OP, I’m a UA grad who currently goes to grad school at Michigan, so I can give you some info on some of this stuff.
I guess the first thing to say is, like many other people in this thread, I think you want us to talk you into going to Alabama. That means something. You prefer Alabama, but you’re wondering if the career opportunities will be good enough.
Let me talk about the lifestyle stuff first. Alabama’s campus is very beautiful and modern. Michigan’s got some nice buildings, but they can be pretty eclectic, and some of them have this weird brutalist industrialist thing going on where you look at the smokestacks and wonder if they’ve got child laborers in there or something. The biggest difference between the two might be the weather. Michigan is extremely cold sometimes, and pretty cold most of the time. If you walk outside with wet hair it can freeze. Alabama was almost always sunny and warm, which I liked a lot, coming from California.
I did room with some really rich kids my first year here at UM. I’ll always remember two of my roommates arguing over whether someone with $10 million was rich or just well-off. But, as others have said, Michigan’s a big school, and you can find whatever groups you want. And, as people have said, Alabama Greek life may be similarly flashy–I really don’t know. I wasn’t involved in Greek stuff and I’ll bet the average wealth of students at Alabama has gone up significantly since I graduated in 2010.
Alabama’s the clear choice on lifestyle, which is probably why you’re leaning towards it. But, of course, what matters most is that you get a good educa—wait, that’s the idealist in me talking. What matters most is that you get a good job.
Let me be honest. When I started reading your post I thought “it’s gonna be easy to talk her into going to UA if she’ll save at least 50k doing it.” I picked Alabama over Michigan as an undergrad because it was a lot cheaper. I was surprised to see that you’re actually considering paying a little MORE to go to Alabama. As an alumnus, I felt a swell of pride when I saw that in the seven years since I’ve left Alabama has turned itself into the kind of place that makes top-notch students like you want to choose it over Michigan on even footing.
Alabama’s clearly on the rise. Believe me, in 2006, nobody talked about it remotely the way so many people on CC do these days. But Alabama and Michigan aren’t peer schools–maybe half a dozen schools are Michigan’s peers. Michigan is what Alabama hopes to be in forty years if it’s lucky.
None of that matters if you want to go to law school, so one thing this all comes down to is how sure you are you want to go to law school. I majored in philosophy, a hidden gem at Alabama that has an excellent pre-law program. I got good grades and a good LSAT score and was accepted to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia (with full tuition) and NYU, and waitlisted at Michigan. I went to Yale.
Here’s something that may surprise all the prestige-obsessed people on CC. When Craig Janacek, YLS’s director of admissions, called me to give me the good news, he told me “We have a history of getting strong philosophy majors from the University of Alabama.” Prestige and reputation and all that stuff are just far more complicated than the US News-obsessed CC community believes. I see people here talking about differences in rankings when the truth is, many admissions officers probably don’t know or care about ranking gaps as large as 50. For law school, going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or a couple other places for undergrad will give you a boost equivalent to maybe .1-.2 GPA points. All other undergrads are treated basically the same, whether it’s Brown or a CSU.
If you want to keep the option of working for Goldman Sachs open, go to Michigan. This prestige stuff is also sometimes relevant when applying to grad schools, but this’ll vary a lot by field. I’d say that the more connected the discipline is to the real world, the less the prestige stuff matters. Philosophy is very disconnected from the world, so it’s the best example of a discipline where going to Alabama will hold one back in grad school applications.
I’d wanted to get a PhD in philosophy, but decided to apply to law school after reading this blog post: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/10/sorry-cal-state-students-no-princeton.html
The short of it is, for a PhD in philosophy, if you want an elite grad school, you have to go to an elite undergrad. Pretty dumb. I went to Yale Law and then Michigan, ranked #4, liked me just fine. It’d be worth checking out whether grad schools in the disciplines you’re considering have the same bias philosophy does. I’d suspect they don’t, or have less of it.
One final piece of advice, and this one’s important: negotiate! Alabama knows it’s not Michigan’s peer and it doesn’t expect to compete with it on even footing. I’ll bet they’d really appreciate it if you told them about your situation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that caused them to up their offer somehow. Alabama wants people who want to be there. If you tell them that you’re considering paying more to go there over UM, I think they’ll pull out all the stops to get you to choose them.