<p>I live in NJ and one of the main state schools, Rutgers, is the same if not more expensive than most public universities for out of state students in the south</p>
<p>In my personal case, my dad works for WUSTL, so we recieve tuition benefits. If I were to go there (not going to happen), I’d get free tuition, but anywhere else, and I’ll get half of WUSTL’s tuition applied towards anywhere else. With that 21k taken off, my options are a lot more open.</p>
<p>I went to the University of Idaho because I wanted to leave the Bay Area, I’d already saved money by doing my first two years at CC, and with the Western Undergraduate Exchange, tuition wasn’t much more than a UC or CSU. Factor in cost of living/renting in Idaho vs. California and attending UI was probably cheaper.</p>
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<p>Too bad no engineering.</p>
<p>Just to further illustrate the class size point with a little more detail from Princeton’s 2010-2011 common data set, Princeton reports the number of classes within each size range as follows:</p>
<p>Class size / # of classes per year</p>
<p>2-9: 226
10-19: 370<br>
20-29: 87
30-39: 37
40-49: 22
50-99: 56
100+: 38
TOTAL: 836</p>
<p>Now, let’s just assume the average class size within each of these ranges is the mid-point of the range, e.g., the average class with 2-9 students has 5 students, the average in the 10-19 range is 15, and so on (making the average for classes in the 50-99 range the midpoint for that range, 75). Let’s further assume the average size of a 100+ student class is 120—probably a low estimate, because it takes only a few mega-lectures to bring up the average significantly, though at Princeton the upper bound is apparently the seating capacity of the largest lecture hall. McCosh 50, which seats 480. Then we get the following numbers of students enrolling in courses in each category annually as follows:</p>
<p>2-9: 1130 (= 226 classes X an average of 5 students/class)
10-19: 5550 (= 370 X 15)
20-29: 2175
30-39: 1295
40-49: 990
50-99: 4200
100+: 4560
TOTAL: 19,900</p>
<p>From these figures, it’s easily seen that although 71.3% of the classes at Princeton have <20 students (226 + 370 = 596 out of 836 total classes), Princeton students in fact spend considerably more time in large (50+) classes than in small (<20) classes. In fact, Princeton students on average spend approximately 44% of their class time in large (50+) classes (8760 student enrollments per year, out of 19,900 total course enrollments), as compared to 33.6% of their time in small (<20) classes (6680 enrollments per year) and 22.4% of their time in medium-sized (20-49) classes (4460 enrollments).</p>
<p>DON’T BE FOOLED by a high percentage of classes with <20 students! A much more important figure is the percentage of large (>50) classes, which in general is MUCH higher at universities—even the most elite private universities—than at LACs, and much more determinative as to how much time students will spend, on average, in large classes. At Princeton, 11.4% of the classes have 50+ students, but Princeton students will, on average, spend 44% of their time in those large classes—which only stands to reason, because it takes so many more student to fill up each large class. At a top LAC like Swarthmore, in contrast, only 1.56% of classes are large (50+)–a total of 6 out of 384 classes, including 5 in the 50-99 range and 1 in the 100+ range—making it easy to avoid large classes altogether at Swarthmore, but probably not at Princeton. If you want small classes, don’t go to a major university; go to a top LAC.</p>
<p>And all the individual anecdotes in the world won’t refute the data that the colleges themselves provide.</p>
<p>We’re residents of Texas so we have two great publics (UT and A&M). Although I feel confident our D would have been admitted to one of the honors programs at UT, the immense size of the school, location, etc. simply wasn’t a fit nor was A&M. She applied to two OOS publics (UVA and UNC) and the rest privates. She was accepted at both publics and ultimately selected UVa over others (Northwestern, BC Honors, Wake, etc.) because A) It would save us approximately $45K over the course of 4 years (full pay/no FA), and B) It offered “everything”: sports, strong Greek scene, incredible tradition, respected/well-known academic reputation, great weather, gorgeous campus, etc.</p>
<p>Son chose OOS public university, in part, because he got into their honors program and received a scholarship that brought his tuition in line with in-staters. This school is increasingly diversifying its student body by bringing in well qualified out of staters.</p>
<p>Then there’s the highly subjective “I want to go somewhere not close to home” reason that disqualifies good in-state schools. All of the above applied in our case.</p>