<p>For UT, they have the top 7% auto admission for in state student. So top students take it for granted and aim at something else. </p>
<p>I wish I could say that our state university is good, but I am not impressed. (UTenn) There are certainly strong students who choose it for financial, athletic scene, family or other reasons and who do well in life, but, overall, it is not one of the stronger state universities. Many of our top students choose Alabama, Georgia or Ole Miss instead. Alabama will offer in-state tuition with a certain level of ACT score.
Interestingly, one of my co-workers has a son who was just accepted at Northwestern, Amherst and several other excellent schools (including Oklahoma) and has chosen to at least start at UTenn-Martin. I was pretty shocked, and don’t expect it to be a 4 year deal, but he has a particular musical interest in which Martin is strong. </p>
<p>UMASS Amherst Honors College. They even have their own Honors housing!!!</p>
<p>I live in NY (NYC suburbs- about ten minutes from NJ- and I attend school in Manhattan) and I think that there is a definite prejudice among people I know against NY/NJ publics. Most of my friends who considered CUNYs did so only for the honors programs, and many of the colleges are still trying to get their reputations back on track (the days of CCNY being widely considered the poor man’s Ivy in the sciences are long, long gone, and it took a lot of convincing to get my friend to realize that their engineering program was a great opportunity). Also, once people are leaving home to go to college, nobody wants to go to a SUNY- none of them seem awe-inspiring enough to make it worth their time to attend if they have other options, with POSSIBLE exceptions (in their minds) being Binghamton and Geneseo (Stony Brook is practically a commuter school). On the other hand, everyone does see NYU, as someone mentioned, as a more mediocre kind of place (if not mediocre, at least, then not worth the insane amounts of tuition)- now that we’re already in NYC, the lure of the bright lights doesn’t really affect us. Rutgers is either “ehhh, Rutgers” or “Rutgers? What’s Rutgers?” If there’s anything worth staying in the tristate area for, it’s Columbia/Barnard, Princeton or Yale.
Now that reality has entered their heads, plenty of my friends will attending CUNYs and are now looking longingly at the UChicago posters they’d had hanging in their rooms and wondering what happened. Next year, they’ll forget they applied anywhere else.</p>
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<p><a href=“https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg05_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=86”>https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg05_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=86</a> says that 85% of frosh and 61% of all undergraduates live in campus dorms.</p>
<p>Do you mean to say that it is more of a “suitcase” school, where students living on or near campus frequently return to their parents’ houses in NYC or other nearby places on weekends?</p>
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<p>It does have a rep as a suitcase school as many students who dorm live close by and campus life isn’t helped by being located in a residential suburb some alums felt had little for undergrads staying on campus to enjoy. </p>
<p>Every SB alum has painted dorm life there as dreary and a place to get through, not a place to enjoy one’s 4+ years. </p>
<p>ucbalumnus: I mean that for many (especially the ones who commute to my high school from Long Island) it’s practically in their backyards, so even if you dorm it FEELS like a commuter school (I know someone who dormed because they wanted the “college experience” but ended up going home three nights a week for dinner and laundry services). Basically what cobrat said, though I know plenty of people who commuted after saying that it was so close by that it simply didn’t seem worth it to them to dorm. Some even picked it BECAUSE of its proximity. Like cobrat said, it has a bad reputation when it comes to dorming.</p>
<p>I have absolutely no problem with state universities. But I think it is safe to say that not all state schools are created equal. We currently live in a “fly over” state and I would not consider our state flagship for any of my children. I would have no problem with my children attending the likes of UVA, William and Mary, UNC at Chapel Hill, UIUC, UT @Austin, University of Michigan, Purdue, Georgia Tech, UC@Boulder, UA@Birmingham and quite a few of the California state schools. If you have a bright child, the honors programs in some of these schools can be great values. </p>
<p>I think that our Flagship, University of Delaware, is a great choice for OOS students because its instate students make up only 1/3 of the class. That means that OOS students are the majority and gives the school more of a feel of a National University. It’s also Div 1, has a beautiful suburban campus, easy access to I-95, centrally located between several major metro areas and is the 8th oldest college in the country (depending on whose numbers you believe). If you are looking for an out of state option, I think its worth a look. </p>
<p>I don’t think OOS percentages are particularly valuable when looking at state flagships, if they are not put into their appropriate context. For instance, UC Berkeley is only 19% OOS. Yet when I entered in the distance from my house in Southern California to UC Berkeley (424 miles) into a map radius generator and set the desired location to the University of Delaware I found that I could reach virtually all of the Northeastern states, Toronto, Ottowa, 2/3rd of Ohio, VA, WV, NC, DC, and most of SC. </p>
<p>I don’t think UDel has a national feel at ALL! In fact, I think it has one of the more local/regional feels of almost any university. Yeah- lots of out of staters, but they are almost all from PA, MD and NJ. Delaware is a small state- of course there are lots of students from out of state. My PA raised sister went there (and we are familiar with lots of current and recently graduated students) and they report the same thing- lots of kids going home on the weekends to their 1 hour away PA and NJ homes.</p>
<p>Schools that lots of kids from my offspring’s NYC public magnet send applications to but few actually enroll in are UWisconsin-Madison (which nobody seems to have mentioned in this thread so far thus far); Penn State University Park; University of Vermont (another school nobody here has mentioned). That’s in addition to Berkeley, UN-CH and UVa, of course, but the second group aren’t safeties for kids with high stats. </p>
<p>I’m not saying anything about cost–just that these are the colleges students at one particular high school where almost everyone has a 2100+ SAT score use as safeties. </p>
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<p>Quite a few classmates from my graduating class and previous graduating classes enrolled at UWisc-Madison. It was considered an academically reputable public university for classmates with exceedingly low GPAs who wanted topflight academics. Everyone in my year who applied was accepted including one with a D+/C- range average. </p>
<p>Main deterrents in my day were being admitted to more higher ranking options, size, willingness to go to the Midwest*, OOS cost, and a supposed high reputation for partying/drinking. However, if the first three weren’t issues, the academic rep of UWisc-Madison was such the last wasn’t considered. </p>
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<li>Considering most of us wanted to get away from NYC for college, this really wasn’t an issue at all for most of us.<br></li>
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<p>UMD-CP gets a lot of tippy-top kids who take the full merit ride. We know a number of kids who did so and are now at Caltech, MIT, Duke, JHU, Stanford, Columbia, etc. for fully funded grad school. These were folks who turned down HPYSM, et al to go to UMD. Average SAT for accepted students was 2000 and WGPA 4.03 for last year’s admissions cycle. UMD is generous with AP/IB credit. </p>
<p>St. Mary’s MD is an honors state school with LAC focus. UMBC is more STEM (and has a lot of merit $$). Also know folks from S1’s & S2’s selective HS programs who have gone there and come out with excellent grad school and job options.</p>
<p>My niece who was sal and had a 34 ACT is at UGA honors with the Zell Miller scholarship plus and additional $3k/year in merit. Just about a full ride. She matriculated with 13 APs and is able to double major and still graduate early.</p>
<p>Some family friends are about to send their third child to Cal State Chico – all were val or sal, SAT > 2100 and got merit $$. The first two have done extremely well for themselves. Collectively, they turned down UCB, Davis, Scripps and Cal Poly.</p>
<p>Many of these state schools are actually more highly regarded in hiring circles than their more academically well-known competitors. Especially when you look at particular majors. Most of the Big 10 schools are more highly regarded in Science and Engineering fields than most of the ‘Ivy League’. UT and TAMU are also very highly ranked engineering schools. UT is also up there for other fields as well. I would look into the details based on major choice. While some state schools have very high OOS tuition (on par with private schools) they also offer options to waive that extra fee for top students. Some have agreements with other states. When I went to UMinn it was on a reciprocity agreement where I paid the tution from my home state rather than the OOS price. Don’t know if they still have that program, but it cannot hurt to look.</p>
<p>As far as Rutgers goes…a good friend of ours went to Rutgers UG, and graduated magna cum laude from an Ivy T-7 law school. My Bil went to Rutgers for his second BS degree (CS) and said his education there was better than SUNY Albany (Finance). He has had a very successful career with a big telecomm firm.</p>
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<p>MN and WI have a reciprocity agreement for discounted tuition at each others’ public universities. MN also has agreements with ND and SD.</p>
<p>Cobrat, not sure what you consider a bad GPA, but UW-Madison may have changed from your time. Per the most recent CDS, the average (unweighted) GPA of enrolled freshmen is 3.8 and almost 70% have at least 3.75. Parents here of relatively good students complain that their kids can’t get into UW (soccer sideline talk), can’t go to their own flagship.</p>
<p>Minnesota recently ‘renegotiated’ their reciprocity agreement with WI, don’t know about other states. UMN-TC tuition is several thousand $ more per year than UW. WI residents now pay the MN tuition rate to attend there, not the WI rate as they did in the past.</p>
<p>University of Wisconsin was my D1’s safety. (top 2% of class, 35 ACT, 800 on Math II, Physics, Latin). She was admitted in October before she applied to any other school. She’s graduating soon at a top private university. </p>
<p>It was also a serious contender for D2 (2130 SAT, 3.5 GPA) who was admitted in December a week before she got into her private ED school. </p>
<p>I think it’s the ideal safety for those with top stats. </p>
<p>Beautiful place (at least in June and July), great academics, admissions is almost automatic with ivy competitive stats. Essays are short, quick, probably not even read for top students, and decision can be received as early as October to ease stress of going to college at all. Not concerned with yield. </p>
<p>Minnesota on the other hand, D2 applied to as soon as application opened 9/1. In December, she was “admitted” to a school she never applied to and we had to call to find out that she had been waitlisted - they don’t actually officially tell you, they just assume that you’re honored to have the opportunity to study something else at their esteemed institution. </p>
<p>We’re from Mass by the way. </p>
<p>Weird that UW/Madison had that kind of reputation in NYC. It’s well-known and respected around here (Chicago suburbs). As is Iowa, which has become a go-to school for a number of bright but not straight-A students at D’s high school. </p>