I edited my response to hopefully make it less confusing.
Personally…I would go to Michigan. It is an outstanding school that students from all over the country dream about attending. And…there will be money left over to fund part/all of med school.
But…if these parents have the money- where paying for 4 years of a UC and 4 years of any medical or graduate school is of no hardship at all, retirement is funded etc…then I would let the student decide.
All premeds need a plan B (considering odds are staggering that they won’t go to med school).
What is your plan B?
Would Davis or UMich easily accomodate that plan B?
What about adding a stats or data science minor to your biology major (because biology is low ROI), or switching to Food Science for instance - what’s the process? is it competitive? Complicated? Any other interesting majors accross the colleges?
What if you choose UMich “in case of Med School”… and don’t end up in Med School?
If you end up disliking UCD what’s the process to transfer to UMich?
Try to answer ALL these questions for yourself.
I would choose UMich and clear with parents that I’ll study abroad a lot, but if you’ve wanted UCs for so long, got into an excellent one for your major (UCD), visited and still feel it’s your best fit, and have the money to go for it… why not? It’s a personal choice. Sometimes when you have money it’s not about value but about just being able to pay for it.
If your parents have saved enough to let you choose and are letting you choose, I’d say it’s up to you.
(I WOULDN’T pick Irvine - too commuter).
Your parents aren’t making sense. They will pay $300,000+ for undergrad, but won’t contribute to med school, which is much more expensive? To me, the choice is clear.
Ask your parents to please use the money they would pay for a UC and put it towards your med school fees. Go to Michigan. Or, there are still colleges accepting applications out of state. Go to one of them, get amazing grades, have your living away from home experience.
As a side note, I don’t think the UCs are some magical universities. I have only been through Davis in passing, but I know Irvine very, very well. There is no part of me that would be willing to pay all that money to be in Irvine. The university is fine, but you can’t get more bland Orange County than the city of Irvine. Sorry to all those who live in Orange County.
If you save money on undergrad, will your parents shift that money to help you with medical school costs? Medical school, should you actually go, will be $100,000 a year and will be funded with loans loans and more loans.
It sounds like they will…or am I reading that wrong?
Please take medical school out of your equation. You need a college with a great plan B in case medical school doesn’t happen.
California will be there for vacations, and maybe grad school (not medical school…one of the hardest places to get accepted due to the large number of applicants). Don’t count on a UC undergrad degree to help you get accepted to a CA medical school. @WayOutWestMom can explain the numbers there.
In my opinion, University of Michigan is your strongest acceptance. Just because it’s close to home doesn’t mean you need to go home a lot.
Born and raised in Michigan. IMO, all of those schools are amazing. Anyone talking down a UC school is pretty nuts. I would take the adventure to California. No other state like it, such an experience. The diversity in California is amazing.
Congrats, there is no wrong decision between these 3 schools.
Hard to say if it makes sense. Maybe she has a sibling heading to college in four years and they can’t cash flow two at the same time. I dunno. It’s possible. Or it’s possible that these parents went through school this way and see value in bootstrapping your way through grad school. Or they think a young adult should seek alternative means to pay for it. Maybe by agreeing to work in an underserved community for a few years. Heck, maybe they are cash flowing it and plan to retire the second the kid is through with undergrad.
Not saying these make sense for everybody. But they could possibly make sense for them.
Go to med school (or other grad school) somewhere else. This is a huge cost difference and you may really be impacting your parents’ retirement as well as your future debt if they are not willing to throw the cost differential toward med school.
Study abroad for a semester or year at UMich.
As parents we took OOS publics off the table due to the cost differential. My D22 is at a private that is about $30k a year OOS instead.
If your parents have billion$ and billion$ and just want you to pay your own way for med school for some reason then the UCs are fine.
I guess it depends what you mean by “talking down”. The UCs are in fact not all identical in terms of things like setting and social life.
I think this is a valid consideration, but the vast majority of residential college students spend the vast majority of their time on campus. So while the surrounding state could be a reasonable secondary factor, I hesitate to suggest it should be the dominant factor, since very likely most of the time the OP would not actually be exploring the surrounding state.
I note this is again why it is a bit unfortunate the OP is looking at these particular California schools. Different people like different things, of course, but I know people are willing to pay a lot for, say, the experience of going to a Claremont College, or USC, or even Santa Barbara–colleges where I think there is some plausible lifestyle appeal.
Irvine, in contrast, may have the worst social reputation among all the majors UCs. Davis is a bit better, but the basic appeal there is it is in a nice traditional college town–good for in-state residents who want that experience, but why pay a ton extra for that OOS when that is already what Michigan, and in fact many other less expensive public universities, would offer?
Again, I really don’t think this is talking down these UCs in the academic sense. But when the OP is basically asking should they pay a lot more money for lifestyle reasons, a realistic assessment of the lifestyle they would be paying for at these particular colleges seems appropriate.
Irvine is more of a commuter school. So there is some issue with that. Orange county is amazing though. People literally spend their savings to plan vacations there.
$160K+ is a little more than I would pay for an Orange County vacation . . . .
And that is sort of the point, right? California isn’t going anywhere, in fact if the OP really wanted they could spend school breaks and such there, and they would have a ludicrously large budget to fund all that because of how much they would have saved on college costs.
The basic economics of all this is that the taxpayers of Michigan have decided to massively subsidize the OP’s education, and because money is fungible, the OP can use that subsidy in all sorts of different ways, including California vacations, med school tuition, a future house downpayment, or so on.
Or, the OP could spend all that money on the experience of being a residential college student at Irvine or Davis. And I think we are just trying to make sure the OP is really thinking through whether that is the way they want to spend all that money.
Including even if the OP wants California adventures. Because I like California, but if you gave me $160K to spend on California adventures, I would not spend it on 36 months in either Irvine or Davis.
Im sorry, I did not see the OP talking about money. I only read his first post, so maybe that is an issue.
Clearly, if money is an issue that is a whole other point. Community Colleges are also a great option.
Inside the Commuter Experience
29,449 undergraduate students were enrolled in the fall 2021 quarter at UCI, with 12,586 of these students living in housing communities and 57% of undergraduate commuter students making up the rest of the undergraduate population.
UCI is more than that…
Also UCI may used to be a commuter school, still is, but Irvine is very lively on weekends with people still around and many things to do. Top notch pre-med with lots of students apply and getting into med school. I grew up 15 min away and know many people who went there.
HOWEVER, no way I pay OOS money for any of the UC UG campuses. Too much money, if there are cheaper and poss better alternatives. UM is top notch.
Irvine is great for families, i.e., parents with young children. Single college kids, not so much.
The campus is surrounded by multi-million dollar homes; not exactly college chic. Davis has a significantly better college community.
Any top ~100 Uni/LAC will offer a top notch pre-med program.
Irvine is perfectly positioned for Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Anaheim Angels, Disneyland, Hiking galore…
I was trying to ballpark the difference between UCI OOS and Michigan in-state, which I believe is around $40K/year (give or take).
Yes, and many would be some combination of affordable and/or offer a very different college experience from a big public, and also not be in the state of Michigan.
Again to me it is unfortunate the OP has zeroed in on two that are very expensive and what I would consider a downgrade in terms of campus lifestyle. I get sometimes the OP could leave campus and do Cali things, it just again seems to me there are much more efficient ways to have Cali adventures.
@cueless : did you get into any other OOS universities ?
Percentage of all (rather than frosh) undergraduates living off campus is not a good proxy for commuter students, since many non-frosh resident students at many colleges live nearby off-campus. UCI’s 2022-2023 common data set says that 82% of frosh and 44% of all undergraduates live on campus. This suggests mostly residential students, many of whom live off campus after frosh year.
However, UCI does have a “suitcase” reputation, which is that many resident students leave for the weekends to stay with their families.
For comparison, University of Michigan has 96% of frosh but only 27% of all undergraduates living on campus.
Going back to the original question, it does not look worth spending an extra $160k for UCI or UCD, especially for a pre-med looking at the possibility of expensive medical school costs.
Your experiences as a HS student living in Ann Arbor may not match those of kids from Ann Arbor attending UMich in ways you may not be able to predict. So I suggest this. You likely have friends in HS with older siblings at UMich. Ask a few of these friends, or even better their siblings, if it turned out the way they expected. Did it seem too familiar? Do they wish in retrospect they had gone somewhere else? Or did it turn out to be different than they had expected?
Sorry for the confusion.
I meant UCI is much more of an experience than a vacation. Not meant to be money focused.
It is a great school for pre-med. More than just a “OC vacation experience.”