Anonymous wrote:Purdue is an excellent school on the hard sciences - engineering and CS. And not hard on the pocketbook. My older son graduated from there last year and was immediately picked up to work for Nucor Steel. He's making probably about $100k a year and has zero debt. Nucor is very production goal focused so the good years at Nucor are very good years for any production related worker.

We paid less for Purdue (out state) all in than we pay for our second son in state at William and Mary.

No regrets whatsoever.

And it takes only a couple hours to get there. AA and United have significant service to Indianapolis.

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Anonymous wrote:I feel sorry for these schools. Purdue is a highly ranked engineering program. UMD too. Oh well.

You … feel sorry for them? I feel fairly certain that most great engineering schools would rather have high-scoring students and a lower yield rate. They probably feel bad for their colleagues at the small prestige schools that admit a bunch of test optional kids in ED and then don’t have room for high-scoring kids.

Incredible schools. But no, if you take a look at Purdue’s incoming students profile (matriculates), their test scores are very low.

1360 median SAT and 32 ACT is hardly “very low” when you’re test required.

The middle 50% SAT for Purdue College of Engineering (West Lafayette) is roughly 1380–1510, ACT 32–35, and weighted GPA typically 3.9–4.0. Purdue enrolls 2,800–3,100 first-year engineering students per year at the main campus.

That means roughly 700–800 incoming engineering students each year have a 1510+ SAT. No Ivy comes close to matching that raw number of high-stats engineering admits in a single class.

What separates Purdue is the rigor: tough grading curves, limited grade inflation, and success earned through actual college performance rather than high-school GPA momentum. Some schools are elite because of the strength of the students they admit; Purdue is elite because of both the strength of their students class and the strength of the curriculum that a curriculum filters them regardless of incoming stats.

Rigor across high schools is so subjective. You see kids getting into Ivies who might actually have lower 'academic' floors than a kid at Purdue with a 32 ACT. Case in point: a 2027 athletic recruit with any Ivy offer just hit my radar with a 4.58 GPA but an 1120 SAT. Even with athletic context, that’s a massive gap. It makes you wonder how many kids are currently at elite TO (test-optional) schools who wouldn't even get a look at Purdue because their test scores wouldn't make the cut.

I think the same could best said not just about Purdue, but a lot of top state schools that require scores. Hence, why TO schools that report median scores really doesn't mean anything when comparing to test required schools. Lastly, ranking publications that still use and give significant weight to median test scores as a ranking factor really need to reevaluate for creditability. I think this will eventually happen.

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Anonymous wrote:I feel sorry for these schools. Purdue is a highly ranked engineering program. UMD too. Oh well.

You … feel sorry for them? I feel fairly certain that most great engineering schools would rather have high-scoring students and a lower yield rate. They probably feel bad for their colleagues at the small prestige schools that admit a bunch of test optional kids in ED and then don’t have room for high-scoring kids.

Incredible schools. But no, if you take a look at Purdue’s incoming students profile (matriculates), their test scores are very low.

1360 median SAT and 32 ACT is hardly “very low” when you’re test required.

The middle 50% SAT for Purdue College of Engineering (West Lafayette) is roughly 1380–1510, ACT 32–35, and weighted GPA typically 3.9–4.0. Purdue enrolls 2,800–3,100 first-year engineering students per year at the main campus.

That means roughly 700–800 incoming engineering students each year have a 1510+ SAT. No Ivy comes close to matching that raw number of high-stats engineering admits in a single class.

What separates Purdue is the rigor: tough grading curves, limited grade inflation, and success earned through actual college performance rather than high-school GPA momentum. Some schools are elite because of the strength of the students they admit; Purdue is elite because of both the strength of their students class and the strength of the curriculum that a curriculum filters them regardless of incoming stats.

Rigor across high schools is so subjective. You see kids getting into Ivies who might actually have lower 'academic' floors than a kid at Purdue with a 32 ACT. Case in point: a 2027 athletic recruit with any Ivy offer just hit my radar with a 4.58 GPA but an 1120 SAT. Even with athletic context, that’s a massive gap. It makes you wonder how many kids are currently at elite TO (test-optional) schools who wouldn't even get a look at Purdue because their test scores wouldn't make the cut.

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Anonymous wrote:People tend to focus on the engineering and computer science programs at these schools, but the truth is the majority of students at these schools are not enrolled in these majors.

I don’t know much about Purdue, but the last time I looked outcomes for UMD humanities majors weren’t impressive.

Humanities majors don't do well as well, period.

Pp you were replying to. My DC is a humanities major. When DC was deciding which college to attend, we looked at outcomes for that major (political science) at all the schools DC was accepted to. UMD had the worst outcomes by far, which was surprising given its proximity to the federal government.

Anonymous wrote:People tend to focus on the engineering and computer science programs at these schools, but the truth is the majority of students at these schools are not enrolled in these majors.

Actually, The College of Science (including Computer Science) and Engineering comprise 48% of the class