Didn’t know this until now but the Big 10 conference actually has more than 10 schools. Isn’t it time for a new name? Per Wikipedia they are divided into East and West divisions:
East Division:
IU
Michigan
Maryland
Michigan State
Ohio State
Penn State
Rutgers
More like Big 14. Now I get the joke in post #2. :))
I think all these schools do get talk about plenty on CC. Certainly more so than the Pac-12, which actually does have 12 members, at least we can count!
Anyone who says Big Ten universities don’t offer much merit aid hasn’t done their homework. It is possible for an OOS student to have a full ride – with tuition, room and board – at several big ten universities, and partial to full tuition at others. Due to merit aid, these universities can be very affordable for the type of applicant that would be competitive for Ivies and top privates.
@lostaccount Can you provide links to any of those articles about SUNY being designed to be ugly so they wouldn’t attract students from Private schools?
For the record, I see a lot of high performing students turning down admission to Penn State, Maryland, Rutgers, and even Michigan to attend Binghamton, Geneseo, or Buffalo. The biggest difference is sports but I think Buffalo is more like Pitt in the regard that more of their students seem to be interested in the local pro teams than their own school’s teams.
The reason they keep the name is because they were around so long with 10 schools so the schools have become associated with the Big 10 name. If they changed the name they lose the Big 10 brand.
I have kids attending 2 different Big Ten schools. The big surprise has been the U of Nebraska. It’s much different from the typical big sprawling generic state U. many people assume it is.
First of all, it’s about half the size of many of the Big 10 schools–about 19k undergrads, and 6k grad students. And there are two main campuses in Lincoln (one for agriculture, law, dentistry, and a few other fields, and the other for everything else), about a mile or so apart. So even though UN-Lincoln has 25k students total, whichever campus you are on feels surprisingly moderately sized, compact, and manageable.
The school seems amazingly well organized and efficient–they get admissions decisions back to you in a few days, and administrators seem to always answer the phone when I’ve called (minimal phone tag). The campus is clean, safe, well-maintained, and the “City” campus is right across the street from Lincoln’s main business district, restaurants, etc.
They have significant merit aid that made it about $6,000 per year cheaper than our state flagship would have been. There are already a lot of students from the Chicago and Minneapolis areas. I would imagine others will eventually get the word on what a bargain this school is.
There are other good universities out in that neck of the woods that are also underrated–U of Iowa, U of Kansas, U of Oklahoma, Ok State, and Kansas State come to mind. People wanting a solid education at an affordable price with a fun atmosphere might want to forget about the usual suspects and check out this section of the country.
Four of the five schools you mentioned in your last paragraph ARE NOT in the Big Ten. And yes, Nebraska-Lincoln is overlooked and should get more attention. Every UNL alum that I have met on the east coast are sharp and accomplished people.
@lostaccount - The SUNY’s were built in the 60s when brutalist architecture was in vogue. I think it is ugly but your statement that this style was chosen to keep away private students is just ludicrous.
“For the record, I see a lot of high performing students turning down admission to Penn State, Maryland, Rutgers, and even Michigan to attend Binghamton, Geneseo, or Buffalo. The biggest difference is sports”
No, the biggest difference is in-state tuition vs. out-of-state tuition. It makes little financial sense for most New York residents to turn down a SUNY to go out of state to a state school in another state. Michigan may be a better school, but if they can’t swing the extra cost or decide that the difference isn’t enough to warrant the additional cost, they will stay home and go the the SUNY. As they should - the SUNY are good schools too.
The private schools with the best financial aid do also tend to be the most selective.
However, for the given scenario, all the private “full need” schools listed in #14 (not just Yale & Stanford) are significantly cheaper even than UM-CP’s in-state rates.
The ~60 schools that claim to meet full need include Bates, Bryn Mawr, Colorado College, Connecticut College, Holy Cross, F&M, Macalester, Mt. Holyoke, Occidental, and Trinity. These schools are selective, but not vastly more so than UM-CP. For the stated scenario (a solid student whose family earns double the national median income), their net prices will differ. Nevertheless, I would expect most of them to offer significantly lower net prices than most OOS public Big 10 universities (unless merit aid comes into play, perhaps.) Their costs may be competitive in many cases with in-state public university rates. Of course, that won’t be true for families with higher incomes. In-state public flagships represent the benchmark for many solid, upper middle income students.
If you earn too much to qualify for FA and not enough to afford private school rack rate, highly rated Big 10 schools like Michigan are definitely the best deal around if you are in-state. In addition, many states offer guaranteed tuition contracts for their state college system , including the flagships. When our son was small, and tuition was more reasonable, we purchased one for about $24K (about 4 years of tuition at the time) . Its current value at Michigan’s in-state rates is about $68K. When you compare that to OOS state rates totaling $150K+ for 4 years it is no surprise that so many good students stay with their state flagships.
I guess everyone has different preferences. What I don’t I get is that if a student who lives in a state where a Big Ten School, why do you have to go to a $60,000 liberal art school??? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just go to a state school that has ALOT of research opportunities?
“Why do you have to go to a $60,000 liberal arts school??? Wouldn’t it just be cheaper just to go to a state school that has A LOT of research opportunities?” (#36)
The answer to this question as it relates to Big Ten schools will be elusive until its premise is more fully considered. Of the top 50 undergraduate institutions of origin for students continuing on to get a PhD in science or engineering, 27 are liberal arts colleges when normalized for student population. None are Big Ten schools. If you would like to do a contrasting value analysis, you will at least have to acknowledge the success LACs have had in preparing their students for research related pursuits.
Why aren’t they discussed more here on CC? Because CC as a whole skews to those from the Northeast and from California; it’s as simple as that.
NASA2014 - a lot of top students who are in-state for a Big 10 state school (I’m excluding NU) DO go there. It’s a different mindset out here than it is on the east coast - no one would blink twice about a valedictorian choosing U of Wisc or U of Michigan or U of Illinois, unlike on the east coast where the state schools are perceived as fallbacks.
But as to “why”? Well, that’s like saying - if you live in Florida, why go to Europe on vacation when you could go to Disney World? Some people feel that private universities and / or LACs offer a particular experience that a large state school doesn’t, and they believe it’s worth $60K a year. (I do.) And other people don’t, and the world continues to turn on its axis. People don’t need to agree on the cost/value of how other people spend their money.
“Some people feel that private universities and / or LACs offer a particular experience that a large state school doesn’t, and they believe it’s worth $60K a year. (I do.)”
…and I don’t. I think it’s crazy to attend a private university that will cost much, much more than attending an instate school the caliber of The University of Michigan.
I think you can’t make broad generalizations. If all you want from college is the degree (kind of like a union card), then I don’t think fit or all the other variables that CC students and parents discuss on this site makes a difference. If that is the case, spending less $$$ makes sense. Not everyone looks at a college degree in that way and there are many reasons a parent would see value in sending a kid to a small, private and academically strong LAC. YK, different strokes for different folks and all that . . .
