University of Arizona or Arizona State University?

Question

I live in Montana but am considering one of these two schools as my safety school. I am also applying to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Pepperdine. Both U of A and ASU have made generous scholarship offers to me. Which would you recommend and for what reasons?

U of A and ASU are my safety schools because they have made offers of $20,000 a year and $21,500 a year respectively to attend. These offers are based on my status as a National Merit finalist. Although I feel I have the merits to get into schools such as Stanford and Harvard, my safety schools must be public universities because my family is not independently wealthy.

Answer 1

Congratulations! You must have an outstanding record if you would get generous scholarship offers from both and were even possible for Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton (I assume Pepperdine was a back-up!).

Both U of A and ASU are very good schools. I think your choice should come down to which is best for what you plan to study and your personal preferences. If you are in the physical sciences, for example, I would definitely go for the U. of A, because it is the research school for the state and thus probably has the better facilities and the better research opportunities for students. Also, because ASU is so enormous, it may be harder to get onto a research team, so if you wanted to develop a record which would make you most appealing to top medical schools or graduate schools in science, that is something to consider.

Beyond that, both schools have respected faculty and good reputations (at least among those who recognize academia west of the East Coast states!). My personal preference would be for a somewhat smaller school, having felt very lost when I started as a freshman at UCLA, but there are some individuals who thrive and are able to stand out in crowds, and if you are one of those, maybe ASU would be a reasonable choice for you.

Answer 2

If you are even thinking about those other schools -- you should go for a much better safety school than U of A or ASU. Neither is that highly regarded. If you threw a dart at a map of the US, chances are you would hit a state with a better public university than either of them. If you are thinking about large state universities as safety schools, you would be better off with something in the Big Ten or ACC or any of the UC schools.

That being said -- University of Arizona is far superior to ASU -- unless you are majoring in business.