URochester vs Purdue Engineering

<p>What do you guys think? My son was accepted to both and now we are deciding which school to pick.</p>

<p>How do the finances look for each?</p>

<p>We have not yet heard from Purdue financially and we are out of state. I do not think he got any merit and I don’t think he got into the honors college either. From Roc we got 14K a year in merit which is pretty good.</p>

<p>Purdue OOS COA $42,480</p>

<p>UR COA $59,384 - $14,000 = $45,384</p>

<p>So costs are comparable.</p>

<p>I guess it would all come down to whether your son prefers a large state school or a smaller private school.</p>

<p>There advantages and disadvantages to each.</p>

<p>Purdue has the better national reputation/ranking in engineering, offers more engineering subspecialties, and has better on campus engineering job recruitment.</p>

<p>UR offers smaller classes, more personal attention, more opportunities to get involved in research.</p>

<p>Purdue has much better sports teams. (Big 10 football and basketball. Sorry YellowJackets - no comparison. Disclosure: I attended a Big 10 for grad school and had season tickets for the entire time.)</p>

<p>Putting money aside along with personal desire and comfort, look at the ASEE.org profiles at profiles.asee.org. Go to the online profile search. </p>

<p>You see Purdue gets $222+M in research money. That’s huge. Michigan, another very large program, gets $174M or so. UR gets $22M plus another big chunk of private money - $70M - for optics (where it is the leader), plus some more for a total of about $92M. The optics specialty makes UR look bigger than it is for most engineering.</p>

<p>But then look at the enrollment by area and class. Purdue has 7500 full time engineering students. That’s 150% of the total enrollment at UR. UR’s engineering departments have 1107 full time students. (Interestingly, Purdue’s totals are pretty constant across the classes while UR’s number drop. I suspect that’s because people tend to transfer into Purdue’s engineering because it’s Purdue’s engineering, but I don’t know.) They break this enrollment down by engineering major. You can see, for example, that biomed is popular at UR. That makes sense given UR’s medical excellence. </p>

<p>You can derive all sorts of silly metrics - like $ per student or whatever - but my point is not to do that but to show you that you can look more closely at each school’s actual engineering programs.</p>

<p>And while I went to Michigan for law school - and my family went there - I hate big time college sports. I didn’t then but now I think they’re awful. So I like the way UR treats sports. It’s part of your life. It’s easier to participate and you aren’t in a student athlete ghetto with special work hours and tutors - and they aren’t isolated from the student population.</p>