<p>kebaud - No, Galileo was not a deciding point for him/me although I thought it was a good thing for my son at the time. NCSU didn’t offer a living learning community for male engineering students (they did for females). Good luck in making hard decisions!</p>
<p>Contrary to what has been posted, at least according to this article from the WSJ, for engineering it does matter where you go to school but far less so for liberal art majors. So from this perspective, VT is ranked 5 vs 19 for NCState and would seem like the better choice. From a personal perspective, my CivEng daughter landed a great internship for the summer as a sophomore because of the school’s engineering job fair.</p>
<p>sorry - forgot to post the link</p>
<p>[Engineers</a>, Accountants Say School Matters - WSJ.com](<a href=“Engineers, Accountants Say School Matters - WSJ”>Engineers, Accountants Say School Matters - WSJ)</p>
<p>Bennie, your WSJ article correlates perfectly with the one I posted earlier:
School Rankings by College Major – Job Recruiter Top Picks - WSJ.com
Our son is a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering and we all have been very impressed by Tech’s COE!</p>
<p>5th is better than 19th. It’s not worth that amount of money though. Honestly for engineering/science there are exactly two schools that would be, and as much as I love VT it isn’t MIT or CalTech.</p>
<p>We have ties to both states and both schools. NC State is highly regarded by employers looking to hire-their engineering career fairs “sell out”-meaning more employers want to come than there is capacity for. Raleigh is not an extremely stimulating cosmopolitan mecca, but it is a sweet city and it is a gateway to a lot of experience opportunities that the remoteness of Blacksburg prohibits. I would choose between the two based on cost and where student might be most interested in having contacts after graduation. Beyond those two factors, a willing student has the opportunity for an excellent engineering education either place.</p>
<p>On a side note, while UVa is generally much stronger educational institution, it’s engineering program is not as strong as Tech’s or State’s.</p>
<p>If the OP’s son really prefers Virginia Tech then he should put extra effort in trying to obtain some merit aid to lower the OOS cost. I don’t know how much Tech offers. In our experience some universities seem to be stingy (e.g., GT) and others may offer quite a bit (e.g., UMD College Park). If the net cost of the two schools is in the ballpark then other factors will come into play.</p>
<p>chuy - how were you able to get instate tuition so quickly? We have looked at that and there does not seem to be a way to do that for the first 2-3 years. It seem that you were able to get it after your freshman year.</p>
<p>I was part of a program called the Academic Common Market, where if you major wasn’t offered in your home state you could go to a school in another participating state and pay in-state. It only kicked in after freshman year because ‘general engineering’ didn’t count.</p>
<p>Unfortunately it seems that VT had pulled out of the program due to the caps that they placed on specific engineering majors.</p>