As someone that hopes to enter the medical field as a neurosurgeon, does undergrad matter?
In state tuition at UNC is fantastic, but the academic majors that Northwestern offers are more appealing (double major in Neuroscience & Biology with a concentration in neurobiology.) This path isn’t offered at UNC. Is the higher tuition worth the prestige & the ability to take classes more suited to a student’s hopeful career path?
No. Go to the excellent in-state option at UNC, rack up good grades and do well on the MCAT; then take all the money that you have saved on your undergraduate education and spend it on an excellent medical school or graduate program. If you know that you are going beyond an undergraduate degree, it will be the graduate/professional education that is more important; the “prestige” of the undergraduate school is not going to be that relevant.
Quite frankly, once you have an M.D., nobody is going to care where you got it or where your undergraduate degree was from, anyway.