'04 grad here. Very good academics (US News has them tied with NYU and William & Mary, and that sounds right to me), but would not recommend going there unless your kid would enjoy spending four years surrounded by a lot of drugged up/drunk, apathetic, spoiled rich brats from this area and the NYC suburbs. Also lots of supposed "diversity" in terms of lots of rich kids from different countries. Zero socioeconomic diversity. In sum: great professors, terrible students (and pretty terrible weather). Would not recommend for my own child, that's for sure.

When I lived in Rochester, there wasn't that much off-campus fun to be had by the undergrads. It's not like some urban universities where you can really explore the city. But maybe that's changed in the last 20 years.

Tons of fun! Very competitive. Great school. Not depressing and much better school than pp states.

You may be confusing University of Rochester with RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). UR is a pretty middle of the road school, nice medium size, wide range of student majors and interests, yes STEM/premed common, but for sure not like MIT/CIT/Carnegie Mellon. Plenty of frats/sororities. Think cold and grey, if you aren't used to the Great Lakes region, the weather can be depressing (but there are lots of college towns with the same type of weather that are very popular, ie Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Syracuse)

Does anyone here know about University of Rochester? It is highly ranked, but I know nothing other than what I can read on the website. Seems to be a strong STEM school. Is it any fun? Or is it another MIT, CMU, JHU?