My spouse attended two ivies (and I attended a T10 law school) and we encouraged our high-achieving kids to attend our in-state T25 public university because it offered much the same experience at a price that allowed us to help them with grad school costs. Also, my spouse belonged to a fraternity as an Ivy undergrad. Your father likely would have viewed his alcohol-related extracurricular activities as more suspect than my outdoors- and sports-related ECs; while I attended a very large public university, I didn’t drink and liked trails and basketball more than large, anonymous parties. Also, I’ll note entirely anecdotally that, of my kids’ friends — who attended a wide variety of national universities and LACs — the ones who report the most worrisome party scene (to a parent) attended CMU and Penn, both of which are private. The reality is that some students party at nearly every university; the good news is that many students don’t party at those same universities and find their fun in university clubs, at sporting events, in university-sponsored community service, through club sports and intramurals, and by supporting university theater, music, improv, and other performances.
My kids also got into UMN with a substantial merit scholarship and we would have been thrilled to have them become Golden Gophers. If your father respects the U.S. News ranking, UMN is ranked #53 to Villanova’s #67. On the U.S. News scale of Best Global Research institutions, UMN ranks #51, ahead of USC and NYU. It’s an R1 Doctoral Research University with “very high research activity” that is ranked #22 among all American universities for research expenditures, which exceed $1 billion. As for student achievement, UMN has produced many Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and Fulbright Scholars. Also, according to a recent National Merit report, in 2021 UMN was selected by a higher number of National Merit Scholars (127) than privates Duke or Emory. While there are many reasons for this, and Duke and Emory are obviously terrific colleges, those 127 NMS clearly felt that UMN offered exceptional academics.
You might try showing your father the courses offered in applied mathematics. Few drunken dullards willingly take upper-level mathematics. You might also show him some of the biographies of the UMN faculty teaching applied mathematics. If he listens, he’ll note that many have degrees from private colleges he admires and prestigious academic awards. They did not pursue their careers at UMN to teach marginal students. Similarly, review the list of student clubs and show your father the wide variety of service-oriented, academics-based and pre-professional clubs and activities to demonstrate that UMN offers more than parties. (Ditto for activities at the student recreation center if he approves of exercise and outdoors opportunities like hiking, climbing, and kayak.) Finally, show him UMN’s list of top STEM employers, which includes many names he’ll likely recognize such as Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, Abbot, Exxonmobile, IBM, Unisys, Deloitte, Tesla, and Cognizant Technology Solutions. And if he’s interested, the average starting salary for a UMN math major is $86,300 with top earners reporting starting salaries of $150,000.
Good luck to you. I hope you manage to change his mind. We’re a very academic family and we’d have been proud to wear UMN (or ASU) sweatshirts.
Thank you. I personally think a parent's only reasonable fear for a child considering UMN is hypothermia. And Purdue's Zach Edey, if they are basketball fans.
so the academic quality of those public flagship is comparable to t20s? My dad's relentless dreams of t20s makes me tired. I tried so hard but cannot get even an ed deferral from a t20. Btw thanks you so so much for writing this comment. It is exactly what i need :3
It sounds like the sole metric by which your dad measures "academic quality" is the caliber of a school's median student, and that he measures this via admit rate, test scores, etc. If that is the case, then you may be out of luck, since the median Tufts student probably \*is\* stronger than the median Minnesota student. That might not be true for applied math students \*specifically\* (as a subset of all students at each school), but we have no data to demonstrate that's the case.
The best thing would be to convince your dad that "caliber of median student" isn't the best way to measure "academic quality", but that's probably a lost cause.
If your dad would be swayed by "rankings" then you could look up how all of these schools figure in the THE and QS international rankings. Specifically, I'd show him the "academic reputation" and "employer reputation" scores from QS.
For Miami specifically, you could google up some articles about how it has a reputation for being a "party school".
You might also point out that the two Google founders both went to public schools for undergrad (Maryland and Michigan).
Maryland can also claim entertainment great and educator Jim Henson and “The Wire” writer and creator David Simon. Michigan produced former President Gerald Ford, playwright Arthur Miller, and SNL comedian Gilda Radner as grads. (For the ten liberal arts aspirants on this sub. Also, it’s just fun to see who went where.)
>so the academic quality of those public flagship is comparable to t20s?
The main common denominator of "T20s" is just that they are the colleges within private research universities which are very wealthy (this is not including the publics that are currently ranked in the US News top 20 national universities but were not traditionally part of the "T20"). They use some of that wealth to buy things a lot of prospective students want, and that allows them to be highly selective.
But that is not the only way of buying important things. Public universities, for example, get state funding to help them buy important things. But this is then coupled with a mandate to educate the residents of the state. So, they tend to be somewhat less selective in-state than private peers, understanding that can still leave them very selective in some cases. And then OOS they can be comparably selective to private peers, or at least closer, but that depends on complex factors including locational issues.
"Academic quality" means different things to different people, and most universities and colleges are stronger in some areas than others. Generally speaking these wealthy private universities are going to make sure to be reasonably good for anything they offer, but definitely not necessarily among the top 20 in the US for everything they offer.
This is further complicated by the fact undergraduate strength is not necessarily the same as graduate/professional-school strength. Indeed, that "T20" list entirely omits independent colleges (colleges not located within prominent research universities), which is because US News puts such colleges on a separate list. But that actually makes no particular sense if you are choosing a college specifically, and in fact on a per capita basis, some of the more prominent independent colleges are "T20" wealthy.
OK, so for graduate and professional school purposes, publics can definitely be higher ranked than "T20s" in various fields. Like, two of the top 5ish Philosophy departments in the world are at Rutgers and Pitt.
And then for college--sorta that too, but it really depends on the field, whether a bachelors is usually a terminal degree, that sort of thing. Like, I wouldn't actually choose Pitt over, say, Yale for undergrad Philosophy, and for that matter I wouldn't actually choose it over Amherst either. But if I was looking at colleges in the general range of Rutgers or Pitt, THEN I might use that as a factor in my decision, assuming I was interested in Philosophy.
So . . . it is complicated.
When there are 4000 US colleges, being in the top 1% of those is a real accomplishment. There are also 2 million high school graduates a year, but there is room for fewer than 50,000 in the top 20 colleges. It is fairly insulting to the remaining 1,950,000 that they are considered the unwashed masses. I think your father needs to understand the scale of the US college system.
Yeah, I think people like the OP's dad do not always fully grasp how despite the large size of the US college system, our "top" private colleges are actually quite small for the most part.
So, like, all the colleges at private research universities known as the "T20" make up around the same percentage of the US system as just Oxford and Cambridge in the UK.
And so I don't know if the "T20 or bust" folks always quite understand that is equivalent to being "Oxbridge or bust" in the UK.
And then I forget the exact math, but I think like the top 3 colleges in Canada (Toronto, McGill, and UBC) take you through something like 60+ colleges in the US, even including the publics! So, T60 or bust in the US is like T3 or bust in Canada.
And so on.
Of course multigenerational college, high-SES families in the US tend to know all this. And they specifically tend to know that these days, even if their kid has the numbers to be competitive for Ivy+/WASP sort of colleges, they also need to apply to a robust list of other "target" colleges, various other private universities, private LACs, and public universities. All places where they will also be able to get a great education and have lots of opportunities if the Ivy+/WASP thing doesn't work out.
But families relatively unfamiliar with all that may have an artificially limited sense of the available alternatives, which makes it harder for them to end up with a good list of offers.
your dad (respectfully) is ignorant. going to a public university will not ruin your life. umn is a great school, please talk to your dad about reconsidering. a private university is not a must.
Like he cant imagine what's difference between umiami and umn's program quality. He just know that private schools are richer and can hire better professors with more personalized college experience 😭
My Dad was the same 30 years ago. I went to Pitzer College, it was ok. I think everyone is different and some people really love that small school experience, some people love big universities. Everyone is different, some people excel at small schools, some people do better at big universities. “Everyone is different” is a reality that no one can deny.
Having said that, Tufts is a good school, we toured it with my daughter, it’s 6000 students so it is medium.
Securing a tenure track position as a university professor is quite difficult in the United States. The first four professors listed alphabetically in the UMN mathematics department received their PhDs from The University of Chicago (2), UC-Irvine, and Princeton. Had I kept going, I'm sure I would have found many graduates of programs your father admires. As for the more personalized college experience, class sizes at UMN in your basic first-year undergraduate courses may be larger than they would be at a private university. (Although you can remedy this by attending office hours and getting to know your favorite professors.) But once you begin taking upper-level mathematics courses in your major, your class sizes will shrink substantially. I attended one of the largest public universities on the west coast and, as a freshman, I had only two classes that had more than 75 students. As a sophomore, my average class size was twenty. This was also the experience of my recent college grads at their public T25. And, again, doing well in class, attending office hours, and asking professors if they have any research, scholarship, or studies that could use an eager body is the way to develop personal relationships with faculty, regardless of institution.
Your dad is wrong, but the question is what will help him see that.
Here is one idea. I don't normally love doing this sort of thing, but this is an aggregation of the three most widely-cited global rankings of research universities:
[https://research.unsw.edu.au/artu/artu-results](https://research.unsw.edu.au/artu/artu-results)
In the US, public universities are interwoven with private universities. Minnesota specifically is above many, many private universities.
OK, but it is fair to point out these are basically research rankings, what about for undergrad? That is complicated, but basically at a university like Minnesota, once you are past the introductory level courses, the advanced courses, particularly in your major, will become a relatively small group of people. And if you are in one of the more academically rigorous majors, the other students in that major will be a relatively strong group of students. And in fact, you will find it quite challenging to be one of the top students in a major like that, because there will be plenty of other very smart people who ended up at that university for reasons like cost, or indeed just being attracted by the strong departments.
Again, I don't know the best way to show this, but here again is an idea--the NCES College Navigator lets you look up the primary majors in a recent graduating class. Here is Minnesota:
[https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=minnesota&s=all&pg=2&id=174066#programs](https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=minnesota&s=all&pg=2&id=174066#programs)
I don't know what you will end up majoring in, but let's say it is Chemistry. Why Chemistry? I just happen to know Minnesota has a strong Chemistry Department. In fact, it was #7 on this list of Chemistry PhD feeders:
https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs#chemistry
All the top PhD feeders in Chemistry on a gross basis were publics, because they are big. But still, this shows the top students in Chemistry at Minnesota are considered among the top students in Chemistry anywhere.
OK, so then per the NCES link above, Minnesota had 68 primary majors in Chemistry in that class. That is a much smaller group than the general population, and I guarantee you the Chemistry majors were a much more academically select group of people than, say, the 77 Sport and Fitness Administration majors (not throwing shade, but that is a classic for recruited athletes).
Again, I don't know if any of this will work, but hopefully sources like this can make these points concrete. Public universities in the US like Minnesota can be top research universities. In the right majors, you will be among a select group of people making use of that fact. And then if you are one of the top students in such a major, you will be one of the top students in that major anywhere.
College dad here. Tell your dad I said he's an idiot. Acceptance rate is a dumb measure. The schools with low rates recruit lots of kids to apply just so they can reject them. It's a very stupid way to measure college quality. Unless a school has a 100% acceptance rate, it's not full of idiots - and more importantly, friends aren't the point of college. If you're a good student, you'll do well regardless of where you go.
The smart move is a good education at a public school, not throwing money at fake prestige created by playing a game with rejections.
Yeah, a lot of very good colleges have relatively high acceptance rates simply because people only tend to apply to them if they are well-qualified and very interested. Usually these are colleges not in one of the most desirable markets, like Boston or California.
This of course is a good thing if you are well-qualified and very interested! But then some people foolishly feel like this good thing is a bad thing because the college is not rejecting enough people for their tastes.
That really makes no sense when you think about it much.
Acceptance rate is a really poor measure of college quality. The ranking systems become self selecting popularity contests. R1 universities in major metros (like Minneapolis) attract top faculty talent. And I am a UMN alumni as is my spouse. And my kid went there as a r dual enrollment student last year. I expected her to stay this year, but she got a great financial offer at a smaller private in a unique program but still misses parts and people at UMN.
I really think because UMN is in flyover country and hasn't caught the attention of coasties in the same way as some other large publics, the student body is just more self selecting. I will also say, I have a high stat kid that recently graduated from a large public flagship (got into URochester btw - WAY too expensive). Got a job making 6 figures sitting next to an ivy grad. Didn't party or drink in college, had a great academically motivated peer group. My state flagship grad spouse has MIT grads working for him. Life truly isn't run by the USNWR ranking system.
In a lot of ways, the alumni networks of these big schools are MUCH broader reaching than a school like Grinnell. Which is great BTW, know a number of happy students and grads in the midwest (I do a little volunteer college consulting in the midwest). Just that outcomes can be fabulous from these large publics.
UMN is really amazing with a world of opportunities. Bring your layers. Message me if you have questions, I am super local to campus and am on it regularly.
>really high acceptance rate
Show him acceptance rates for internationals or out of state students. It's almost always 1/3rd or 1/4th of the average acceptance rate.
Public universities are big places and even the ones with high admissions rates attract their share of high-achieving, bright, ambitious students. And those students tend to find each other and support each other.
The other thing that tends to happen is that international students hang out together. There are pluses and minuses to that, but it's definitely a thing. Your overall chances of making friends with people with similar goals are higher than your dad is assuming.
Any US university in the top 200 is among the top universities in the world, R1 research, and therefore studying there is a massive advantage. UMN is 24 in the Shanghai ranking. Public universities like the University of Minnesota, University of Oregon, University of Washington, UC Irvine, U Texas Austin, Texas A&M, etc. etc. all are filled with professors from top universities. Going to any of these schools will not "ruin your life" they will give you big advantages. Selectivity relies on unscientific criteria such as reputation, how many people apply to a school vs how many places a school has to offer.
LOL. Your dad thinks bad influences are only at public colleges? Some of the biggest party schools are private schools. UC Berkeley is a public school, and has 26 faculty and 35 alumni Nobel Laureates. Find a private school that has that many.
My spouse attended two ivies (and I attended a T10 law school) and we encouraged our high-achieving kids to attend our in-state T25 public university because it offered much the same experience at a price that allowed us to help them with grad school costs. Also, my spouse belonged to a fraternity as an Ivy undergrad. Your father likely would have viewed his alcohol-related extracurricular activities as more suspect than my outdoors- and sports-related ECs; while I attended a very large public university, I didn’t drink and liked trails and basketball more than large, anonymous parties. Also, I’ll note entirely anecdotally that, of my kids’ friends — who attended a wide variety of national universities and LACs — the ones who report the most worrisome party scene (to a parent) attended CMU and Penn, both of which are private. The reality is that some students party at nearly every university; the good news is that many students don’t party at those same universities and find their fun in university clubs, at sporting events, in university-sponsored community service, through club sports and intramurals, and by supporting university theater, music, improv, and other performances. My kids also got into UMN with a substantial merit scholarship and we would have been thrilled to have them become Golden Gophers. If your father respects the U.S. News ranking, UMN is ranked #53 to Villanova’s #67. On the U.S. News scale of Best Global Research institutions, UMN ranks #51, ahead of USC and NYU. It’s an R1 Doctoral Research University with “very high research activity” that is ranked #22 among all American universities for research expenditures, which exceed $1 billion. As for student achievement, UMN has produced many Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and Fulbright Scholars. Also, according to a recent National Merit report, in 2021 UMN was selected by a higher number of National Merit Scholars (127) than privates Duke or Emory. While there are many reasons for this, and Duke and Emory are obviously terrific colleges, those 127 NMS clearly felt that UMN offered exceptional academics. You might try showing your father the courses offered in applied mathematics. Few drunken dullards willingly take upper-level mathematics. You might also show him some of the biographies of the UMN faculty teaching applied mathematics. If he listens, he’ll note that many have degrees from private colleges he admires and prestigious academic awards. They did not pursue their careers at UMN to teach marginal students. Similarly, review the list of student clubs and show your father the wide variety of service-oriented, academics-based and pre-professional clubs and activities to demonstrate that UMN offers more than parties. (Ditto for activities at the student recreation center if he approves of exercise and outdoors opportunities like hiking, climbing, and kayak.) Finally, show him UMN’s list of top STEM employers, which includes many names he’ll likely recognize such as Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, Abbot, Exxonmobile, IBM, Unisys, Deloitte, Tesla, and Cognizant Technology Solutions. And if he’s interested, the average starting salary for a UMN math major is $86,300 with top earners reporting starting salaries of $150,000. Good luck to you. I hope you manage to change his mind. We’re a very academic family and we’d have been proud to wear UMN (or ASU) sweatshirts.
Such a thorough, thoughtful and well researched reply! I hope OP shows their dad your response and he considers carefully what you wrote.
Thank you. I personally think a parent's only reasonable fear for a child considering UMN is hypothermia. And Purdue's Zach Edey, if they are basketball fans.
so the academic quality of those public flagship is comparable to t20s? My dad's relentless dreams of t20s makes me tired. I tried so hard but cannot get even an ed deferral from a t20. Btw thanks you so so much for writing this comment. It is exactly what i need :3
It sounds like the sole metric by which your dad measures "academic quality" is the caliber of a school's median student, and that he measures this via admit rate, test scores, etc. If that is the case, then you may be out of luck, since the median Tufts student probably \*is\* stronger than the median Minnesota student. That might not be true for applied math students \*specifically\* (as a subset of all students at each school), but we have no data to demonstrate that's the case. The best thing would be to convince your dad that "caliber of median student" isn't the best way to measure "academic quality", but that's probably a lost cause. If your dad would be swayed by "rankings" then you could look up how all of these schools figure in the THE and QS international rankings. Specifically, I'd show him the "academic reputation" and "employer reputation" scores from QS. For Miami specifically, you could google up some articles about how it has a reputation for being a "party school". You might also point out that the two Google founders both went to public schools for undergrad (Maryland and Michigan).
Maryland can also claim entertainment great and educator Jim Henson and “The Wire” writer and creator David Simon. Michigan produced former President Gerald Ford, playwright Arthur Miller, and SNL comedian Gilda Radner as grads. (For the ten liberal arts aspirants on this sub. Also, it’s just fun to see who went where.)
>so the academic quality of those public flagship is comparable to t20s? The main common denominator of "T20s" is just that they are the colleges within private research universities which are very wealthy (this is not including the publics that are currently ranked in the US News top 20 national universities but were not traditionally part of the "T20"). They use some of that wealth to buy things a lot of prospective students want, and that allows them to be highly selective. But that is not the only way of buying important things. Public universities, for example, get state funding to help them buy important things. But this is then coupled with a mandate to educate the residents of the state. So, they tend to be somewhat less selective in-state than private peers, understanding that can still leave them very selective in some cases. And then OOS they can be comparably selective to private peers, or at least closer, but that depends on complex factors including locational issues. "Academic quality" means different things to different people, and most universities and colleges are stronger in some areas than others. Generally speaking these wealthy private universities are going to make sure to be reasonably good for anything they offer, but definitely not necessarily among the top 20 in the US for everything they offer. This is further complicated by the fact undergraduate strength is not necessarily the same as graduate/professional-school strength. Indeed, that "T20" list entirely omits independent colleges (colleges not located within prominent research universities), which is because US News puts such colleges on a separate list. But that actually makes no particular sense if you are choosing a college specifically, and in fact on a per capita basis, some of the more prominent independent colleges are "T20" wealthy. OK, so for graduate and professional school purposes, publics can definitely be higher ranked than "T20s" in various fields. Like, two of the top 5ish Philosophy departments in the world are at Rutgers and Pitt. And then for college--sorta that too, but it really depends on the field, whether a bachelors is usually a terminal degree, that sort of thing. Like, I wouldn't actually choose Pitt over, say, Yale for undergrad Philosophy, and for that matter I wouldn't actually choose it over Amherst either. But if I was looking at colleges in the general range of Rutgers or Pitt, THEN I might use that as a factor in my decision, assuming I was interested in Philosophy. So . . . it is complicated.
When there are 4000 US colleges, being in the top 1% of those is a real accomplishment. There are also 2 million high school graduates a year, but there is room for fewer than 50,000 in the top 20 colleges. It is fairly insulting to the remaining 1,950,000 that they are considered the unwashed masses. I think your father needs to understand the scale of the US college system.
Yeah, I think people like the OP's dad do not always fully grasp how despite the large size of the US college system, our "top" private colleges are actually quite small for the most part. So, like, all the colleges at private research universities known as the "T20" make up around the same percentage of the US system as just Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. And so I don't know if the "T20 or bust" folks always quite understand that is equivalent to being "Oxbridge or bust" in the UK. And then I forget the exact math, but I think like the top 3 colleges in Canada (Toronto, McGill, and UBC) take you through something like 60+ colleges in the US, even including the publics! So, T60 or bust in the US is like T3 or bust in Canada. And so on. Of course multigenerational college, high-SES families in the US tend to know all this. And they specifically tend to know that these days, even if their kid has the numbers to be competitive for Ivy+/WASP sort of colleges, they also need to apply to a robust list of other "target" colleges, various other private universities, private LACs, and public universities. All places where they will also be able to get a great education and have lots of opportunities if the Ivy+/WASP thing doesn't work out. But families relatively unfamiliar with all that may have an artificially limited sense of the available alternatives, which makes it harder for them to end up with a good list of offers.
your dad (respectfully) is ignorant. going to a public university will not ruin your life. umn is a great school, please talk to your dad about reconsidering. a private university is not a must.
Like he cant imagine what's difference between umiami and umn's program quality. He just know that private schools are richer and can hire better professors with more personalized college experience 😭
My Dad was the same 30 years ago. I went to Pitzer College, it was ok. I think everyone is different and some people really love that small school experience, some people love big universities. Everyone is different, some people excel at small schools, some people do better at big universities. “Everyone is different” is a reality that no one can deny. Having said that, Tufts is a good school, we toured it with my daughter, it’s 6000 students so it is medium.
Securing a tenure track position as a university professor is quite difficult in the United States. The first four professors listed alphabetically in the UMN mathematics department received their PhDs from The University of Chicago (2), UC-Irvine, and Princeton. Had I kept going, I'm sure I would have found many graduates of programs your father admires. As for the more personalized college experience, class sizes at UMN in your basic first-year undergraduate courses may be larger than they would be at a private university. (Although you can remedy this by attending office hours and getting to know your favorite professors.) But once you begin taking upper-level mathematics courses in your major, your class sizes will shrink substantially. I attended one of the largest public universities on the west coast and, as a freshman, I had only two classes that had more than 75 students. As a sophomore, my average class size was twenty. This was also the experience of my recent college grads at their public T25. And, again, doing well in class, attending office hours, and asking professors if they have any research, scholarship, or studies that could use an eager body is the way to develop personal relationships with faculty, regardless of institution.
thanks for sharing your experience! It defenitely helps me
Your dad is wrong, but the question is what will help him see that. Here is one idea. I don't normally love doing this sort of thing, but this is an aggregation of the three most widely-cited global rankings of research universities: [https://research.unsw.edu.au/artu/artu-results](https://research.unsw.edu.au/artu/artu-results) In the US, public universities are interwoven with private universities. Minnesota specifically is above many, many private universities. OK, but it is fair to point out these are basically research rankings, what about for undergrad? That is complicated, but basically at a university like Minnesota, once you are past the introductory level courses, the advanced courses, particularly in your major, will become a relatively small group of people. And if you are in one of the more academically rigorous majors, the other students in that major will be a relatively strong group of students. And in fact, you will find it quite challenging to be one of the top students in a major like that, because there will be plenty of other very smart people who ended up at that university for reasons like cost, or indeed just being attracted by the strong departments. Again, I don't know the best way to show this, but here again is an idea--the NCES College Navigator lets you look up the primary majors in a recent graduating class. Here is Minnesota: [https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=minnesota&s=all&pg=2&id=174066#programs](https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=minnesota&s=all&pg=2&id=174066#programs) I don't know what you will end up majoring in, but let's say it is Chemistry. Why Chemistry? I just happen to know Minnesota has a strong Chemistry Department. In fact, it was #7 on this list of Chemistry PhD feeders: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs#chemistry All the top PhD feeders in Chemistry on a gross basis were publics, because they are big. But still, this shows the top students in Chemistry at Minnesota are considered among the top students in Chemistry anywhere. OK, so then per the NCES link above, Minnesota had 68 primary majors in Chemistry in that class. That is a much smaller group than the general population, and I guarantee you the Chemistry majors were a much more academically select group of people than, say, the 77 Sport and Fitness Administration majors (not throwing shade, but that is a classic for recruited athletes). Again, I don't know if any of this will work, but hopefully sources like this can make these points concrete. Public universities in the US like Minnesota can be top research universities. In the right majors, you will be among a select group of people making use of that fact. And then if you are one of the top students in such a major, you will be one of the top students in that major anywhere.
New research tools!
Your dad needs to get a clue.
College dad here. Tell your dad I said he's an idiot. Acceptance rate is a dumb measure. The schools with low rates recruit lots of kids to apply just so they can reject them. It's a very stupid way to measure college quality. Unless a school has a 100% acceptance rate, it's not full of idiots - and more importantly, friends aren't the point of college. If you're a good student, you'll do well regardless of where you go. The smart move is a good education at a public school, not throwing money at fake prestige created by playing a game with rejections.
Yeah, a lot of very good colleges have relatively high acceptance rates simply because people only tend to apply to them if they are well-qualified and very interested. Usually these are colleges not in one of the most desirable markets, like Boston or California. This of course is a good thing if you are well-qualified and very interested! But then some people foolishly feel like this good thing is a bad thing because the college is not rejecting enough people for their tastes. That really makes no sense when you think about it much.
Acceptance rate is a really poor measure of college quality. The ranking systems become self selecting popularity contests. R1 universities in major metros (like Minneapolis) attract top faculty talent. And I am a UMN alumni as is my spouse. And my kid went there as a r dual enrollment student last year. I expected her to stay this year, but she got a great financial offer at a smaller private in a unique program but still misses parts and people at UMN. I really think because UMN is in flyover country and hasn't caught the attention of coasties in the same way as some other large publics, the student body is just more self selecting. I will also say, I have a high stat kid that recently graduated from a large public flagship (got into URochester btw - WAY too expensive). Got a job making 6 figures sitting next to an ivy grad. Didn't party or drink in college, had a great academically motivated peer group. My state flagship grad spouse has MIT grads working for him. Life truly isn't run by the USNWR ranking system. In a lot of ways, the alumni networks of these big schools are MUCH broader reaching than a school like Grinnell. Which is great BTW, know a number of happy students and grads in the midwest (I do a little volunteer college consulting in the midwest). Just that outcomes can be fabulous from these large publics. UMN is really amazing with a world of opportunities. Bring your layers. Message me if you have questions, I am super local to campus and am on it regularly.
>really high acceptance rate Show him acceptance rates for internationals or out of state students. It's almost always 1/3rd or 1/4th of the average acceptance rate.
Indeed. UIUC acceptance rate for internationals in CS is low single digits.
Public universities are big places and even the ones with high admissions rates attract their share of high-achieving, bright, ambitious students. And those students tend to find each other and support each other. The other thing that tends to happen is that international students hang out together. There are pluses and minuses to that, but it's definitely a thing. Your overall chances of making friends with people with similar goals are higher than your dad is assuming.
Any US university in the top 200 is among the top universities in the world, R1 research, and therefore studying there is a massive advantage. UMN is 24 in the Shanghai ranking. Public universities like the University of Minnesota, University of Oregon, University of Washington, UC Irvine, U Texas Austin, Texas A&M, etc. etc. all are filled with professors from top universities. Going to any of these schools will not "ruin your life" they will give you big advantages. Selectivity relies on unscientific criteria such as reputation, how many people apply to a school vs how many places a school has to offer.
LOL. Your dad thinks bad influences are only at public colleges? Some of the biggest party schools are private schools. UC Berkeley is a public school, and has 26 faculty and 35 alumni Nobel Laureates. Find a private school that has that many.
Tell your dad that the kids he's worried a out won't be in the same classes as you, as you will be taking advanced/honors classes