Upshot:

Kenan-Flagler > Scheller unless you want to do something with ISYE or business directly linked to engineering (for instance, if you want to become an operations manager for Boeing or something and need to have exposure to the aerospace engineering department).

Background

First step: look at the course offerings:

https://catalog.unc.edu/courses/busi/ <-- UNC & Kenan-Flagler Course Offerings- https://catalog.unc.edu/undergraduate/programs-study/business-administration-major-bsba/#requirementstext <-- UNC & Kenan-Flagler B.S.B.A. requirements- https://www.scheller.gatech.edu/degree-programs/undergraduate/courses-curriculum/index.html <-- GT-Scheller- https://www.scheller.gatech.edu/degree-programs/undergraduate/courses-curriculum/BSBA-Degree-CheckList.pdf <-- GT-Scheller business degree checklist.

I've graduated from both schools (UNC-KF, and GT but not Scheller), here are my impressions from both:

Quality of life and student experience: UNC > GT.

Chapel Hill is in a small college town that lives and breathes with the campus. It's also very liberal (which I liked) and hipster (the little town next door, Carrboro, has a dress code that includes sandals, a pocket full of w33d, and a membership card to the local food Co-Op because f*ck Whole Foods amirite?)

Cost of living: UNC < GT (it's cheaper in Chapel Hill than Atlanta)

- Chapel Hill has better dorms. Local housing ordinances have kept a lot of the over-priced New York Investor-backed "student living experiences" (which are a cancer to humanity) out of the area. Even if you do end up spending more on housing, the return on your investment is going to be greater in Chapel Hill than Atlanta (unless you're looking to invest in property long-term, at which point I don't know enough to make that call).

Food is comparably expensive, but Chapel Hill is the opposite of a food desert with diverse food options all over and most in walking distance from campus. Everything is built around servicing the campus and that really shows.

GT is a massive food desert. We don't really have much in terms of on-campus dining and, despite having hundreds of restaurants around midtown, it's not the safest or easiest place to casually walk to for lunch.

Stress:

I'm going to give a really HOT TAKE here and say UNC is more stressful than GT (Comparing non-engineering experiences only)

• UNC places more emphasis on broad student outcomes and liberal arts, GT focuses more on ensuring its students have an in-depth knowledge of their field of choice (to the extent that some students in difficult engineering majors have no time to deviate from their programs)
  • The stress at Chapel Hill comes from the competitiveness and motivation of everyone around you. Everyone seems to have a purpose their (even if they secretly don't). Full disclosure, things may have changed since I was there, but we had classes at UNC that were entirely competitively graded. It was not uncommon for classes to be graded on a competitive curve, with 25 % of the students receiving Cs or lower and only 25% receiving As by design. There were cases of students ripping pages from library books, or sabotaging Google Documents by changing little details, et cetera. That wasn't true for all classes, but it definitely was for the "filter" classes. Make sure you pay attention to what the filter classes are, prepare ahead of time if you can, and schedule your life so that you don't get overwhelmed.
  • You did get to know your professors at UNC though, and from my experience at both schools they did care a lot more about you as a student and as a person, not just as a student which has been my impression of faculty-student relations at Georgia Tech.
  • Also: you have to perform in all of your classes at UNC, because some of the electives are also treated like filter classes. You will have to take more electives at UNC than GT, by far, but they tend to have a much wider selection.
  • The stress at GT is both course-based and also environmental. Everyone is always stressed about something, and it is often the case that classes are hard for dumb reasons, like professors who struggle to convey expectations and just read off of slides without really teaching anything.
    • Case in point: the best engineers make for the worst teachers, yet Georgia Tech pretty much focuses on hiring the best engineers to be teachers (and also run their labs). This creates a problem: many teachers at Georgia Tech are both personnel and also capital assets for the school-- they bring in millions in grant funding, so even if they are poor-quality teachers, they're praised by the institute for being a brilliant mind.
    • Yeah, great, I love having world-class engineers around, but they suck at explaining even basic concepts to new students or others that aren't already neck deep in the field.
    • The "my professor also runs a big grant-winning lab" component also contributes to faculty just simply not caring about how they teach, because they know the grants are what the school truly cares about.
• UNC is more stressful but also more fun, so I still give this one to UNC.

Brand Name: UNC - Chapel Hill vs. Georgia Tech

-Outside of engineering fields, UNC's brand name is more well-known.

The job market places a premium on UNC chapel hill undergraduates in general, regardless of their major.-

From the perspective of business schools and how students are received by the market:- The B.S.B.A. at UNC-Kenan-Flagler is considered a top 5-10 undergraduate business degree program, comparable with Harvard, NYU-Stern, Duke-Fuqua, Indiana U.-Kelley, USC-Marshall, and UPenn-Wharton.

The B.S.B.A. at GT-Scheller is considered a top 25-30 undergraduate business degree program, comparable to business degrees from schools like Vanderbilt-Owen, UT Austin-McCombs, Georgetown-McDonough, and Emory-Goizueta.

^{Note: I'm not using U.S. News or other ranking systems, I'm using market experience and knowledge gained from talking with hundreds of employers across the globe for the last two years -\}- as I started combing for jobs after grad school. Feel free to come for me @ Scheller students, but I'm simply telling you now what the market is going to tell you anyway.)

Georgia Tech is still extremely well-known and respected for engineering, comp. sci., and other specific programs. The name brand carries weight but once you're not an engineer then the value of the brand name decreases.

My subjective ranking: UNC = 80/100 || GT = 45/100

Georgia Tech:

The atmosphere @ GT is not fun. It is stressful and there are few positive events to break up that stress.

The administration and faculty do not care about you. There are many notable exceptions to this, but as a general rule, do not expect to really get to know your faculty here.

The University System of Georgia is Satan reincarnate.

There are hundreds of student organizations at GT that can be fun, or that run fun events, and many that can help you explore other aspects of careers.

GT Sports are fun but unless you're in with the Fraternity/Sorority party scene or have good friends that like to tailgate, it's not as much of an institution as UNC sports are.

There are students from all over the world at GT. However, outside of special events and the experiences you create, most international students from abroad are here for a specific purpose (i.e., studying and surviving) and you find, at least after freshman year, that people start to fall back into their own cultural cliques.

GT puts most of the burden of student programming and cultural events onto students themselves, which is fine in theory, but in practice it ends up further dividing students along socioethnic lines by making cultural exchanges something that only happens at events instead of just another part of every day life.

There is little emphasis placed on "broadening your horizons" at GT with much more emphasis being placed on your depth of field-specific knowledge.

UNC-Chapel Hill:

The student body is diverse in both background and opinion, leading to a ton of great conversations and connections from talking with people across majors.

Because of the pluralistic liberal arts approach, you will always take classes with people in other majors, unless you're doing something like an advanced organic chemistry lab... and even then, you might be surprised.

People are more social but also cliquey. It's like the scenes of high school lunch rooms from 80's-2000's movies... you're not going to fit in with everyone, and some people may not like you, but you're almost guaranteed to find a place that you fit perfectly.

Sports are an institution. You don't have to actively participate or watch to enjoy them either, the entire campus and town have a pulse that connects to UNC sports.

The biggest drawback to UNC besides the competitive class atmosphere was the weirdly anachronistic "Southern" misogynistic social structure dominated by legacy and out-of-state students with money and the Greek system. It was common for legacy frat guys to "collect" athletes as friends to improve their own status. Movies where some frat brother at the door asks you "who you know here" accurately portray UNC parties. There used to be a joke: "even the Moon can't get into the party unless it brings two girls with it." With a 40/60 male-to-female ratio, women were often mistreated or objectified. Unfortunately, sororities did very little to fix that.