At what point is it worth it to go to a state school instead of a expensive private?

<p>*Getting an A in an MIT graduate class is much much easier than getting one in an MIT undergraduate class. It’s not even close. Being an undergraduate at MIT was really really hard. With all due respect, in my EECS department, I doubt the expectations and the pace could have been comparable at Kansas. Furthermore, back in the early 80’s EECS was oversubscribed so rather than limiting people by lottery, they culled the ranks the “MIT way”. The intro classes were intentionally made more brutal than usual and Darwinism ruled the day. Lots of people switched to physics and materials science. </p>

<p>*</p>

<p>Since it’s been awhile since you were an undergrad at MIT, I wonder if grade inflation has seeped in over the years due to the very high cost. I have no idea about MIT, but friends who have kids at a couple of ivies have complained to me that their kids don’t have to work very hard for their A’s (which has been a disappointment for these parents who had expected that their kids would not have as much free time to ‘fool around’ as they seem to have - and still get A’s.) These parents feel that their kids had to work much harder for their grades when at their high schools.</p>

<p>*For someone paying full-freight this is the $100K (difference between public costs and private costs) question, isn’t it? It’s a tough choice, especially in a state with good public schools. *</p>

<p>Sometimes the difference is more than $100k (per child). A state school may have a COA of $25k, but with merit, that cost can be a lot lower. If our boys had gone to elites, we would have been full-pay for both of them ($400k). However, since they took big merit scholarships, their combined undergrad cost will be far less than $100k (for TWO kids).</p>

<p>One of my nephews is a senior in high school. If he goes to a UC (instate), his parents will pay about $30k per year (and probably get crowded into a triple dorm). He has an opportunity to go to an OOS public with full tuition plus $2500 per year. If he makes that choice, my brother estimates that his son’s total costs for four years will be about $50k - and that includes air travel and a private room honors dorm. Since this nephew is pre-med, the savings will be tremendous and he’ll have no undergrad loans.</p>

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</p>

<p>The Harvard kids yes for most, HS was harder. At Harvard you CAN challenge yourself to a really hard level, but it’s not required. The MIT kids - no way, it’s still wicked hard - they HAVE to work that hard. I recruited at the MIT career fair. I’ve seen plenty of resumes with GPAs below B level. It really does depends on the school.</p>

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</p>

<p>Has it really been awhile? </p>

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</p>

<p>I think the better evidence is that the percentage of students at Harvard who actually flunk out is practically nil. </p>

<p>The real issue is that testing is, sadly, stochastic. Surely we can all think of examples of people who studied extremely hard and knew the material extremely well…but nevertheless will perform poorly on a test anyway, either because of terrible luck, because he misunderstood some of the test directions, or some other mishap. {Note, the opposite also happens: some students who happen to know practically nothing about the subject at all can sometimes receive very high test scores simply because they happen to guess the correct answers; or that the one topic that they did study happens to be the central feature of the test; or that in an open-book test, “bring any materials you want”-type test, they just happen to the one student who luckily brought in the one book from which all of the test questions and answers were derived, etc.} </p>

<p>The issue then is what happens if you happen to be that unlucky student who scored poorly despite diligent preparation and knowledge of the material. At Harvard, you’ll probably still pass - not with a top grade, but you’ll still pass. But at a state school, you really will fail. Those schools don’t care about bad luck. If you score poorly, they won’t care why, all they’ll see is that you scored poorly. </p>

<p>The upshot is that Harvard is a safer school because it reduces the variance of the grading by censoring the tail-end. Even in the worst case scenario, you’re still going to pass. You have no such assurance at many other schools.</p>

<p>*Since it’s been awhile since you were an undergrad at MIT,</p>

<p>Has it really been awhile? *</p>

<p>Well, I would call going to MIT in the early 80s, awhile ago. It wasn’t a super long time ago, but long enough that costs have jumped so much that “grade inflation” may have crept in (I don’t know, that’s why I asked). </p>

<p>But, as you say…you’re recruiting from MIT, so you see grades. I’ll have to ask my bro what he saw when he did a recruitment trip to MIT 2 weeks ago.</p>

<p>CRD…do you remember what your undergrad tuition was at MIT in the early 80s? Did you start in the late 70’s…or are you a youngin’ dad?</p>

<p>*
The real issue is that testing is, sadly, stochastic. Surely we can all think of examples of people who studied extremely hard and knew the material extremely well…but nevertheless will perform poorly on a test anyway, either because of terrible luck, because he misunderstood some of the test directions, or some other mishap. </p>

<p>the opposite also happens: some students who happen to know practically nothing about the subject at all can sometimes receive very high test scores simply because they happen to guess the correct answers; or that the one topic that they did study happens to be the central feature of the test; or that in an open-book test, “bring any materials you want”-type test, they just happen to the one student who luckily brought in the one book from which all of the test questions and answers were derived, etc.} *</p>

<p>I think that this is why many profs have moved away from just using a mid-term and final exam to determine a grade (which often happened many years ago.).</p>

<p>I’ve noticed a trend to use several tests, quizzes, homework, projects, etc and the final exam for grading. And, some profs are getting more and more creative…if you score better without the final exam grade, then that’s what’s used. If you score better on the final exam then you did on previous exams, then that will be your grade. Some will offer extra credit points. It seems to me that many profs really want the grade to reflect what you learned, not when you learned it.</p>

<p>Re: Post #40–grade inflation
[The</a> Truth About Harvard - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-truth-about-harvard/3726/]The”>The Truth About Harvard - The Atlantic)
[Professor</a> Fights Grade Inflation, Affirmative Action | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/6/2/professor-fights-grade-inflation-affirmative-action/]Professor”>Professor Fights Grade Inflation, Affirmative Action | News | The Harvard Crimson)
[Boston</a> Globe Online / City & Region / Matters of honor](<a href=“http://cache.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/harvard_honors/]Boston”>http://cache.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/harvard_honors/)
[National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/]National”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/)</p>

<p>

Academic performance is a proxy for disciplined study.
Rau & Durand, 2K:
<a href=“http://www.jstor.org/pss/2673197[/size]”>http://www.jstor.org/pss/2673197&lt;/a&gt;

So, those with an “academic ethic” will not be weeded out.</p>

<p>What is the academic ethic?
Rau & Durand, 2K:
<a href=“http://www.jstor.org/pss/2673197[/size]”>http://www.jstor.org/pss/2673197&lt;/a&gt;

So, I see no reason to conclude that students capable of prioritizing academics and avoiding binge drinking will be “weeded out” at Delaware unless they have an unusual lack of ability. In the latter case, they probably wouldn’t be admitted to an elite school anyway.</p>

<p>Noimagination, so you want to play the academic research game, do you? I’m happy to oblige, for it’s one that I sadly know all too well.</p>

<p>The first thing I would say is that the journal in which it was published - Sociology of Education - ain’t exactly the highest level of journal. Furthermore, having only 33 citations (according to Web of Science) or 74 (according to Google Scholar) after 10 years means that your paper isn’t exactly having a great impact in academia. </p>

<p>But secondly and far more importantly, the paper cannot be interpreted in the way you have described. A serious shortcoming of the paper is that it never establishes causality, a flaw that unfortunately seems to behave much (probably most) of the sociology literature. All that the paper can assert is that there is a positive correlation between GPA and their construct of “academic ethic” without actually establishing the causal link between them. It is entirely plausible - and indeed has been discussed in the literature - that poor grades may actually cause a decline in academic ethic, as students may simply lose hope and stop studying, as they may figure that they’re never going to get a top grade anyway, so why bother trying, and may even start drinking (which is a negatively-weighted component of the authors construct of “academic ethic”). Let’s face it - if you’re constantly receiving poor marks no matter how hard you study, your enjoyment of studying will probably decline. That GPA and “academic ethic” are both cause and effect of each other seems also to be a strong possibility. </p>

<p>Which also then leads to the highly plausible alternative story that the true academic construct to be measured is personal confidence. Hence, even if we accept that GPA is indeed only purely the result and never the cause of any student behavior (which is questionable), GPA may actually be caused not be “academic ethic”, but rather by the omitted variable of personal confidence which actually causes higher GPA and is positively correlated (and indeed perhaps causes) “academic ethic”. </p>

<p>Barring a difficult-to-run field experiment, the gold standard of methodological tools for pinning down causality and ruling out omitted variables is to identify an instrumental variable. One I might suggest is, because “academic ethic” is partially measured by refraining from alcohol, perhaps one could identify those particular students who are unlikely to consume alcohol regardless of how poor their grades are, perhaps because of physical intolerance, strongly-held religious views, or other such means. {The problem is that I suspect that such an IV would probably be weak because of the relatively small sample size of the study.} Even if the authors couldn’t identify an IV, they could have at least gathered survey data over multiple (or at the very least two time periods in order to build a panel where they could at least regress GPA onto the lagged academic ethic regressor variables, and attempt to argue causality that way (perhaps with proximity matching based on their MDS model to attempt to eliminate omitted variables). They didn’t even do that. </p>

<p>Without that analysis, figure 4’s path analysis model is not particularly meaningful, as the causality arrow directions are then simply assumed, but never actually demonstrated.</p>

<p>But even if you do accept everything that the authors said, their results do not support anything more than a mild relationship between “academic ethic” and GPA. The regression model of Table 4 explains only 32% of the variance in GPA , and while the table doesn’t show any delta-values, judging from the significance values, differences in student “academic ethic” surely cannot explain any more than 10% of the total variance in GPA. Hence, a whopping 90% of the variance in student GPA has nothing to do with “academic ethic”, and nearly 70% of the total variance in GPA has nothing to do with any of the variables at hand.</p>

<p>You also have to keep in mind, I never said anything about being weeded out of Delaware entirely. I was simply talking about being weeded out of Delaware chemical engineering. I’m sure that somebody who could get into a top school probably could graduate from some major at Delaware, just not necessarily from ChemE. That may not have even necessarily have to do with flunking out the major. Just getting lower grades than they’re used to getting tends to cause students to “weed themselves” out of engineering. For example, if you were a superstar straight A high school student who was good enough to get into Harvard, but chose Delaware for the chemical engineering program, only to be stuck earning B’s and C’s in your engineering classes, you might choose to leave the program even though you are passing, just because your grades are not as good as you’re used to. </p>

<p>But with only B’s and C’s on your transcript, no respectable school will want to take you as a transfer applicant. Harvard certainly won’t. They won’t care that you had been admitted before as a freshman. All they’ll see is that you’re not performing well now, and they won’t care why. That’s the problem. So now you’re stuck at Delaware, and you’re no longer even in the chemical engineering major that you chose Delaware over Harvard for in the first place. Now you’re probably wishing you could take back that choice of turning down Harvard…but it’s too late.</p>

<p>Personally, I think what should happen is that engineering programs (and other difficult majors) should simply cancel the corresponding grades of those students who leave the program. If the guy isn’t going to major in engineering anyway, who cares what his engineering grades are? Let him walk away with a clean slate. Let him apply, if he wants, as a transfer applicant to other schools with a clean academic record. But they won’t do it. Engineering programs seem to actually delight in sadistically punishing students, even those who have left the program.</p>

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<p>I’ll speak for engineering and say that, while courses do often tend to assign homework and quizzes, by far the largest component of the grading consists of the midterm and especially the final exams. That is why finals week in any engineering-centric dorm building is such a madhouse - as every student knows full well that if they bomb the final, all of the work that they put in during the semester all falls by the wayside, as a bombed final exam basically means failing the class. </p>

<p>{What exacerbates the situation to excruciating extremes is that engineering exams are graded on curves which means that students are directly pitted against each other. Hence, you see tragicomedic farces such as ‘open-book, open-notes’ exams where students haul in entire suitcases and dollies full of books and papers because nobody wants to be the one guy that lacks book that the exam questions are based on, when everybody else has that book, hence causing you to fail the class because everybody else does well on the exam and you don’t. }</p>

1 Like

<p>I agree with m2ck and the $200K difference between an elite (top 20) vs. a state school. Elite schools don’t give merit, so you are paying full freight there- almost $60K per year for $240K total v $40-$50 K total for State Honors college with merit. Not sure if any college is worth borrowing $200K for undergrad. Conversely without merit, instate tuition for most is probably under $20k per year, $80K v $240 as well, a $160K difference. There are a couple of threads about the middle class being priced out of elites and privates, and that pretty much sums it up. Unless you can get substantial FA or have no problems with the $240K for each kid, you are out of luck. One of the above posters with $50K in loans sounds like a bargain now.</p>

<p>Having an older S who didn’t get that superior education from an ivy either, I am pretty reluctant to recommend the $200K to anyone. Of course, he bears most of the responsibility for that. But it helps knowing that the $240K doesn’t magically buy you success. He is doing quite well now btw, but he is a super brain and I wouldn’t expect less, I just wasn’t overly impressed with what he received. My D went to the same school and received a fantastic education. It was a smaller program though, not Engineering like S. Point is, kids can fall through the cracks anywhere no matter what you are paying.</p>

<p>Going back to the OP – As a PA resident I DO NOT consider Pitt and Penn State state schools. We DO NOT have state honor flagships that cost $40k total!</p>

<p>These schools are “state affiliated” and as such are considerable higher cost than other state’s flagships.</p>

<p>Penn State’s COA runs $25,000-$26,000 depending on which site you are using. They give very, very little merit – I read average for Schreyer’s Honors is $3,500 – So many IS are looking at a $21,500 price tag. For a middle class, high stat kid, many of the state’s LACs and privates after merit/institutional grants comes out cheaper! We see this every year for many in our local high school graduation class. And know that Penn State Schreyer’s honors is quite competitive. The kids getting in there can certainly get into a top 50 with merit or a top 20 with middle-class friendly policies.</p>

<p>Pitt is a much friendlier with the merit.</p>

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<p>They don’t? </p>

<p>Then apparently forgot to tell my brother that, who could have paid to go to a state school, but instead chose Caltech who offered him a full merit scholarship plus stipend. Yes, that’s right - merit. So instead of paying to go to a state school, he got paid to attend Caltech. </p>

<p>Schools such as Chicago and Duke also offer merit scholarships.</p>

<p><a href=“https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/costs/merit.shtml[/url]”>https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/costs/merit.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>[Duke</a> Financial Aid: Merit Scholarships](<a href=“http://dukefinancialaid.duke.edu/undergraduate/other_sources/merit.html]Duke”>http://dukefinancialaid.duke.edu/undergraduate/other_sources/merit.html)</p>

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<p>I know this is going to sound harsh, but I would say that if that is indeed your problem, then frankly, you didn’t work hard enough to get one of those aforementioned merit scholarships from elite schools. My answer would then be to work harder.</p>

<p>Good point sakky, I was thinking more Ivies which don’t give merit(on paper anyway). I think the elites that do give merit give very few merit awards, in the low double digits. I think I read Duke gives 20 or so. My older S received a full merit award from USC, but he didn’t choose to go there. I wouldn’t put USC in the top 20 or elite category anyway, Caltech I guess you would put in top 20.
I don’t know if hard work alone is going to give you a merit scholarship at an elite. So the rest of the thousands that are accepted with little FA should just pony up the $240K and be happy they got into an elite college?
So to answer the OPs point, imho you pick the state school at the point which the other schools you’ve been accepted to are unaffordable and/or require you to take on too much debt.</p>

<p>

First, excellent analysis and deconstruction of the internal warrants to the “academic ethic” position.</p>

<p>Second, I’m more than willing to accept personal confidence as a causative factor in grades, even though I don’t see your rationale for selecting it. The crux of my position is that grades are awarded at least largely based on some nonrandom causative factor that is probably predictably available for many top high school students.

Turn: If grades are based on a curve, then scoring high is a result of performing better than one’s peers. Top high school students have a track record for outperforming their peers at a level often equal to that at a state flagship.

A high school senior probably already has some experience with high-stakes testing and their ability to perform under pressure.

Your brother is obviously a remarkable person. His solution will not work for most.</p>

<p>Caltech’s common data set reveals that in the 09/10 school year 3 freshmen not qualifying for financial aid received a merit scholarship. The average scholarship amount was less than $17k.</p>

<p>I believe they have tightened up a great deal lately.</p>

<p>Even at other top schools, the large merit scholarships are among the most sought-after awards in the country. It takes better than Harvard-caliber stats to get one.</p>

<p>BTW, I seriously doubt that someone of your brother’s caliber couldn’t have gotten significant merit aid at a state school.</p>

<p>Bottom line: I don’t buy the claim that a student admitted to both a top-ranked school and a more average public school for engineering should avoid the latter for fear of being failed unless they have unusual difficulty with examinations or a total lack of self-confidence.</p>

<p>Here’s another suggestion: if you want to go to an Ivy but can’t afford it, then work hard enough in high school to win as many outside scholarships as you can. I can think of one guy I know who went to Dartmouth for free not because of Dartmouth financial aid (because he was given almost none) but because he racked up a slew of outside scholarships that covered almost all of his costs. </p>

<p>A related idea is to obtain a ROTC scholarship at an Ivy. I can think of a number of Harvard ROTC students who are not only receiving a Harvard degree for free, they’re actually getting paid a (small) stipend. Nor do you necessarily incur a military obligation; the ROTC program specifically states that any student is free to drop out of the program at the end of their freshman year and not pay anything back - the so-called ‘freshman trial’ period. At that point, you can decide whether you want to remain in ROTC and complete your degree for free in return for a service obligation, to stay at the Ivy while leaving ROTC and pay for the rest of the degree yourself, or transfer to another school, i.e. the state school. At the bare minimum, you will have been paid for your first year of studies at an Ivy.</p>

<p>And frankly, from a basic standpoint of patriotism, I think more of our most talented youths should be seriously considering careers in the military anyway, at least for a few years during young adulthood. Our country needs more of our best human talent to become soldiers, not investment bankers. But the military also offers the important side-benefit of education subsidies.</p>

<p>“The real issue is that testing is, sadly, stochastic. Surely we can all think of examples of people who studied extremely hard and knew the material extremely well…but nevertheless will perform poorly on a test anyway, either because of terrible luck, because he misunderstood some of the test directions, or some other mishap.”</p>

<p>Oh man, that is so true. I fear for my #2 son when he takes the SATs. He’s very bright and does great on practice tests…but he’s prone to panic atacks (yes, he is seeing a therapist and taking meds), and he has a touch of OCD. </p>

<p>Older son took about 15 practice tests for Physics SAT II. He never scored lower than 770 and usually scored 800. Yet he scored 700 on test day. You just never know. (He did score 790 on Math II – and he’d been doing <em>less</em> well on the Math II practice tests, so, again, go figure.) </p>

<p>I known this isn’t an SAT thread, but that one observatioon just struck me so forcefully. Sorry for getting off-topic. :)</p>

<p>* if you want to go to an Ivy but can’t afford it, then work hard enough in high school to win as many outside scholarships as you can. I can think of one guy I know who went to Dartmouth for free not because of Dartmouth financial aid (because he was given almost none) but because he racked up a slew of outside scholarships that covered almost all of his costs.
*</p>

<p>I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone could get $200k in private scholarships for 4 years of college. It might be possible to rack up enough for the first year with some kind of unusual connection or hook. But since most private scholarships are only for 1 year it’s very unlikely someone could cobble together $50k in private scholarships every year.</p>

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<p>Oh really? Are you sure? </p>

<p>[Student</a> wins record scholarship offers | The Post and Courier, Charleston SC - News, Sports, Entertainment](<a href=“http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/mar/03/star-student-wins-record-scholarship-offers/]Student”>http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/mar/03/star-student-wins-record-scholarship-offers/)</p>

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<p>I’m simply offering it as an example of an alternative story. The issue is not that my alternative story is necessarily correct, but that the authors of the paper cannot rule that story out or plenty of other alternative stories because their research design did not permit them to do so. Strong papers actually anticipate plausible alternative stories and attempt to show why they are not consistent with the data. </p>

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<p>And the crux of my position is something that nobody seriously disputes: technical majors such as engineering tend to grade harder than most other disciplines. </p>

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<p>Top high school students have a record of performing well relative to the average high school student. They (usually) have no record of performing well against each other. </p>

<p>Let’s take Caltech as an example. I think we can all agree that practically every Caltech student was a superstar high school student. Yet the fact remains that plenty of Caltech students perform poorly - with some even flunking out. The curve forces some of them to flunk out. My brother knew several such students. One would think that every Caltech student would be adroit in excelling under high-stakes and high-pressure testing situations. But then why do so many of them end up with terrible grades at Caltech? </p>

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<p>Let me put it to you this way. While the UC system does award merit scholarships under the moniker of the Chancellor or Regents Scholarship, the amount of the award is largely predicated on your financial situation: only if you’re poor will your UC merit scholarship cover your full costs (but, then again, if you’re truly poor, your costs may have been covered by financial aid anyway). If you’re not poor, then you just receive the minimum amount, which at the time was only ~$1000 per year or so - clearly nowhere enough to cover the costs of attending UC. Hence, it was clearly far more financially advantageous for my brother to attend Caltech than to attend UC. </p>

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<p>Then let’s use a specific example. Berkeley is a ‘more average’ public school relative to the top privates. Yet because the Berkeley College of Engineering runs the most strict admissions regime of any of Berkeley’s constituent colleges, I would say that anybody who is good enough to be admitted to the CoE - and certainly anybody good enough to be admitted to a high-demand engineering major such as EECS - is probably good enough to have gotten into at least a lower Ivy. </p>

<p>Yet the fact remains that many Berkeley EECS will receive mediocre grades. In fact, it is stated as a matter of rule that the ‘typical’ grade assigned in EECS classes should be around a 2.7-2.9. </p>

<p>*A typical GPA for courses in the lower division is 2.7. This GPA would result, for example, from 17% A’s, 50% B’s, 20% C’s, 10% D’s, and 3% F’s. A class whose GPA falls outside the range 2.5 - 2.9 should be considered atypical. (A Typical GPA for basic prerequisite lower division CS courses (CS 40, CS 41) is 2.5, with GPA’s outside the range 2.3 - 2.7 considered atypical.)</p>

<p>A typical GPA for courses in the upper division is 2.9. (This GPA would result, for example, from 23% A’s, 50% B’s, 20% C’s, 5% D’s, and 2% F’s.) A class whose GPA falls outside the range 2.7 - 3.1 should be considered atypical. A typical GPA for basic prerequisite upper division courses (EECS 104A, EECS 105, CS 150, CS 153) is 2.7 with GPA’s outside the range 2.5 - 2.9 considered atypical. *</p>

<p>[Grading</a> Guidelines for Undergraduate Courses | EECS at UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml]Grading”>http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml)</p>

<p>Now, keep in mind that that’s just talking about the ‘typical’ grade. If 2.7-2.9 is the typical EECS grade, then that means that a substantial proportion of EECS students will be receiving less than a 2.7-2.9. And in fact, a not insignificant number of them will be receiving failinggrades (defined to be anything less than a 2.0 from technical courses that you need to stay eligible in the major). </p>

<p>Again, keep in mind that these are students who are probably good enough to get into at least a lower Ivy. Yet clearly many of them will end up with terrible grades - and some will even flunk out entirely. </p>

<p>The sad truth is that engineering programs - especially at the state schools - are generally characterized by low grades, high stress, and high attrition rates. What if you turn down an Ivy for Berkeley for the engineering program…only to end up with terrible grades, which is precisely the fate of many Berkeley engineering students? You’re probably wishing that you could go back in time and choose that Ivy instead. But you can’t; it’s too late.</p>