My daughter is wrapping up her freshman year as a pre-nursing student at ASU's downtown Phoenix…read morecampus. In summary, ASU has been awesome!
She chose ASU over other universities because of (1) "direct admission" into ASU's nursing program; (2) admission to ASU's Barrett Honors College, reportedly the gold standard of honors colleges; (3) great merit-based scholarships that ASU automatically offered to her; (4) a great reputation in the world of nursing, with clinical opportunities at Mayo's Phoenix hospital and Phoenix Children's Hospital.
As a Barrett student, my daughter lives on the 14th floor ("penthouse") of Gordon Commons in a good-sized two-person room with a private bathroom. (Her boyfriend is in the Best dorm on the Tempe campus. It's not nearly as nice.) She likes the dorm food and the ability to use dorm food credits at nearby eateries, e.g., Chick-Fil-A. She sometimes takes the shuttle to the Tempe campus and pays extra to eat at the Barrett dorm there. Reportedly, the Barrett food is epic.
For her pre-nursing classes, she has found she is more college-ready than her classmates. On team projects, she often must correct classmates' mistakes. She enjoys her Barrett class, where she finds a higher caliber of student and an engaging professor. She's now beginning some of her special research obligations as a Barrett student.
As a "direct admit" nursing student, my daughter must earn a GPA of 3.5 or higher each semester. Last semester, she got a 4.0 with several "A+" grades. This semester is also going well, but she is taking a challenging anatomy class along with pre-med and other pre-health professions students. Apparently, it is a weed-out class. She is on the border between an A and B; all her friends are in the D-range. Fun fact: the students are already working with cadavers. A random fact: ASU will open its brand new medical school in 2026.
As is the case everywhere, a lot of students prefer partying to studying, but the downtown Phoenix students tend to be more serious and have fewer distractions.
Some students prefer the quieter downtown atmosphere; others prefer the busier Tempe campus. Next year, my daughter will be living in her sorority house in Tempe and taking the shuttle to downtown for half of her classes. It's a 20-minute ride.
ASU does remarkable outreach to parents and enthusiastically encourages family involvement in many aspects of the university. (By contrast, our other daughter attends a University of California school, which does NO family outreach.) So, I have volunteered for several roles, e.g., ASU Family Ambassador.
The ASU website offers family access and tons of information and resources. This feature is being upgraded as I write this. Also, several Facebook groups offer a plethora of helpful information and support. My favorite is ASU Moms. Typical situation: a student has a medical emergency; parents can't immediately fly to Phoenix; a local mom helps out as if it were her own kid.
At the outset of the college application process, ASU was not on our radar. However, it did spectacular marketing and really grabbed our attention. Plus, its rolling admissions gave our daughters the comfort of knowing they had at least one solid option. Whereas many universities are inexplicably turning down incredible applicants who show strong promise of future success (including our daughters), ASU seems eager to recruit and reward all these über-qualified, frustrated, overlooked kids. I think this is a great strategy: I believe ASU will ultimately make the University of California schools seem exceedingly average.
No university is perfect, but overall, I heartily recommend ASU.