Coop programs are not 5 years of education for the cost of 4. The 5th year is expensive. It is the opportunity cost of not being in a full pay job. The true cost of the 5th year is the pay difference between a full time pay and coop pay. This assumes you can get a job without a coop. This is in fact the default case in the country — coop schools are few and far between and everyone else are able to get their engg jobs.
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FWIW many engineers attending college on a traditional calendar are able to do summer internships.
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Yes, I agree. Because we are local, we know many Northeastern students; most of them love it, but the co-op model hasn’t been a good fit for all. We have a UMass Amherst visit scheduled soon & he visited UMass Lowell on his own (all I know about his Lowell visit is that he was super-impressed by their nuclear reactor 
).
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They were really generous with merit for my D26 (she got 38k and she is simply a typical average excellent student, no special things like robotics that WPI awards specifically), we weren’t expecting that. Give them a chance for sure.
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Northeastern now has a plan to graduate in 4 years with co-ops by using summers either for coursework, or co-ops, or both. It’s explained on their website.
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My GS is a rising junior in the honors program at UMass Amherst, majoring in engineering, and he is very happy with both the university and the engineering program - and the food! 
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If he is hoping for merit to bring the costs down, might he also be a candidate for the highly-rejective, highly need/based generous colleges (Ivies, etc)? I know they are not generally “known” for engineering but there are ABET accredited programs and for Brown, at least, their CS (and I believe also their Computer Engineering) graduates have always done very well. I’m sure the stats for the ABET programs would be available.
He has the stats for Ivies etc but probably not the extracurriculars (no notable STEM achievements or portfolio). He might put in a couple of long-shot applications to the ones whose NPCs work for our family. Brown, though, is not looking good for us–their NPC predicts a cost of $30-50k more than their peer schools.
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You don’t need stem extracurriculars. You need some extracurriculars
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That seems so strange that Brown is that much higher because I know they stopped using home equity about four years ago, and that should have put them in a more competitive range.
That being said, the Ivies will usually match other financial aid offers from other Ivies where a student is accepted (also MIT and Stanford, at least in the past). So if he got into more than one, you can ask the Financial Aid office for a professional judgment review and they are likely to meet your best offer from one of their peer institutions .
Brown has not had a functional NPC for a while. Whenever I used it, it felt much more like a random number generator with very small changes in inputs yielding very dramatic differences.
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Right, I should have been clearer. He has several extracurriculars–a sport, an instrument, a volunteering commitment, a hobby, a part-time school year job & a full-time summer job–all done for several years. He doesn’t have awards or specific distinction in any of them. When my older kid was applying last year, his classmates who were accepted to Ivy-type schools generally had more spectacular activities. He will still apply to MIT & maybe a couple of others, but I think his likely outcome is somewhere in the UMass/WPI/BU/Northeastern part of his list.
Yes, same–earlier this spring it was saying we would pay $8000. Now it’s more like $75,000. I think it may have stabilized–this number is about what it reported when my older kid was looking 2 years ago. I will run it again in early fall & check with their aid office.
It does seem strange, but when my older son applied we saw a $25k variation in his aid packages from peer schools, all of whom were ‘meets full need,’ and the variation wasn’t always explainable by home equity policies. I think we are in that tricky income band where some schools start phasing out significant financial aid but others don’t; the private university NPCs I’ve run this summer return numbers ranging from $20k-$78k.
Another factor is that our older kid will graduate from college in 2 years, which means kid #2’s school needs to still be affordable when we have only one in college. Basically, this means kid #2’s options are (a) get into one of the schools with incredibly generous aid (which mostly have admissions rates of under 5%), (b) get significant merit, or (c) UMass. All of those options sound pretty good to him, so something should work out.
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I would very much look into how easy it is to get co-ops at this point, even for engineering.
The coops of northeastern even 15 years ago are not today. (I know a lot of northeastern people). My 25 is at another coop school, it is AWFUL hard to get them for any major…NEU may be slightly easier, but not much I don’t think, and from what I have seen, NEU’s connections to local companies personally are not what they once were.
Also check how hard it is to change majors. I know someone right now struggling to get out of engineering into something else at Northeastern. I think it is easier at BU. (I don’t think BU has the paperwork of NEU from what I have heard, at least not in practice).
I also would be curious how a “summer” coop at NEU is different than an “internship” anywhere else….
Anyway, my kid (also looking at engineering) is looking at both schools, and talking to people (we are also somewhat local) I think is only applying to BU….though their school track record with NEU is phenomenal. NEU seems very businessy to my kid and a bit transient. They like BU engineering felt a bit smaller (though not small).
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I agree, and hopefully someone at Northeastern would answer that question.
For bachelor’s class of 2024, Northeastern reports that 100% of COE students completed at least one co-op:
Here are the co-op peeps:
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I would say “completed” and easy to get are different. Did it take 300 applicantions and blood sweat and tears though? and how many were actual co-ops versus basically summer internships (thus no different than other schools)? RIT grads have guaranteed 2 (it is a graduation requirement) and I can tell you it is a nightmare at times for kids.
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I do not know how “easy/hard” it is for current Northeastern students to get co-ops, but I will say that my husband (software architect / long time AI guy, in SF bay area) has had many Northeastern students as co-op interns over the years (at different companies) and his feeling is that they were all just great as employees, well prepared to work. So for him, he says it’s a positive to see Northeastern on a resume, and would bias him towards being more inclined to hire. However, he’s not a MechE so that may be different.
My S23 (note he is still a student) says he thinks that in MechE, a lot of your desirability to employers is about the projects you worked on. He says that the kids who work on the car teams get recruited heavily because of this, and he expects it is similar for other types of teams and projects. He was just attending Formula SAE competition this year and there was a ton of recruiting activity going on there. His feeling is that in MechE it is much less about the school you attended, and more about what you did there.
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This is a really good point!
I’d take it further to look into the first year curriculums at the different schools. Do they both have a first year design class? How robust is the class? How many credits? Are the projects meaningful enough to add to a resume and discuss at an interview?
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Agreed. There was a thread from a few years ago that Northeastern limited co-op apps to 100, not sure if that’s the case now.
Great point, and I’ve heard the same. We’re trying to find out how accessible the projects & teams are at different schools; he doesn’t have robotics or CAD experience, so a highly competitive, application-based project teams environment is probably not right for him.
When first year students are applying to these teams, our experience is that most teams are more interested in the applicant’s enthusiasm, teachability, and willingness to put in the work time. Also many teams are open access and don’t turn anyone away. My son did not have ANY robotics or CAD or any other relevant experience. He successfully applied to the car team in his first semester, and by the next fall he was promoted to one of the subteam leads. Depending on what they are doing, these teams can be a lot of work… but the kids learn so much!
Best thing is just to contact all teams of interest, and talk to them. They are typically very willing to talk about the process and what they are looking for!
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