Northeastern, University of Pittsburgh (with possible transfer to BU), or UMass (with possible transfer to BU)?

My son is a high school senior deciding on college. He has been undecided, but is now leaning towards economics as his major. His top choices are:

Northeastern (with a first semester in Prague). pro: likes the feel of the school, being in the city, and the co-op and study abroad opportunities, diverse and strong student population, flexibility in picking a major and minor. Negatives: overcrowded, unsure of the level of the econ program itself, co-ops not guaranteed and hard to secure, iffy advising and administrative support, won’t qualify for BU guaranteed transfer if he were to transfer as a sophomore, and studying abroad first semester might make transferring elsewhere as a sophomore also harder.

Pitt (honors college) - with the option to transfer to BU as a sophomore; Just started considering it again. Pros: Higher ranked undergrad econ program, got honors college and merit aid - much cheaper than NEU, also in a vibrant city, would work with guaranteed transfer to BU and also with other transfer options if he chooses that. Cons: giant intro classes for econ, less diverse student body - maybe less academically strong (?), internships etc. probably geared more for PA.

UMass (honors college) - also with the option to transfer to BU. Pros: cheapest option, decent econ department, nice housing at the Honors College and food. Cons: in the middle of nowhere (he loves being in a city), no opportunity to do music or art as a non major, has had very serious problems with antisemitism in the past two school years.

BU (guaranteed sophomore transfer if he goes to a US college freshman year). Pro: highly ranked econ program, in Boston (which he wants). Cons: no real campus, would have to deal with being a transfer, iffy advising, also expensive (but offset with a cheaper year freshman year either at UMass or Pitt). But if he chooses to transfer from wherever he goes freshman year, he would apply to other schools as well - not just BU.

Any thoughts? Specifically on the quality of the econ programs at each. Trying to see how much those might outweigh other considerations.

This wouldn’t be a tough decision for me.

On the low cost end, UMass with Commonwealth Honors is excellent, but your kid has several tangible reasons not to be feeling it. I feel as if choosing UMass would involve a tacit, preemptive decision to take the sophomore transfer to BU; and I don’t feel like starting your freshman year with one foot out the door is really a good way to begin the college experience.

On the high cost end, I don’t feel as if Northeastern is really offering the value-added that you should expect for the cost differential. The first semester abroad would probably be fun, but it’s mainly a way of preserving the school’s revenue stream while biding kids’ time away from campus for a very-expensive semester. Your son could do a semester abroad, as a Pitt or UMass student for vastly less money, and it wouldn’t be inferior in any way, so you’re basically just donating tens of thousands of dollars to Northeastern for the privilege of being in a generically-educational and fun holding pattern until they have dorm space in the spring. Once on campus, there’s nothing special about studying Econ at Northeastern as compared to Pitt Honors or UMass Honors, and as you say, there’s no guarantee of fruitful co-ops, especially given the trajectory of the economy. To me, the only thing you’re really giving up by passing up Northeastern here is Boston, and you even have a second chance at that with the BU sophomore transfer option.

That leaves Pitt. It’s more expensive than UMass but still pretty affordable. It’s in a great urban area; in fact, one with a vibrant Jewish community if that’s important to you, which it sounds like it might be. Honors is a really nice enhancement. In addition to the honors housing, do not underestimate the benefit of priority registration! This means that instead of “taking what you can get” in terms of classes, you get to skim the cream in terms of the most interesting classes with the most highly-regarded instructors. This means that not only are you entering a well-regarded program, but the quality of your particular experience will be skewed toward the best the school has to offer. (This is true for UMass Commonwealth Honors too; it just seems that the Pitt vibe and environment feel like a much better fit.) Pitt students can even join CMU music ensembles, if they aren’t finding what they’re looking for in-house.

In your position, I would choose Pitt, and I would try to go in with the assumption that I was going to stay for four years. Keep that BU offer in your back pocket, and if you really feel that it would be worth the disruption and the extra money, the option is there. But it has so much in common with Pitt - even the two cities have a lot of similarities IMO - that I don’t think you should assume it will offer an upgrade that’s commensurate with the price difference, much less worth having to start over on a new campus after a year. Pitt is a great school, and I don’t really see much downside to choosing it over the other two urban universities which cost so much more. (In your case, that is. There are students for whom BU and Northeastern, with full-need-met aid, would be cheaper than Pitt, and then it becomes a different conversation.) Also, 32% of Pitt students come from outside PA (vs. 27.5% at UMass, which still isn’t bad) - probably an even higher percentage in Honors, though don’t know that for a fact - so I really don’t think it’s “geared for PA” - he can go anywhere with a Pitt degree that he could go with a degree from one of the MA schools.

As decisions go on these forums, I honestly feel less conflicted about this one than most. I’d be feeling pretty settled about choosing Pitt.

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Thank you for your thoughts! As far as Boston, we live in the Boston area, and while my older daughter did not want to apply anywhere in Boston, my son strangely really wanted to get into a Boston school (and while I wished she would not go far away, with him I wondered - “don’t you want to explore?”).

The info about Pitt honors is really useful! Also interesting about cross registering at CMU! I think he filed it away as a “safety” he did not even want to consider, but rethinking it after looking into the major more closely.

We know lots of kids who have gone and who are going to Northeastern from our school and who have benefitted from the coops, but as you said, it is becoming more uncertain these days. Though also hard to tell - with internships so impossible currently, are the co-ops a bit of an advantage?

I consider internships and co-ops basically the same. Northeastern does not get the students their co-ops, it’s on the student to find them, similar to internships. Northeastern has listings of co-ops in NUWorks but limits apps thru that to 100 per student. Students are encouraged to pursue co-ops in other ways e.g., networking, using LinkedIn, Handshake (which many/most schools use), etc. There are reports (here, on Reddit, etc) of students spending a lot of time searching for co-ops and not always being successful. I would talk with current students to learn more. Also if one co-ops at northeastern and wants to graduate in four years, summer school would be required. https://coe.northeastern.edu/academics-experiential-learning/co-op-experiential-learning/co-op/undergraduate-co-op/

I also think there’s a lot to like about Pitt, including relative ease in changing majors/schools, since your S doesn’t seem set on Econ. Regarding Econ I would put all these schools in the same category, with none being observably better or worse in that dept, nor with better ultimate job outcomes.

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I agree.

I agree.

One of my kids is a BU graduate. We do love the university. BUT The school cost is now approaching $100,000 a year for undergrad. I just can’t think that your student needs to transfer there at all when he has great options on the table elsewhere.

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If you can afford it and sounds like you can - Pitt.

  1. He doesn’t like Northeastern. And starting abroad is tough.
  2. He apparently likes the city - which isn’t UMASS. But it is Pitt.
  3. He didn’t get into BU. While they offered the “ploy” of guaranteed admission, the entire I want to leave where I enroll before I get there is nutty

I think econ will be fine at all schools. And study abroad is accessible at most every school, certainly these - but do you want to be abroad first semester?

Pitt is not geared for PA and is not “less strong” in any way than other schools. It’s a nationally known and recognized university. Kids today get internships and jobs ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE depending on the areas they apply. If he likes sports, Pitt is an ACC school.

At Pitt, 2879 of 4576 first years are white. 63%. NU is less than half. UMASS is 57% so yes Pitt is less diverse - but still diverse.

Best of luck whatever your student chooses.

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Your son has been undecided and is now “leaning” toward economics as his major. I understand what that might mean for a 17-18 year old, but can you tell us anything more specific about where he thinks he might go with Econ? Are we talking about Economics in Arts & Science? Is he thinking something in business?big picture POV, how does this fit in eith who he is?

From what you describe I would strongly consider Pitt. It checks his boxes. I’m not a fan of having transferring in the back of his mind. If he decides not to transfer, Pitt would be the closest fit.

I’m guessing some of his intro Econ classes could be through the Honors program. Better professors and smaller.

Cross registration with CMU if interested. BTW. CMU has world class FA programs. It’s not just a tech school. Look at the alumni. Carnegie Museum is next door. Good art exhibits.

Squirrel Hill is also next door if being close to a Jewish community is important.

Plenty of quick flights to Boston.

Full disclosure. I’m a Pitt Econ grad from many years ago. They have a good Econ program. Double major in math or stats would be a bonus.

Good luck.

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He does LIKE Northeastern and has friends there, but definitely willing to seriously consider Pitt. We also loved the city when we toured last year

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OK - i was going by this comment - and the Prague thing. For some it might be ok.

I’d want to start making friends at home day one.

After you get back from Prague, then you have to make friends and then those friends (and even your son) may be gone for co op.

If that works for him, it’s ok too.

Pitt cheaper, likely better…it’s certainly a more well known name. College students know Northeastern obviously. I’m not sure society does.

And you save $$.

Best of luck whatever he decides.

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I don’t think he knows. He has always liked social sciences and I don’t see him becoming an academic, but not sure how far he will need to go in terms of grad school - probably a masters at some point? I see how ideas of a career path can change over the college years - his sister went into college obsessed with premed, by sophomore year quit that path - but did not want to think of a PhD in Neuroscience, and now at the end of her junior year thinking she might want to get one even for working in industry not academia.

I loved UMass when I took my kids on visits. One kid liked (didn’t love) it, one kid didn’t like it. Neither went to UMass.

Both kids loved Pitt on visits and one kid attended and a second may too. There are only two knocks I have against Pitt. First, the on campus food is pretty bad, especially compared to UMass, but there are a lot of cool restaurants on Forbes that work for a college kid’s budget and your kid can use meal plan dollars at most of them. The second issue is that off campus housing is abundant and cheap, but also pretty bad quality. This just is what it is, and the young men in particular don’t seem to care.

I agree with others that Northeastern does not seem worth the cost.

The BU guaranteed transfer is a backup if things don’t go well Freshman year. While BU is really expensive for tuition and housing, it is worth noting that the cost of just living and doing things in Boston is also a lot higher than Amherst or Pittsburgh.

Academically and in terms of resume building, BU is a little better than the others, and UMass may be a little worse, but they are all pretty close in terms of what any employer will care about. He should go where he likes the program and the school.

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I’m asking to see if leaning toward Econ, also means leaning toward business. As a Massachusetts resident, I’m guessing that you’re aware of how highly regarded the Isenberg School of Business at UMass is.

OTOH, if his interest is in pure Econ, Amherst College is like an extension of the campus, just down the street. As a member of the 5-college consortium, he can take up to 2 courses per semester at other 5 college campuses, starting 2nd semester of freshman year. UMass has great professors in its own right, but when you factor in access to Amherst professors as well as Smith AND with LAC small classes and seminars, that is an almost unmatched opportunity at in state prices. Best of both worlds. :wink:

It’s easy to take the home town option for granted, but my GS is an out of state engineering student at UMass Honors because he was so impressed with what is there. He chose UMass over Pitt, Maryland, SUNY, and smaller private school options. Now that he’s been there, he loves it. He’s in the Honors dorm, where he’s quite happy, and he loves the food. He has friends and plays a club sport (LAX).

I don’t know what kind of music your son plays. Orchestra? Band? Jazz? Northampton has a really lively music scene from small clubs with open mic nights to bigger performances at the 2600 seat Academy of Music Theater. There’s a shuttle connection between Amherst and Northampton 7 days a week. Or he can ride a bike over on the dedicated, off road bike trail. And Amherst has its own performance outlets. The Northampton/Amherst area is the second biggest booking venue in New England right behind Boston. At a performance by 2-time Grammy nominated jazz & folk artist, Guy Davis, which my wife & I attended recently, we struck up a conversation with an older couple who had retired to Northampton from Chelsea. I was surprised because I had never thought of the Pioneer Valley as a retirement destination. They chose it specifically because of all of the access to live music, which is cheaper and in some ways easier to get to than the same thing in Boston.

You mentioned your son’s experience with anti-semitism in the past couple of years as a concern. There is an active Hillel on campus, which I would think would be a good source to advise you bout the situation there. About 10% of the UMass enrollment is Jewish: at Pitt it is about 9%.

Obviously I think that UMass has a lot to offer - especially since its offerings are supplemented by Amherst College just down the street & the rest of the 5-colleges. At in-state prices, it is a real value.

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Others have already given good answers. I think good co-ops are a bit of an advantage. But it has never been unusual for social science majors to end up falling back on on-campus co-ops like working in Admissions, when something major-related can’t be secured. And it seems clear that the market is going to get tighter. If I were in your position, chose NEU for the co-op program, and ended up with a kid doing admin work in Admissions for his co-op, I would have some regrets. So it feels like a bit of a gamble to me. If he wanted a more pre-professional major, I might be more tempted to gamble, but for social sciences, and throw in the first semester abroad as well… I’m not sold.

If he’s interested in a broader, more interdisciplinary major that includes an econ component, he might check out the Politics and Philosophy major at Pitt. (It’s really what other schools call PPE - there are econ requirements as well.) The major is based in the Honors College (although it’s not limited to Honors College students exclusively) and has its own internship and research opportunities. The basic requirements include 3 econ classes and 7 each from poli sci and philosophy (noting that Pitt has one of the top philosophy departments in the world), but more econ can be added from there if desired, and econ could be emphasized in the capstone. Not sure if this would fit his interests, but it could be worth looking into, as it does leverage the strength of the honors college.

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I wish we had time to stop in Northampton yesterday! Still, I think he is a city access kid :). And he hasn’t experienced any antisemitism himself nor is it really a concern of his - I was just mentioning it out of my own awareness of the situation.

Thank you so much for the feedback! So many informative responses!!!

And as far as Isenberg, I am not sure if that is a separate admission - he was admitted into the College of Social Sciences

I can’t really improve on the great advice and information you have already gotten above, but here are a few pieces of information that may help cement Pitt.

When it comes to departmental strength, there are lots of ways to think about that, and it is not clear which are most relevant to an undergrad specifically. But sometimes I like to just look at EduRank, which is a purely empirical research measure. Again, not the only thing that matters, but helpful sometimes I believe. So here is their US ranking for Econ:

OK, so they have Pitt at #33, BU at #35, UMass at #72, and Northeastern did not make the top 100. I cannot emphasize enough you should not just take this as a definitive ranking, but still, I think it supports the idea that Pitt would at least be among the good choices for Econ, and indeed BU would not necessarily be better (nor worse, that is a trivial difference).

Another topic I wanted to address is what classes will be like. Truthfully, intro classes in big subjects like Econ may not be a favorite in retrospect. Too many kids, too many of those kids might not be very into the material, the instructors might not be the best the department has to offer, and so on. I don’t think this is an easy problem to escape at research universities in general, indeed you might have to look at LACs and such to really get a different intro-level experience. But for sure this can happen at Pitt.

But once you get past that intro level, then I do think you would find a lot of great classes to consider at Pitt–and not just in Econ, they have a lot of strong departments in other Social Sciences, Philosophy and other core Humanities, and so on. And as noted, you can also take up to a class a term at CMU. Which you might not even need, but it is very convenient if you want to do it (CMU is basically adjacent to Pitt).

OK, so point being, I think on this list Pitt is again at least as good a bet for a great overall academic experience as any, including really BU (which is not a slam on BU, it is just praise of Pitt). And Pittsburgh is indeed a fun, historic, accessible city, and I think a lot of people from East Coast cities in particular find it a nice blend of the familiar and the different, at least for college.

So that’s a pretty hard sell for Pitt, but I agree in this particular situation, it does seem like the rather obvious choice. And sometimes the obvious choice is the right choice, and actually it is kinda nice when it is that clear.

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Okay. Isenberg is a separate admission. But if he wants Economics, he’s in the right place. Isenberg does not offer an Econ major.

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There are more than 2500 4-year colleges in the United States.

Unless someone can explain to me what the meaningful difference for a student is between #35 and #72, I would suggest that this difference is as trivial as the difference between #33 and #35. All three of these schools rank in the 98th %ile, or within the top 2%, of all colleges on this ranking.

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So first some background: since this is a research ranking, it really does not apply to many colleges, like LACs, or really any institution without robust PhD programs, and in fact specifically R1s will have a big advantage (in 2025, there were 187 of those in the US). And to be very clear, that does not mean I think those non-R1s are bad places to go for college, including if you are interested in research as an undergraduate.

In terms of what the rankings mean, you can pull up charts which will show you what they counted in terms of publications and citations in a given year. So in 2020, for Economics, for BU they had 1258 publications and 64696 citations. UMass had 762 publications and 45240 citations. If you look into their methodology, they say:

We use the OpenAlex database as a proxy to retrieve scientific publications and links between them (citations). Rather than just summarizing them, we build a graph with publications as nodes and citations as edges to calculate the weight of each publication. Then we adjust that weight for the publication date and share of university representatives in the list of authors.

I like all this because it is relatively transparent and empirical. But how much should it matter in choosing an undergrad?

I think that is a very complex question, and if someone wanted to answer, “It should matter very little, maybe not at all,” I would not give them a fight! Like, I personally think many LACs are great, and as noted this measure basically has no application to them, so how important can it really be?

So why even bring it up? Well, again this is a somewhat complex thought, but I am aware that some people when choosing a college want to ask whether or not any given college has a good department in that area. But most of the “good for X” content available online is, to me, more trouble than it is worth as it tends to include a lot of stuff that is not so transparent. And a lot of that conversation ends up converging toward what I would call the usual suspects.

OK, so to be blunt, no one really needs EduRank to tell them Harvard has a “good” Economics department (I am using Harvard because EduRank has them #1, both in the US and the world in fact).

But to me it gets more interesting around where, say, the University of Washington shows up at #8 in the US, #10 in the world. Like, I know this, but I am not sure everyone knows that Washington is such a research powerhouse, in Economics and a lot of other areas too.

Which again does not mean it should be everyone’s college choice, but maybe if someone is looking at Washington because they really like the location, the campus, the cost, and so on, but they need assurance it is “good for X”, then it could help them to know that Washington did well in this measure for X.

And basically, that is what I was thinking with Pitt. I don’t think anyone should pick Pitt over BU, UMass, or indeed Northeastern, just because it did well in EduRank for a subject in which they might be interested.

However, if they like Pitt for other reasons, but then want some assurance they are not doing something they shouldn’t in terms of “good for X” questions, well, perhaps EduRank can give them the assurance they need.

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