<p>My parents are leaning towards sending me to Emory( oxford college 1st 2 years) , but I woud like to attend michigan if accepted. I was deferred EA. I plan on majoring in econ and I know michigan’s department is probably stronger than emory’s. My parents argument is that they don’t want to pay private school money to michigan since it is a large state school w/ massive class sizes and lots of TA’s. Is this true? They also have said that state budget cuts could negatively impact the quality of education at michigan. How should I go about refuting these arguments or are they in fact true.</p>
<p>UMich only gets 6% of its operating funds from the state, so any state budget cuts shouldn’t have a huge impact on their overall finances. They figured out long ago that the state funding is drying up, and shifted to other streams of revenue, including a $7bil+ endowment.</p>
<p>Your parents obviously don’t know much about Michigan…or good public universities in general. Classes are seldom taught at by TAs (or GSIs as they are referred to at Michigan) at Michigan. Only 3% of all classes at Michigan are taught by GSIs. Most GSIs only assist faculty with discussion groups and research labs. The only courses taught by GSIs are introductory Mathematics, English and Foreign Language courses. </p>
<p>[Information</a> About Graduate Student Instructors at the University of Michigan](<a href=“http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/gsi-sa/teach.html]Information”>http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/gsi-sa/teach.html)</p>
<p>Also, classes at Michigan are not larger than they are at Emory. Emory may offer more niche seminars than Michigan and may partition lectures into several sections taught by the same professor, but in the end, students at Emory will not receive a significantly more presonalized education. </p>
<p>Finally, as gman pointed out, of Michigan’s $5 billion+ budget, only $300 million (less than 6%) comes from state funding. The rest is raised by the university through tuition, private/alumni domations, research funding, revenues generated by the university, endowment returns etc…</p>
<p>Financially, Michigan is one of only 10 or so universities to receive the highest credit rating by Moody’s and S&P. Its endowment of $6.6 billion is the 6th largest university endowment in the US, larger than all but Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.</p>
<p>If you think you would be happier at Michigan…and assuming it is not more expensive than Emory, I would say go for it!</p>
<p>Why are you arguing something that may not happen? </p>
<p>you still have to be admitted to UMich; </p>
<p>you are already admitted to Oxford @ Emory…</p>
<p>Wait to see if UMich comes through…</p>
<p>I would think that Michigan would be stronger than Oxford College and comparable to Emory College. I agree with rodney that there is nothing to decide unless you are admitted to Michigan.</p>
<p>i want to be ready to make a decision/ talk things through should I get admitted to michigan. I dont think theres any harm in figuring things out in advance.</p>
<p>thanks for the well thought out reply alexandre</p>
<p>You should think it through in advance if its a reasonable possibility notincollege, I agree with you 100%. Dont want to be rushed at end of April.</p>
<p>My daughter has this delima but we haven’t received our financial aid award from Michigan and we have no idea what to expect. We know exactly what we will have to pay for Emory… : ( I’m assuming that since we didn’t hear anything about merit scholarships she didn’t get any from Michigan. Has anyone from OOS received their financial aid award, if so, how was it? I don’t want to rule out Michigan based on my assumption that we won’t get any grants.</p>