<p>Living on campus is just HUGE to me.
Does anybody have any percentages of juniors/seniors who live ON-campus at UA?</p>
<p>Living on campus may seem “huge” to you now as high school senior, but once you’re an upper-classmen, you may be WANTING to move off campus…especially if your friends move off-campus. Off campus can be less expensive, and some of the complexes are even nicer than the dorms. </p>
<p>Of course, many with housing scholarships stay in campus housing for all 4 years, but many upper-classmen move off campus or move into greek houses (which technically are on campus, but wouldn’t get counted in stats.) I don’t think that those who are living at The Bluff are counted as living on campus, either…even if they are using the NMF scholarship.</p>
<p>Oh trust me, this is definitely something that a superficial student like myself has looked at. But I really feel like mom2ck is correct in her statement that employers are going to view flagships very similarly, especially these two. Umich and University of Nevada? Maybe those two would be seen as significantly different, but UA and UMDCP seem to be extremely similar in their quality of academics. USnews places them 20 ranks apart. Not exactly a big deal once out of the top 50 range. </p>
<p>As for living on campus, perhaps you all are right. Although I am adamant about having everybody on campus and the dorm life at this point in my life, as I grow a bit older this may change.</p>
<p>Nihility…you are definitely not going to be able to live on campus all 4 years at UMCP. You have the potential to do that at UA if you decide to. Off campus at UMCP is expensive and not safe (IMO), off campus at UA is affordable, and safer.</p>
<p>According to 2010-11 OIRA Common Data Set reported by UMCP and UA, a higher percentage of UMCP undergraduates live on campus. Freshmen are roughly equal at each school.</p>
<p>Here are the numbers:
UA
Freshmen living in university housing - 92.8%
Undergraduates living in university housing - 29.7%
Undergraduates living in private housing - 70.3%</p>
<p>UMCP
Freshmen living in university housing - 93%
Undergraduates living in university housing - 42%
Undergraduates living in private housing - 58%</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you for posting this because all these responses have provided me with more insight. I too was offered the 2/3 oos tuition scholarship and will be attending because of it.</p>
<p>vilines, you mentioned off-campus safety… Out of curiosity, I looked at the crime data reported for College Park and Tuscaloosa ([Neighborhood</a> Search for Home Buyers and Real Estate Investment - NeighborhoodScout](<a href=“http://www.neighborhoodscout.com%5DNeighborhood”>http://www.neighborhoodscout.com)) and was quite surprised to see that Tuscaloosa has a significantly higher crime rate per capita than College Park. Violent crime was 7 times higher and total crime was more than 3 times greater.</p>
<p>Annual crimes per 1000 residents
Violent crimes: Tuscaloosa = 5.28 ; College Park = 0.74
Total crimes: Tuscaloosa = 68.91 ; College Park = 20.83</p>
<p>you also need to consider (all other things being equal) where will you want to work when finished…do companies from that area recruit at either/both schools? which school would the employers from there be familiar with.? That doesnt make one school better than the other, but just something to think about and add to the equation.</p>
<p>Parent56- that is true. Unfortunately, in my son’s case, he is not sure which company he wants to work for. Or if he wants to work for the government. So that has only factored in a small amount for him. I would guess that there are many students that do not know what they want to major in in college, much less who their target employer is after graduation. </p>
<p>As far as crime statistics- I do not trust the real estate sites. I did go to the FBI stats site, and they do not even list College Park as a seperate “city”. I need to figure out what the surrounding area is classified as.</p>
<p>According the neighborhoodscout website, those are FBI stats.</p>
<p>“The crime data that NeighborhoodScout used for this analysis are the seven offenses from the uniform crime reports, collected by the FBI from 17,000 local law enforcement agencies, and include both violent and property crimes, combined.”</p>
<p>but if you go to the FBI page, and look at their stats, it does not list “College Park”. That is one of the reasons I don’t trust real estate sites! </p>
<p>Good point. I’m not sure why College Park is not listed there. However they do list 2010 data in table 9 (Universities and Colleges). You will have to manually calculate the incidents per 1000 students. </p>
<p>*Annual crimes per 1000 residents
Violent crimes: Tuscaloosa = 5.28 ; College Park = 0.74
Total crimes: Tuscaloosa = 68.91 ; College Park = 20.83 *</p>
<p>These are misleading data points.</p>
<p>College Park is a small town of 30k people in 5.5 square miles. And, everyone knows that CP is very near Wash D.C…not exactly a low crime rate area. lol</p>
<p>Tuscaloosa is a good-sized city of about 100k people in 70 square miles. If Tuscaloosa were to carve out 5.5 square miles, which included UA campus, make that a small city, that new city would also have a lower crime rate.</p>
<p>Likewise, if you were to extend the CP area to include 70 square miles, the crime rate would likely significantly increase.</p>
<p>Nihility, do you really have no idea what you are going to do in college? If you lean at all towards a STEM major, Maryland excels in these majors and is known for job and graduate school placement. If you are leaning towards business/humanities/any non STEM major, then I would just pick which school you like better.</p>
<p>“lol…Employers don’t acknowledge such differences between flagships…they just don’t. This isn’t a comparison between Princeton and Podunk.”
UMD is ranked #22 in engineering, Alabama is not in the top 100. To me, this seems pretty hard for an employer to ignore. Other STEM rankings have a similar disparity between the schools.</p>
<p>Sorry if this seems at all like I’m attacking UA, it’s a great school as is UMD. I’m just trying to help out the OP here.</p>
<p>For what its worth, my D is at UA and UMD is one of my sons first choice schools (he’s a big lacrosse fan!). We have direct knowledge from those considering UMD that while College Park itself, a very small and insulated community that includes the campus, carries the socio economic status of a community surrounding a major / highly ranked public university, the communities surrounding college park are significantly different, much lower income, and higher incidents of inner-city type economics and the crimes associated to those communities. This is nothing against UMD per se, but will factor into our decision to send our son there after our college visit.</p>
<p>I am still of the belief that what you do at the college is more important than where you go. Graduating with little to no debt will allowable a student to choose a first job based on what they want to do and experience to be gained instead of what it pays in order to pay off debt. But everyone has to make those decisions based on what is best for their situation. UMCP is a good school. I do not think a degree from UMCP will give a graduate that much of an advantage over another state school. Unless the employer is a UMCP graduate also. Especially if the graduates have demonstrated experience in what the employer is looking for. </p>
<p>Drummer…then help him on the UM-CP forum. Do you know what these college forums would be like if everyone from other schools were posting on each others’ forums. The forums would quickly devolve into arguments. That’s why it’s bad form.</p>
<p>And, as someone who comes from a family of hiring engineers, I know for a fact that they don’t really care about such things…at all.</p>