<p>Hawkette, I applaud your effort at trying to call some attention towards some non-Ivy top schools. REVD are, in many aspects, comparable to non-HYP schools… Unfortunately, however, many CCers will reject that notion regardless of however many stats you show them that show that quality of education isn’t all that different between these different schools.</p>
<p>^What’s important to note is that while quality of education should be the factor that prospective students look at (plus fit of course) (also I am not making any judgment as to whether or not there is a gap in the quality of education between these schools and HYP), another important factor is the standards of admission, which IS demonstrably higher at HYP.</p>
<p>Starting Median Salaries (x$1,000):
Penn 60.4
Dartmouth 58.2
Cornell 58
Rice 57.9
Columbia 57.3
Duke 56.8
Brown 52.3
Vanderbilt 51.8
Emory 50.6</p>
<p>Mid-Career Median Salaries:
Dartmouth 129
Penn 118
Duke 116
Brown 107
Cornell 106
Rice 105
Vanderbilt 100
Columbia 100
Emory 94.3</p>
<p>Source: <a href=“http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-graduate-salary-statistics.asp[/url]”>http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-graduate-salary-statistics.asp</a></p>
<p>Hawkette - thanks for all the effort. At some point will you be able to do a separate category for merit aid?</p>
<p>If you included WashU, your acronym would still sound the same…WREVD. Or maybe someone else could do a WashU, U of Chicago, Northwestern and U of Mich. (WUCNUM or NUCWUM) 
It just doesn’t have the same ring as REVD.</p>
<p>"Methodology Overview
Data Set Characteristics:
All data used to produce PayScale’s Education Package were collected from employees who successfully completed PayScale’s employee survey.</p>
<p>Bachelors Only: Only employees who possess a Bachelor’s Degree and no higher degrees are included. This means Bachelor graduates who go on to earn a Master’s degree, MBA, MD, JD, PhD, or other advanced degree are not included.</p>
<p>For some Liberal Arts, Ivy League, and highly selective schools, graduates with degrees higher than a bachelor’s degree can represent a significant fraction of all graduates.</p>
<p>Careers that require advanced degrees, such as law or medicine, are not included."</p>
<p>In other words: WORTHLESS</p>
<p>Source: [PayScale</a> College Salary Report Methodology](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/salary-report.asp]PayScale”>College Salary Report Methodology | Payscale)</p>
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<p>Columbia’s is $13,664 and Duke’s is $24,205</p>
<p>[U-CAN:</a> Columbia University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org)
[U-CAN:</a> Duke University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org)</p>
<p>this is also pretty irrelevant:</p>
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<p>if one school gives you significantly less financial aid altogether because they calculate need differently, the fact that most of it comes in the form of grants is unimportant, you need data on the proportion of students getting aid and on the average size of grant.</p>
<p>indebtedness at graduation is a good way judge the quality of a college’s FA:</p>
<p>Harvard, Princeton and Yale whom we know give out good FA all have low indebtedness at graduation: 11k, 5k and 12k respectively.</p>
<p>[U-CAN:</a> Harvard University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org)
[U-CAN:</a> Princeton University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org)
[U-CAN:</a> Yale University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org)</p>
<p>This whole idea is a little dumb, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Comparing these four schools together is a disservice to Duke, just as grouping all of the lower Ivies together is sort of a disservice to Columbia and Wharton. Truthfully, Duke probably has a shot to jump into the HYPS acronym over the course of the next 25 years. Their Financial Aid is a real focus for them, and they offer a nice contrast to the HYPS schools (great major athletics, southern state, name that doesn’t sound pretentious to your average Joe) with some of the positive factors too (reasonably small size, diverse, high quality students, financial aid).</p>
<p>If any school is going to jump into the conversation with HYPS from outside the Ivies over the first part of this Century, Duke’s in the best position to do so.</p>
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<p>Yeah, these numbers seem pretty old because Vandy’s FA packages don’t include loans anymore.</p>
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<p>Yes and no. Yes if you compare schools whose student body share comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, but no otherwise because it’s not an apple-to-apple comparison.</p>
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<p>no that’s just it, if a school gets poorer students applying they should offer more financial aid to compensate. I care more about how much a low income/middle class student is likely to get than how much the school gives out in total. If school A & B give out the same amount of financial aid, but A gets poorer applicants, B is doing a better job with financial aid, that’s the definition of being need blind and meeting full need. So indebtedness is an apples to apples comparison because it gives you a good proxy for where need is being met better.</p>
<p>Well REVD offers a lot of things that the Ivies don’t, especially year-long warm weather, laid-back culture, and good athletics (with the exception of Emory and Rice). Also, just like the Ivies, excellent academics and talented student bodies. I’m a big fan of all four of these Southern gems; all offer unique college experiences, especially Duke (one of the nation’s best college basketball programs) and Rice (residential college system, no frats or sororities, nationally recognized baseball program, and all Houston has to offer). Duke, Rice, and Emory were always high up on my college list and I’m currently attending one of them.</p>
<p>confidentialcoll: I get what you’re saying, it’s just that I think that there are too many variables that need to be controlled before you can make any conclusions.</p>
<p>For instance, after FA, it was roughly the exact same price for me to attend Vandy and Rice. I choose Vandy. In choosing Vandy, I chose to incur extra costs, such as increased traveling expenses and storage unit costs. These costs aren’t huge but they probably will add up to maybe 2k more for me to attend Vandy. So if one were just to take into account my projected indebtedness at Vandy vs. Rice, they might be lead to falsely believe that Rice gave me the better deal, which wasn’t the case.</p>
<p>nych, do us a favor. Look up the quality of the Chemical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley - you cannot get much more “elite” than UC Berkeley’s ChE Department.</p>
<p>then</p>
<p>come back and apologize for your comments</p>
<p>thanks</p>
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<p>this is a silly argument, because there are endless variables to control for in any comparison. You can always make this argument when choosing a metric to compare schools over. Average indebtedness does not have strong biases toward certain types of universities and all else being equal is a good way to judge how strong a financial aid program is. Unless you can explain why all else is biased one way or another average indebtedness remains a good proxy.</p>
<p>On a less relevant note, if vandy costed more for you in terms of travel and storage (which must be common for profiles like yours), they probably should have offered you more FA to compensate, at least for travel.</p>
<p>"Yes if you compare schools whose student body share comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, but no otherwise because it’s not an apple-to-apple comparison. "</p>
<p>Makes sense, like some schools may enroll a higher proportion of students from wealthier families who don’t need aid, hence won’t have loans altogether. While other schools may enroll proportionately more students from solidly middle class backgrounds who won’t qualify for need based aid by the various imperfect formulas, nevertheless truthfully can’t afford attending without borrowing.</p>
<p>But really, what matters to you as an applicant is what aid deal you personally get.
The aggregate statistics won’t help you individually. Any more than the aggregate SAT score distributions of matriculants will change your SAT scores. If Rice, or whoever, gives you a good FA deal, it shouldn’t matter in your decision whether others who have attended there got the same deal, or took out $5,000 more in debt than you will have to.</p>
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<p>Uh, no, geographically WashU would belong with NU and U Chicago, none of which are southern. Hawkette’s REVD is explicitly meant to be southern. (I think it’s very cute!)</p>
<p>If deciding between any of the Ivies and the REVD schools, I think it would all come down to personal fit and preference. Trying to argue that some of these schools are meaningfully better than others is silly, and reveals the arguer as either a naive high school senior or a pompous college student. These schools all offer bright kids wonderful opportunities. End of subject.</p>
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<p>What if they open different doors in different parts of the country? I think that’s a perfectly fine outcome. It flies in the face of the common wisdom of CC which centers on NY as the center of the universe, but who cares?</p>
<p>As for Missouri not being southern, suggest do not make this argument to residents of Lawrence Kansas. Actually to me Missouri can be deeemed to sort of swing either way, As it were.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in St. Louis. It is not southern. They do not have southern accents. They do not eat southern foods. It is not a southern city. They identify far more with the midwest than the south. Their “rival” (so to speak) is Chicago, not any southern city. And what does Lawrence, KS have to do with St. Louis?</p>
<p>monydad, the U.S. Census Bureau identifies Missouri as a Midwestern state.</p>