Just to balance out the above reply and make your life a little harder, I'm attending Pacific next fall, so I thought I'd pitch in my two cents. I picked between NECO, ICO, and PUCO, and ended up with PUCO. I actually discarded NECO off the bat after interviewing. That's not to discredit the person above - s/he has great reasons for attending, but the school just didn't do it for me. I really didn't like the two lecture hall thing, because if I'm paying $40k a year, I want to be able to see my prof! However, some people, including the person above, feel differently, and if it works for you - great!
For me, I really loved Pacific because their academic program and community setting seemed so strong to me. They have a lot of research and collaboration going on with industry partners (Nike, Intel) which I thought was great. One of the students mentioned that a/some of the prof(s) literally wrote the book on optics (I think) that the NBEO uses, and there were similar things to say about other profs; basically, on interview day, I felt like I would be paying top dollar for some top profs. It was great that the dean of the optometry program came out and gave us a talk on interview day too, and the fact that profs and other student ambassadors came out to have lunch and a reception with us really resonated with me - it felt like students really were made a top priority here, that the profs genuinely do care, and that the open-door policy is adhered to because the profs genuinely want to teach their students, not use them to get funding for more research. Again, that's not a knock against schools that do do a lot of research, and Pacific does more than its fair share as well. Overall, Pacific just made me feel really at home, and made me feel like I would easily have a support system around if I ever needed it.
I also really liked Pacific's emphasis on academics up-front and then more clinical exposure later on, because I like to be very confident in knowing not just what I'm doing, but why I'm doing it, before I start working with patients. Having worked in an optometric office, it's the worst feeling when patients ask you why you're doing a certain test and you're not really sure yourself, even if you know how to actually administer the test. Partly because Oregon has a fairly broad scope of practice for optometrists, but they teach a really broad spectrum of optometry and cover all the different approaches, which I think is really cool (i.e. medical side, behavioural side). The emphasis on vision therapy is cool too - even if it's not fully proven yet to insurers, it does make a difference in patients, and someone pointed out to me that it's the one of the few things that optometrists do that are exclusive to them (i.e. that opticians and opthalmologists don't do). Pacific's NBEO scores certainty don't hurt, either.
Another factor for Pacific was the externship sites. Both Pacific and NECO have pretty great options available, but I liked Pacific's selection process a lot better. Where NECO prioritizes selection by GPA, Pacific does it by lottery. I spoke with some of the students on interview day who told me that Pacific pretty much puts up a bulletin board with all of the sites a couple weeks ahead of selection time, and everyone can pin where they want to go, so you'll see if anyone else is even interested in the same site as you. That way, if you only sort of kind of wanted a site, you could change it to somewhere else if a lot of people want it, or vice versa, if you really wanted a site, you could stick to it. That way, it won't be a surprise if it goes to lottery or not, and it's fair. Not that I don't hope to get good grades in Pacific, and I've heard again and again that it doesn't impede on the community feeling at NECO, but it's just nice to not have that in the back of my mind. Since, regardless of which school you go to, your 4th year externships will make up the vast majority of your real, meaningful patient work in optometry school, I felt like that was a pretty important thing to consider.
In regards to having other campuses around - it did put me off at first to have a bunch of undergraduate students walking around, but at the end of the day, it's not like you're forced to interact with them if you don't want to. However, I did think it was pretty cool that you can have interprofessional patient care - i.e., work with their dentistry or physio students to come up with a combined care plan for patients. While some like the exclusivity of a pure optometry institution, I felt like that was a nice opportunity that you wouldn't get at many other places.
So I guess, in a word, why I chose Pacific was the super strong academic program, the curriculum structure, the extremely welcoming environment, and the externship site selection process!
