@IWannaHelp
In Texas it’s auto admit for top students so our fortunately our qualified or overqualified kids can count on them for safety and don’t have to worry about getting rejected by them.
Those rankings were published by Niche and another site. CC won’t let me post Niche links but you should be able to google them.
~ UPDATE ~
Thank you everyone for the excellent advice offered on this thread! It really helped persuade me to support my daughter’s decision to apply ED to Northwestern.
And on Friday she was accepted to Northwestern for engineering and music!
She is over the moon! Honestly, she started tearing up a bit when she read her acceptance letter (and then we all started tearing up - who was cutting onions?)… And btw, we are a rather stoic bunch…
We did not realize how much she really wanted to attend NU… She has been attending camps and performances there for years and loves this school!
And to think, I was pushing her to not even apply ED before starting this thread…
Many posters here offered insights that impacted my thinking, and ultimately led me to supporting my daughter’s decision which came from her heart. And now she has been admitted to her dream school. THANK YOU!
BTW, she has also been admitted to engineering at UIUC, Ohio St, Minnesota (haven’t heard from others)… and offered $100k+ Merit scholarship that we’ll have to turn down (yikes - that’s tough).
Anyhow, best of luck to others going through the college application process. So glad it’s over and my daughter can relax a bit.
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MEGA-congrats to your daughter- and congrats to you also, @Scubaski1, for trusting your daughter. The balance between holding on and letting go that you have been doing with her since birth keeps moving on…
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Our daughters will be classmates! Exciting!
I didn’t see this thread before, but I do want to tell you one thing: I have an older daughter who went to Penn State for engineering. Not a top 10 or even 20 school by a long shot. She, at 25, now runs a group at a major consulting firm and her lateral colleagues went to MIT and other top programs. I’m sure your daughter will do very well graduating from NU.
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DD16 was admitted in UM CoE, along with a few other schools. I went with her to the Admitted students days at UM. She, too, wanted to do music in college and possibly considered a premed pathway at the time. We visited UM CoE and talked to many there- she was told that likely a double major in a very different area will increase the duration of studies to 9 or even 10 semesters. Also, it seemed quite difficult to create a connection with the school of music at UM , which is quite competitive. She ended up attending a different uni and will graduate in spring with double major and minor in piano performance.
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@captusica… Good info and congrats on your D finding a great fit! We heard the same things about the difficulties of double majoring in Eng/Music at Michigan. Michigan is a top school, but NU is the perfect fit for my D. We’re so happy she will attend.
It’s been such a welcoming environment - so many NU students/parents/alum/staff have already reached out to “welcome us to the family.” It’s pretty impressive. My D is already connecting with many Class of ‘24 NU students from all over the world. I know social media really facilitates this, but my other 2 kids (currently attend huge big 10 public U’s) did not have this kind of a personal welcome. I can see why they talk about the great networking of some private schools…
Also, we got quite a nice NU financial aid surprise in the mail recently (we weren’t expecting it!). This really helped us mentally deal with my D having to decline other school’s big merit aid offers. So we are all pretty much head over heels in love with Northwestern right now - even though there are several other Big 10 alum in the house. ?
There’s a new YouTube video showing NU “dedicated” $3.5M just for undergraduate research!! If you want sponsored undergraduate research, there are very few places better than NU. NU spent $1.3M last year for it (for comparison, Yale spent about $1M for science/engineering research fellowships). The approval is based solely on the merit of the proposal and the approval rate has been around 60-70%! Training is available to you on how to formulate and write a thoughtful proposal. All these higher ranked state schools have very limited funds for undergraduate research and they are therefore very competitive. The graduate rankings don’t take all these “amenities” into account.
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Northwestern is ranked #34 for undergrad research programs:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/undergrad-research-programs
Publics:
UMich is #7
GT is #8
W&M is #13
UT is #16
Cal/UCB is #21
Rankings by expenditure:
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd
Lots of publics before you hit Northwestern at #29.
@sushiritto Please look at the methodology. It’s highly unlikely schools’ deans would know anything about other schools’ undergraduate research. What a ridiculous way to rank.
According to UM’s own undregrad research website, “more than 1,300 of your fellow students work on real research and real scholarship with over 800 faculty members from the across campus.”. That’s out of an undergraduate population of 31,00 and most of them are not funded and not independent research.
I also looked at their “summer undergraduate research in engineering” (SURE) and “summer research opportunity program” (SROP) and these appear to be their main programs with funding and they are both very competitive (one needs to be “outstanding”; one requires you to be at least in junior standing and the other one is only for underrepresented minority. In fact, less than 50 students (page 3 for group photo) were in SURE in a given year while the engineering school has a total of 7,500 undergrads! There are some others here and there but they are all very competitive and restricted to certain areas with very limited number of awards.
https://lsa.umich.edu/urop/Prospective-Students.html
https://www.engin.umich.edu/research/undergraduate-opportunities/
Compare all that to Northwestern’s open funding for undergraduate research: “last year the Northwestern Office of Undergraduate Research awarded 1.3 million dollars in funding to 563 independent research and creative projects that support students’ post-college aspirations. Impressive numbers to be sure. But getting undergraduate research to the scale and scope of its current operations – processing nearly 900 applications annually – was no easy task.” I don’t think Michigan has any undergraduate research grant program that comes anywhere close to giving out over 60% of the applicants! These numbers exclude the traditional research for which you work with faculty/grad students for their on-going research and Northwestern’s entire population is only 1/4 of Michigan’s.
I also took a look at JHU, which is #1 in research expenditure on your link. But that link is meaningless. It got nothing to do with grants for independent undergraduate research. At JHU, applicants for research grants are ranked and they have to compete against their fellow students. That means the funding for undergrad research is rather limited. Their analogous program to Northwestern’s has only 48 recipients last year (29% success rate with only 164 applicants). Big difference!
https://research.jhu.edu/hour/internal/pura/recipients/
https://lsa.umich.edu/bli/fellows-program-structure/phase-3–advanced-fellows.html
Not sure what constitutes research or where this would be reported but my son and another student were awarded their $10, 000/$15,000 in freshman year through this group they spent the entire year then summer conducting self made research. They had a graduate student that had expertise in startups prior to her graduate work at Michigan. They had to check-in weekly and sometimes twice a week depending on what they needed to accomplish. This was all self guided. They learned several different research techniques and collected data and come up with an analysis. Michigan paid their expenses including an Arbnb at their choosing to attend this week long program. Part of their research was going to a tech conference and meeting with students from Stanford, Harvard, USC and Berkeley. They each had different approaches.
I could go on to what was accomplished but I don’t think that’s important. So where does this neatly fit in the groups that are doing research at Michigan? It doesn’t. There are hundreds of students doing similar things.
If any student wants to do research then email a professor or grad student and go. If any student wants to do self driven research, which I am sure happens, that would be encouraged. Not everything fits neatly into a certain category. Both schools have students doing great work.
Instead of calling the USNWR ranking “ridiculous” and the US Government ranking “meaningless“, do you have any independent source that rates college research programs besides reading websites?
As @Knowsstuff states above, if you have the desire as an underclassman to do research, then UMich will provide you an opportunity.
There’s also a UM student employment website, which I accessed yesterday with dozens of opportunities for students looking to do research. One example that I took notice of was a research project looking for students in the Cardiac Surgical Dept. at the UM Medical Center.
I’m not picking on NU, because it’s an outstanding institution, but @TiggerDad just posted this article from the Daily Northwestern about the finacial health of NU:
Wow… Layoffs in research… I expect this for small Lacs not an elite institution. Looks like they need to hire someone to fix this problem.
Amazed on that NU news.
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Knowsstuff,
The link you provided said $500-$1,500, not $10,000/$15,000 (which would be pretty generous for attending conferences/air bnb…etc). It’s not really undergrad research anyway.
sushiritto,
Just because there’s no other “undergrad research” rankings doesn’t mean USN is legit. For a long time, there’s no such ranking anywhere at all for obvious reason. Of course, USN, being the best in marketing, became the first one to do it, no matter how shamelessly inaccurate it is. I already provided you examples to indicate those rankings are meaningless. As said before, JHU’s research expenditure come fro m Federal government and it’s all spent on specific faculty research. Schools have no liberty to divert that fund to independent undergraduate research. I provided the number of awards for independent research for comparison between JHU and NU to prove my point. Going back to USN ranking, Deans are administrators and have no way to know how other schools fund their undergrad research. This is just a silly exercise that people automatically assume big research dollar translate to large undergrad research dollar. To be fair, they were given impossible survey by USN. I wouldn’t know how else to do it other than randomly guessing. In fact, it’s very difficult to even find the funding numbers dedicated to undergraduate research. Northwestern is one of the very few that provide that data (Yale and Stanford are other examples).
Regarding the news, they were a bit too aggressive in capital expenditure. It sounds alarming but it’s not a crisis. Most schools don’t hold that highest rating. As couple reference points, NU now has the same rating as University of Chicago; Penn got Aa1 as of 2017 (probably still the same) and was stuck at Aa2 for a long time before that.
Knowsstuff,
While I agree with what you were saying, my point was to highlight the fact that if you want to do self-directed research with funding, it’s relative easy at Northwestern. One of the most asked questions people have is how competitive it is. The answer is it’s not competitive. The only requirement is to have a good proposal but your proposal doesn’t have to be better than anybody’s else.
This is your opinion, which I don’t agree with. You assume that “college presidents, provosts and admissions deans who participated in the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey” know little to nothing about other universities finances. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I don’t know what they know or don’t know, so I have no opinion.
What I do know is that folks like me, a consumer, will use the USNWR rankings as ONE useful resource when choosing a college as well as the data from National Science Foundation (NSF). If you can find another source that has better information, then post it. Otherwise, I’ll use USNWR and the NSF. Just because you or anyone says it’s “meaningless” and “ridiculous” doesn’t mean I have to believe you.
I’d read the Daily Northwestern article above:
I’m done here with UG research budget discussions. I really don’t care. 