit from. My son wanted East Coast. If you look on Glassdoor it’s interesting to see where the graduates come from.
aerospace and auto companies hire many CS students. All system have very complex code and computers talking to each other. It’s not just working at internet and comm companies.
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Fortune 1000 companies based there:
MN - 25
AL - 5
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There are 21 Fortune 500 companies in Huntsville Alabama alone. That’s just one city.
The unemployment rates are largely irrelevant. Those don’t apply to college graduates.
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But warmer weather would be pretty nice in the winter, I’m just not sure how much I’d like the weather in Alabama during the other seasons.
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Not sure what this means. The school year is Fall, Winter, Spring. Winter is mild. Fall and Spring are absolutely perfect…sunny blue skies with white puffy clouds. It’s actually like that many Winter days, too.
Anyway…since the UMinn scholarship offer is better, I wouldn’t just sit on that. I would email a polite letter to Mrs. Mary Spiegel, Asst Provost, Executive Director of Admissions and tell her thank you for the offer, but UMinn has offered (state exactly what the offer is). Ask if Bama can increase their offer so that the cost difference isn’t a factor.
“Anyway…since the UMinn scholarship offer is better, I wouldn’t just sit on that. I would email a polite letter to Mrs. Mary Spiegel, Asst Provost, Executive Director of Admissions and tell her thank you for the offer, but UMinn has offered (state exactly what the offer is). Ask if Bama can increase their offer so that the cost difference isn’t a factor.”
Why would the OP want Bama to match an offer from a school that is recognized as academically superior? Unless UA is much cheaper, it would make little sense to spend the same amount of money to get an education that is not equivalent. The UA homerism here is getting a little ridiculous.
UMN seems to have more upsides (higher rankings, cheaper, easier to get to/from home, etc.) and perhaps the logical choice. But if you want to get away and experience another part of the country during college, there’s value in that too. If the latter, I’d ask Bama if they’ll match UMN’s offer as mom2 said.
And the knee-jerk accusations of homerism are getting a little tiring, especially coming from someone who never misses an opportunity to talk up his alma mater.
The OP specifically asked about UA. So your issue should be with him, no?
It makes perfect sense to ask a lower-ranked school to match an offer from that of a peer or more highly ranked school. It would NOT make sense for the OP to ask UMN to match Bama’s offer. That I’d agree with. But that wasn’t what was suggested.
OP, since you received an Elite scholarship, I assume that means you were admitted to University Fellows. Is that something that would benefit your long-term plans? Is UMN offering anything comparable?
I would agree that for a CS student, all things being equal, UMN makes the most sense. (The Twin Cities struck me as a bit of a math mecca when we visited there.) But if you think you’ll be happier at UA or that it will offer you a completely different experience than what you’re accustomed to (there must be some reason so many high stats students from IL are at UA), then I don’t think it would be a bad decision. I guess that makes be a UA homer. 8-|
“It makes perfect sense to ask a lower-ranked school to match an offer from that of a peer or more highly ranked school. It would NOT make sense for the OP to ask UMN to match Bama’s offer. That I’d agree with. But that wasn’t what was suggested.”
See below:
“Ask if Bama can increase their offer so that the cost difference isn’t a factor.”
My response to the above comment:
“Unless UA is much cheaper, it would make little sense to spend the same amount of money to get an education that is not equivalent.”
“But if you think you’ll be happier at UA or that it will offer you a completely different experience than what you’re accustomed to (there must be some reason so many high stats students from IL are at UA), then I don’t think it would be a bad decision.”
It’s called a FREE EDUCATION. I’d say that is a pretty compelling reason and why it’s painfully obvious that these types of students are attending Bama. Honestly, how many high stat students do you think would be going to UA from out of state without the freebies? The answer is, of course, very few.
