Michigan State vs Penn State

juillet
Wed, 02 Dec 2015 09:41:59 +0000

If you are from NY and are looking for new experiences, my opinion is that you should attend Michigan State. Penn State tends to attract many many kids from NY area high schools. Culturally, you may not have a much different experience at PS than you did in HS- at least that’s what goes on here.

It’s true that PSU has more NY-origin students than Michigan State, but I don’t think that means culturally, the school will have a more similar experience to OP’s high school. New York is a vast state with different cities and lots of rural areas. I think that a kid who went to high school in New York City, for example, would actually, “culturally,” have more in common with a kid who went to an urban high school in Boston or San Francisco (or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh!) than a kid who went to a suburban high school in Orange County or a rural high school in upstate New York. Simply living in the same state doesn’t necessarily confer some sort of cultural sameness.

Which is why I question the OP’s need to leave New York to get “new experiences.” A lot of high school students believe that, but it’s rarely true. Even if you went to a SUNY that has mostly NY high school students, those high school students may come from around the state. Everything will still be new. (Heck, even if you went to a more local regional public that attracts a lot of kids from one region - e.g., New Paltz and Purchase attract a lot of city kids - you’d still have a new experience there).

Plus, I’m not sure that any thin-layer ‘new experiences’ would be worth paying twice the price.

That said, there aren’t any flagships in New York that offer the same big-sports, school-spirited, rah-rah experience that Penn State and Michigan State do, so that’s different. To answer the original question…they’re both great schools and neither is clearly better than the other. Frankly your experiences at either would be pretty similar. Michigan State is a well-reputed school, particularly in business; you don’t need to worry about the overall prestige of the school.

One particular difference may be the setting. I don’t know anything about East Lansing. The populations of State College and East Lansing are roughly the same (around 45K people), but East Lansing is directly adjacent to Lansing, a city of over 100K, and is 1.5 hours from Detroit. State College is really in the middle of nowhere; it’s about 2.5-3 hours from Pittsburgh, 3 hours from DC, 3 hours from Philadelphia and 4 hours from New York - and it’s not too easy to get to any of those cities other than New York unless you have a car. So you have to be committed to the whole college town thing. (That said, State College is a really nice college town with anything you’d need during the school year right there!)