<p>Other than the obvious, is there any significant difference between the two in terms of quality of education (good professors, personal attention), student culture (being around more intellectually-stimulated students), and opportunities?</p>
<p>You will find considerable variations in these characteristics within each of the groups of schools you are comparing.</p>
<p>For example, within the Ivy League, Cornell and Dartmouth are very different schools in most respects, so students who have criteria other than baseline criteria (cost and majors/courses offered) are not that likely find both of them to be good fits. And state flagships and their honors programs also vary considerably.</p>
<p>You may get more helpful responses if you named specific schools, along with your academic and career goals, and other preferences you have with respect to how well a college fits you. A general question like what you posted is more likely to lead to a prestige war that give you little specific information about the schools you are choosing between.</p>
<p>My bad. My top 20 schools are RD, so I don’t have any results, but before anyone says “wait until you have that choice,” I really don’t want to wait until April – a month before a decision must be made – to ask this question, so humor me for now. Anyways, I was specifically trying to compare UT Dallas Honors Program with Rice, Duke, Yale, and WUSTL, my reaches. </p>
<p>I’m thinking of a pre-med track, although I have an incredibly open mind.</p>
<p>As for preferences, I’d like a school to range from about 2000-8000 undergrads, or at least make my classes feel small. And like I said, it’d be nice to be around intellectually driven students for a good amount of time and around professors who care about undergrads a decent amount.</p>
<p>I’m just curious because whenever a typical CCer states his/her hopes of entering an ivy someday, many adults here claim that he/she can have a similar education and experience in a state flagship’s honors program for less. I just want to know if that’s true to a good extent because I’m not counting on being accepted to any of those reaches and hoping to get just as great an experience at UT Dallas.</p>
<p>Is UT Dallas really considered a “flagship” in Texas?</p>
<p>While one would expect UT Austin and Texas A&M to retain some of the top students (that you appear to want to see at the school you attend) who did not get into, could not afford, or simply preferred not to go to more selective schools, you may want to check whether UT Dallas is similarly successful in this respect.</p>
<p>Medical schools are said to not be concerned about the prestige of your undergraduate school, as long as it is a four year school, and you get a high GPA in your course work (especially pre-med course work) and a high MCAT score to make the first cut (of course, then there are numerous other criteria that they evaluate).</p>
<p>I think you need to check first if UT-Dallas has sent grads to top med schools in the recent past. If it has been able to do that previously and you’ll be getting a full ride from them, then forget going to private schools, even Ivies, unless they would offer you the same or almost the same package. Now, if UT-Dallas has a bad record of sending grads to top med schools, then it’s time to look into your other school options. Amongst your list, Yale is the obvious best – one of THE HYPSM schools. But if Rice or Duke would offer you money (scholarship), and it would come out substantially cheaper than Yale, then take either school. The bottom line here is to save as much money as you can because med schooling is hard, long and expensive.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus:
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<p>Isn’t that why there’s the honor’s college – to be grouped with such students? The average SAT score (CR+M) is 1440 for 2011 for honors students, if that means anything.</p>
<p>@RML: </p>
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<p>[Pre-Health</a> Results and Statistics - Health Professions Advising Center (HPAC) - The University of Texas at Dallas](<a href=“Health Professions Advising Center | UT Dallas”>Health Professions Advising Center | UT Dallas)</p>
<p>according to this link, they did seem to have students accepted to Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Yale for medical/dental school recently (to name a few).
And I got a full-ride to UT Dallas, so it’s clearly my financial safety.</p>
<p>If the honors program does successfully retain some of the top students that you want to encounter at school, then it would appear that the school has fulfilled that criterion of yours.</p>
<p>If the other (top private) schools couldn’t give you nearly as much as what UT-Dallas will be giving you, forget about going to any of them. The UT-Dallas record shows that it is a very good program and you’ll be paying nothing. Nothing gets better than that, unless, as I’ve said, they’ll match the offer.</p>
<p>UT Dallas is bigger than what you say you want. I don’t know how much more the honors students get than regular students in terms of small classes and personal attention. If those are high priorities, then you might also want to consider alternatives in your “match” range . “Top 20” is a rather arbitrary cut-off if you’re looking for small classes, personal attention, intellectually-stimulated students, good aid, etc. </p>
<p>However, just from the perspective of meeting your pre-med needs, what you’ll get from a “top 20” school basically is a more exclusive country club. You won’t get a better or worse golf score just for being a member. That’s something that comes from your own efforts. If, after aid, you can afford the better country club, great, go there. If you can’t, then don’t.</p>
<p>Depends on what you want to do.
If you want to pursue a career in law/finance, then a degree from an Ivy (also Stanford and MIT) would open a lot of doors. People would say law school doesn’t care about where you went to UG. True, but employers will care about where you went to UG in addition to where you went to law school and your law school grades.
If you want to pursue a career in everything else (especially STEM), save money and attend the state flagship.</p>
<p>Among the final choices for my second kid were Skidmore and UVM. When discussing these choices we discussed there were just as many smart people at UVM as Skidmore however the % of students who are really smart was very different. So for a self-motivated student who will identify and be motivated by other top students a state school can be a great option as they are likely to stand out at the state school and be given may opportunities as such. However, it is also true that the average student at the state school may be less academically inclined and study less … so if the applicant is likely to be drawn to average studying (and partying) behavior then a state school that could be a real negative. I believe either choice can be a great choice and for some students one option might be clearly better. </p>
<p>(PS - My son chose UVM as a non-honors college student and loved it academically but got unlucky with his housing assignment and had issues with dorm life (7 days a week of loud party-like behavior on his floor).</p>
<p>It would be nice if they actually listed the number of students going ot med school as opposed to saying 100% of their excellent students went to med school.</p>
<p>UTD has a combined program for texas residents with 15 seats at UT southwest. They also have lot of research tie ins with the med school and so an aggressive student should be able to make use of these connections to get research and shadowing experience.</p>
<p>The experience of a student going to Rice vs UTD will be totally different and for that matter even UTD vs UT Austin or A&M.</p>
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<p>From what I’ve gathered, the numbers that many top privates provide are somewhat “fudged”. Those schools, or many of them, at least, discourage their students to apply to med schools when they think they would hardly make it, thereby boasting their %tages in med school admission rates. Public schools’ numbers are, at least, transparent – what you see is what you get.</p>
<p>Thanks a lot, everyone!</p>
<p>Basically everyone is saying that it doesn’t matter which one I go to for premed because the vast majority of the results of my future depends on me. As for the differences between the two types, I’m inferring that you guys mean the quality of education shouldn’t be too much of a difference; it’s the total ambience of the schools and %age of “smart” students as a whole that differ.</p>
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<p>That’s the argument of those private schools boasters on CC, but when you’re in an Honors Class, you’re actually going to be grouped with the same smart, highly motivated students as you, giving you an “ambiance” of being in a top 10 school. You will also be prioritized by the school and your profs would make more time for you than all the rest of the students in your university. That’s what Honors Class is, first and foremost, isn’t it?</p>
<p>"Public schools’ numbers are, at least, transparent – what you see is what you get. "</p>
<p>But they dont list any which is a problem. I went to AAMC and found 140 applied in 2011 (2010?). How many got in?</p>
<p>@RML: exactly. so I guess that answers my question then.</p>
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Honors programs are all different … the number of classes taken within the honors program differ … the housing situations differ … etc.</p>
<p>^^^ Perhaps you mean, they do have more options on taking advanced courses than all the rest of the students in the university. Their curriculum becomes more flexible, so to speak, and they will have opportunities to get involved in research, and so on.</p>
<p>I’m a Yale student–I’d speculate you’re better off doing pre-med at the state flagship than at Yale. Pre-med is a ton of work no matter where you do it, but the big thing about the top schools is that your competition (and therefore the curve that your classes are graded on) is absolutely brutal. I’m not totally familiar with how the UT-Dallas honors program works, but that name would give you prestige in applying to the in-state med schools, and the competition for grades in the honors program would certainly be less fierce.</p>