<p>Indeed!</p>
<p>I would not do early decision. Out of the three Cornell is usually ranked the lowest although they are all generally amazing and have the same level of prestige as far as engineering goes. Early decision is a huge commitment and there are so many other things you have to consider. Because they are so similar in academic value, later on after you get acceptances you’re really going to consider each tiny detail about the schools in order to choose. Price, location, weather, atmosphere, job availability, etc. Out of the schools you’ve mentioned here I applied to Berkeley, Cornell, UCSD, and USC. I was accepted to all and chose Berkeley. Early decision should only be used when you are absolutely in love with a school and you know you will be 100% happy with that choice (and be able to afford it).</p>
<p>Here are the US News rankings for undergraduate engineering programs (general) at PhD-granting institutions:
<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate</a>
(Berkeley is ranked 3rd, Michigan and Cornell tied for 7th.)</p>
<p>Here are the US News rankings for undergraduate mechanical engineering:
<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate-mechanical”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate-mechanical</a>
(Michigan is 2nd, Berkeley 3rd, Cornell 10th)</p>
<p>These rankings are based on subjective peer assessments. The differences probably are insignificant when weighed against personal preferences (“fit”), or especially when weighed against net costs. If you are not a CA or MI resident, and if you qualify for need-based aid, Cornell probably will have the lowest net cost (perhaps by far). Use each school’s online net price calculator to estimate your own costs. Here is a sample scenario:</p>
<p>Assumptions
$80K family income, $8K paid in federal taxes
married parents, 1 sibling (aged 14), Maryland resident
$20K in cash assets, no real estate
2015 admissions</p>
<p>Net Cost Estimates (after grant aid only) from Net Price Calculators
$39,888 Berkeley
$36,126 Michigan
$14,831 Cornell </p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>I was in a similar position as you (OOS, ED’ed at Cornell, applied to UMich and Berkeley as well later, all for CS) last year.</p>
<p>I ended up getting deferred by Cornell’s CoE, and even though I really wanted to go there, it was pretty great that that had happened, since I ended up choosing to go to Berkeley. But I wouldn’t worry about the negligible difference in rankings… I ended up choosing based on location (bay area / SV > east coast, climate etc) and a few other factors. Don’t bother factoring in ranking at all for colleges that are all in this scenario.</p>
<p>A huge reason you may want to go ahead with EDing to Cornell is if you don’t want to have big classes. Cal, and I imagine UMich as well, have 500+ students in some courses (I have 800+ in one of my CS courses). You may think this isn’t a big deal now, but you might realize later that is. At Cal, it can also be difficult to get into several popular courses. Probably something similar at Mich as well. Although Cornell is a big school, you certainly won’t have this problem to the extent you will at Cal and UMich. Personally though, I would still just apply EA to Mich, and apply RD to the other two (this is what I should’ve done in hindsight instead of ED’ing to Cornell). Then IF you get into all 3, decide in March. The reason I say this is that I really wanted to go to Cornell back in October/November, but that changed later.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not true. Cornell has big classes, too; 18.3% of its classes have 50 or more students, compared to 14.5% at Cal and 18.1% at Michigan. Of the three, Cal does have more super-large classes-- 8.5% of its classes have 100+ students, compared to 7.4% at Michigan and 6.6% at Cornell, but they’re still roughly in the same ballpark. There’s a common misconception that if a school is private, it won’t have large classes. In Cornell’s case, that’s just flatly wrong. There are many reasons to like Cornell, but small classes isn’t one of them. When I visited there with my D, the tour guides actually boasted that the largest class on campus had 1300 students. That’s more students in a single classroom than there were on the entire campus at the small LAC D finally chose to attend.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, I hear about this problem much more at Cal and other units in the UC system than at Michigan. Not so say it doesn’t happen at Michigan, but I don’t think it’s nearly as common, and I don’t think you can generalize on the Cal experience. (For that matter, my D had trouble getting into a couple of popular classes she wanted to take at her tiny LAC; it can happen anywhere).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I did acknowledge that Cornell is in fact a big school, but he will certainly not face similar class sizes. To elaborate, it doesn’t really matter for the lower division courses, which all 3 have big class sizes for. Even though both Cal and Cornell have 1000+ student classes, it is irrelevant at the lower division level since no one really NEEDS a small class for a lower division course.</p>
<p>BUT, several of Cal’s upper division courses, at least for my major, have 200+ students. That can be a really impersonal experience for some people imo. (I should point out to the OP though that there are discussion sections for each class of ~25 students so it’s not as big of a problem) I’d imagine that Cornell’s upper division courses for the most part DO NOT go to such high sizes. But I could be wrong since I haven’t looked at Cornell’s upper division courses specifically.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>As someone who registered for courses last month, I can tell you that I wasn’t able to enlist in 2/4 courses that I wanted to. There are several courses that fill up VERY quickly, and if you don’t sign up for them in the first phase you won’t get them (and you can only sign up for ~2 courses in your first phase of course choice, so you inevitably have to defer some choices to phase 2, at which point some courses are filled to the top and then some). I also hear from quite a few people that they’re stuck high up on waitlists for certain courses they need.</p>
<p>It’s not really much of a problem for choosing courses to do with your major since you get priority for that, but if say, I wanted to take CogSci 1 or MCB C62 (very popular courses),there’s no way I’d get in if I phase 2’d them.</p>
<p>I mean, I guess if you plan everything out and decide what to phase 1 and phase 2 very carefully, you could potentially get all the courses you want, but it’s just a hassle you wouldn’t find at Cornell.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If your major is CS, you are likely to find relatively large classes at any school with a well known CS department. CS enrollment has been exploding over the past several years.</p>
<p><a href=“http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/courses/roster/FA14/CS/”>http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/courses/roster/FA14/CS/</a> lists upper division CS courses with 10 or so labs. Although the size of each lab is not listed, one can estimate the range of class size based on the range of lab size. However, most Cornell upper division CS courses do not have labs or discussions, so estimating their sizes this way does not work (although if you know a Cornell student who can tell you the size of each classroom listed, that can be used to estimate the size).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It does appear that some departments at Berkeley underprovision courses during phase 1 registration, then see where the demand is and add more space later (probably by reallocating TA assignments, or just waiting until later to assign TAs). See past history at <a href=“telebearsoracle.com”>telebearsoracle.com; . This may explain a lot of complaining about getting waitlisted for classes during phase 1 and 2 registration, but not much complaining from actual students about involuntary delayed graduation due to class availability issues.</p>
<p>Truust, it is a myth that Cal and Michigan have larger classes. All research universities, even those with 7,000 undergrads, will have a similar ratio of huge classes (200+), large classes (50-200), medium classes (20-50) and small classes (less than 20). Some universities, especially in recent years, have flooded their roster of classes with utterly useless seminars to make it seem like they have smaller classes, but if you compare core classes, both electives and within your own major, you will see that there isn’t that much of a difference in class size across research universities. Cornell and Michigan have similar class sizes.</p>
<p>To the OP, Cal, Cornell and Michigan are all excellent for engineering. As many have suggested, CoA is a very important factor to consider. If money is tight, I think you should look into other options. Some have mentioned Georgia Tech, Minnesota-Twin Cities, Purdue-West Lafayette and Wisconsin-Madison. But there are many others worth checking out. CalPoly-SLO, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech to name a few.</p>
<p>Among private universities, many have generous financial aid, including Northwestern, Rice etc…</p>
<p>You can look up the class size distributions in each school’s Common Data Set, section I.
For example, at Yale, less than 3% of undergraduate classes have 100+ students. At Wisconsin, nearly 9% have 100+ students. At Harvard, it’s about 3%; at Michigan, about 8%. Cornell’s average class size averages are among the largest of any selective private school. Berkeley’s are among the lowest of any state university.</p>
<p>Do these overall averages reflect significant differences in the courses that most interest you? Or, are they inflated/deflated by concentrations of big/small classes in areas that don’t matter to you at all? Generally, required elementary-intermediate courses in the most popular majors or programs (such as pre-med) do tend to be relatively large at all research universities. Some universities (e.g. Berkeley, Wisconsin, Princeton, JHU) publish course enrollment numbers in their online course schedules for each term. You can use these schedules to compare enrollments for the classes that most interest you. </p>
<p>As I recall, Cornell engineering is more selective than either Berkeley or Michigan based on SAT scores. I think Cornell engineering has a higher graduation rate than Berkeley or Michigan engineering. I think I also read that Cornell engineering received more applications relative to the size of the program than either Berkeley or Michigan. And, there was a study done by someone at SUNY Stony Brook regarding faculty productivity that favored Cornell engineering. My impression is that Cornell Engineering is statistically similar to MIT.</p>
<p>I wish I had documented the sources. This is going back a few years. Can anyone shed light on this? Is this correct? I tried to verify but the data is very hard to find.</p>
<p>This is really quibbling, though. Berkeley and Michigan have awesome engineering programs.</p>