<p>Please try to answer in a purely objective manner. Vassar is ranked 11 by US news for liberal arts colleges, while CMU is ranked 22 for national universities. Also, Forbes ranks vassar at 11 but CMU at 200 something, which sounds completely wrong.</p>
<p>My issue with the comparison is that they are totally different schools. Vassar is considered an excellent liberal arts school, and CMU is considered an excellent university. LACs and universities are, at heart, very different beasts. At universities the resources tend to be geared towards grad students and the work tends to be slightly more vocation-centric. I’m no expert, though, so I would encourage you to do some research on your own. They’re both very good schools. Once you start to figure out what you want, a decision will be much easier.</p>
<p>I know I want to go pre-med while earning a major in biology or some cognitive science. I honestly feel like Vassar would be me the “better” education because it is such an intimate setting with professors. Why I’ve posted this thread is due to the fact that my deadset parents are on telling me that because CMU’s name carries more weight, my chances of getting into a good med-school are much higher than if I were to attend a LAC. Ultimately, I have autonomy over my decision.</p>
<p>VASSAR!!!</p>
<p>Idiots go to CMU. The real students are at Liberal Arts Colleges ;).</p>
<p>If you’re looking for the one vs. the other opinion, then yeah, I would go with Vassar. Its small size would mean more research opportunities for you (at universities, the research grants usually go to grad students) and the more intimate professor-student relationship would allow you to do things that are less conventional and perhaps more impressive to med-schools.</p>
<p>It completely depends. For my computer nerd son, Carnegie Mellon trumped even Harvard. For my younger son, Carnegie Mellon wasn’t even on the list, but he liked Vassar and was recently accepted there.</p>
<p>I love CMU, but it’s not for everyone. I think it can’t be beat for kids who already know what they want to be when they grow up - especially if that happens to be computer scientist, engineer, drama oriented, musician, artist or architect. Carnegie Mellon has a great career placement office. My older son worked at NVidea last summer and will be at Google this summer. I think that CMU is more vocation-centric than most universities. Its division into sub-schools exaggerates this tendency. It is relatively easy to stay in your bubble and not meet a variety of people. (My son’s friends aren’t all in computer science, but they all hang out at the Linux cluster.)</p>
<p>Vassar is more likely to give you a well rounded education and to expose you to more different types of people. Its campus is quite different - more greenery, more isolated from the much smaller city it is in.</p>
<p>My son is a second year medical student who graduated from Vassar with a degree in biology. He had a great experience at Vassar and especially doing research in the URSI program. Medical school admissions are very numbers driven. The name of the undergraduate school you attend is much less important than your gpa and mcat scores.
Pick the school where you think you will best thrive both personally and academically.</p>
<p>Completely numbers wise, according the schools websites CMU seniors have an 85% acceptance rate to med schools while Vassar has 80%. Not being a science person, I don’t really have personal experience to draw from, but I do have a bunch of very happy pre-med friends at Vassar, many of whom are majoring in interesting and surprising things. Good luck with the decision - both are excellent, albeit very different, schools.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I graduated from CMU 3 decades ago, and my son has been accepted at Vassar. My take on CMU is that it’s a fantastic place to go if you know what you’re interested in. It’s very strong in just about everything - science, engineering, social science, the arts - particularly if your interest is in some hybrid area like technology and public policy, or technology and the arts.</p>
<p>But it’s not a great place for helping you to find yourself. Not the best place for considering the meaning of life, etc. If you want that too, go to Vassar.</p>