Basically, it boils down to:
- can your family afford Case Western Reserve from income and savings ? If not/if the answer is “with parental loans” then the only choice is UTD.
- if the answer above is “yes”, then: Can you switch easily to another major or add a Statistics, Bioinformatics, or Data Science minor (because Biology has an unfavorable ROI on its own) at UTD? If not, then that’d favor Case.
- if, like 80+% seniors who want to be premed, you never make it into med school, what would you do and which college would be best for PlanB?
- if you save them 240k, did your parents offer you something (like funding a semester abroad and internships in any US city…) and does it push you away from Case ?
If you make it through the premed gauntlet and actually apply to med school, as has been mentioned above, med schools won’t care what university you attended, only what you did there. Both have excellent STEM offerings so it won’t make a difference, it’ll be all on your doing everything to take advantage of opportunities available and being among the best at everything you do.
The only way attending a private college helps is in providing closer contact to professors and advisers, so you’d hear about opportunities or would potentially get better LoRs… but since you’re in collegiumV and Honors you will already have some of that at UTD. Case has more money per student and generally better resources due to being private but it doesn’t mean you’ll be spoiled or coddled ;). It does have one definite advantage, it’s primarily residential and there’s a close knit campus community.
And UTD would mean saving a lot of money to use for med school if you do get into one.