Columbia [$90k] BioChem (or similar) versus UCLA [$50k] BioChem (or similar) [not pre-med]

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UCLA is $40K a year. Columbia is $90K a year. But we can afford either without taking out loans, or depriving ourselves, or even working longer. So this is really a question of is Columbia worth an extra $50K a year. Kid will most likely do a grad degree but they are NOT pre-med so no med school. Kid is a serious student who studies hard but isn’t going to do a startup or become a world leader in anything (just a smart introvert).

Here are my assumptions. Correct me if wrong.

a) In terms of prestige (for BioChem) both rank in top 20 but not 10 so no winner.

b) In terms of location kid has a slight favoritism to UCLA as we are in state and the cold winters will be tough.

c) UCLA will consist of 35 gen ed requirements and 110 major requirements out of 180 units so there is space for a minor there.

d) Columbia will consist of 39 to 55 units for gen ed requirements (depends if they test out of or partially out of the language requirement) and a further 70 units for major requirements out of 124 so no space for a minor. The Columbia common curriculum is essentially the minor.

e) Kid is a very shy introvert so Columbia would be nice as classes are smaller and kids bond over the common curriculum.

Any suggestions on how to choose would be appreciated as we are really stuck here!

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What does the student think of the subject areas required in the general education requirements? The Columbia general education requirements are relatively humanities-heavy – would this be a secondary interest, or something that the student puts up with? (Were English and arts courses in high school among the student’s most favorite or least favorite courses?)

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Well here in lies the difficulty. The Columbia core curriculum is as you say very humanities heavy: 1 year of classics, 1 year of art/music, 1 year of civillization, 1 year of writing, 1 year of world history etc. The student did an IB with HL classes in History, English etc. They don’t love it, but are good at it, which is probably why Columbia chose them.

But they are so fixated on an Ivy education they are convincing themselves they wouldn’t mind doing 1.5 years of more humanities!

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My similar-sounding student faced a similar decision 3 years ago (different UC, different comparator - not Ivy, but small, intellectual, etc.). I asked him to consider whether he thought the non-UC was worth twice as much as the UC - we were fortunate that cost was absolutely not the only factor, but I don’t think it’s bad to factor it in. He’s thriving at the UC - he found his people by getting a job, and doing research.

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In some cases it is possible to go straight from a bachelor’s degree to a PhD. One daughter has done exactly this in a biomedical field. PhD’s in STEM fields are usually fully funded.

However, this still leaves two issues. One is that admissions for PhD programs can be very highly competitive, and appears to have gotten more competitive due to funding shortages (the same number of students are applying for an even smaller number of spots). It is possible to find that you don’t get into a PhD program, and some students either do a master’s instead or do a master’s degree on the way to then later applying for a PhD. Master’s degrees are typically not funded, and apparently can commonly be two years in “research science” fields, which I suspect biochemistry is. Also, even if your child does go straight from a bachelor’s to a PhD, or more likely from a bachelor’s to a paying job to a PhD, some parent help for the PhD student can still make the marathon a bit more tolerable.

As such I would be inclined to budget assuming that some financial help for a graduate student is likely at some point in the future. I might also note that any student who got accepted to both UCLA and Columbia is likely to be academically strong enough that graduate school is very likely to be a realistic option.

Thus “not needing to pay for medical school” is great, but does not remove the likelihood of at least helping some with some graduate degree.

You might be surprised what a smart introvert is capable of. It would not shock me if at some point in the future a quiet smart introverted biomedical student figures out that some hormone is a necessary part of some particular disease’s progression and some smart introverted quiet biochemical kid figures out how to wipe out that particular hormone and thereby cure something bad. You never know.

In terms of prestige you are comparing excellent with excellent. A student from either of these schools can go on to very excellent graduate programs and discover that the large majority of the other students in the same graduate program are brilliantly intelligent students who got their bachelor’s degrees at far lower ranked schools. Very smart very serious students attend a wide range of undergraduate schools for a wide range of reasons, and both Columbia and UCLA are towards the excellent end of a large number of very good schools. Maybe there are two winners here, but no advantage either way IMHO.

I might be pulled between “save the money and keep it in the bank to help with graduate school” and “let the kid go where they feel they would be comfortable”. “Minimize travel or at least keep it to a dull roar” might also occur to me – travel can get annoying after a while (and no one in my family was traveling the full way across the US for undergraduate studies).

If all of these say “UCLA” then you are done.

If the student has a strong preference for Columbia it might be tougher.

However, the “Ivy League” part of it is meaningless. There are a LOT of very excellent universities, and UCLA is both very, very well known and one of the best.

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@Guy_Rien I’m so glad you came back. You had many threads, sometimes thinking the system would work against you. Clearly your student did fine.

Let me ask you this - with Columbia $200k more and a Masters likely, will you be able to and are you willing to fund it if she attends there ?

If so, let her choose.

But this entire team, through many threads it was about the top UCs, potentially being disadvantaged vs others who you didn’t think were as accomplished and then money.

I don’t know your daughter or you, but if I was basing it on the many discussions that took place, I’d say only UCLA and I wouldn’t give Columbia consideration.

In fact, I’m surprised, knowing you are full pay and from your many posts you clearly didn’t want to be, that you even let her apply. Mine was interested in Cornell but I wasn’t going to send her. We had a $50k pre set limit. So your situation would have been my worst nightmare. But we ruled against it up front.

So I’m going from your post history.

But if you’ve changed, then let her decide. Yes Columbia is Ivy. It’s also in the cross hairs of the federal government. UCLA may be too.

Great gets - you have to decide which wins - student choice or budget. Both will launch them.

5% of Columbia’s classes are 100+ vs 13% at UCLA. But don’t forget they will have subsections. And we do t know the subjects of those classes.

Also, don’t forget the quarter (ucla) vs semester systems (Columbia).

No wrong answer but one is better for you based on your many posts. Whether it’s better for you kid only she can say.

Back to rank and I think it’s irrelevant - but college raptor rates ucla #7 and I couldn’t find Columbia. Research.com UCLA 9 and Columbia 20. Master portal 16 and Columbia 18. US News UCLA 10 and Columbia 13.

Does any of that matter? Unlikely but I didn’t see Columbia higher ranked in the 4 I looked at.

Congrats - and good luck.

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Yeah. My kid was lucky. But quite a few of her peers were quite unlucky. There school ranks and 5 out of the top 10 kids (all with 4.7+ GPAs) at best got into UC Davis. Fine school, but nuts they didn’t get into UCI/UCSD at least.

Some even got into Ivies but due to being middle class the parents were forced to choose between $100K a year for an Ivy or $40K a year at Davis and chose the later.

But my kid got lucky.

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GPAs as heavily weighted by the high school like 4.7 can be misleading to students and parents, since UC recalculated GPAs tend to be lower than that (no more than 4.3-4.4 for the weighted-capped). Of course, if many applicants are near the weighted-capped GPA ceiling (and in high rigor schedules), then UC admissions have to select between them based on the essay contents, which are obviously not transparently comparable between students by those outside the admission office.

It usually takes a much higher than middle class level of income and assets, or some disqualifier like parents who are divorced and uncooperatively still fighting their divorce, to get no financial aid at an Ivy.

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Luck is created my friend. Your kid got into UCLA and Columbia - it didn’t just happen out of sheer luck, I assure you!! She made choices, including outside the classroom and in her writings, etc. that worked.

Tons of kids at publics make that choice - less expensive vs. Ivy or Ivy sub - every day. You may be one. As consumers, you and they have that choice.

College is commondity - but UCM, UCR, UCSC and Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale - all give someone the same thing - an education. If people aren’t going to pay for Ivy cost schools up front, they might not have applied to them…..just like I suggested to you about your case.

Well - now yours (and you) has a choice to make - and that’s the problem with choice….having to make one.

I look forward to hearing the final decision.

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Let me reassure you this is not the case. All those claims about being tuition free.under $150k make the assumption you have typical assets.

I saved up $400,000 for three kids tuition. My AGI is about 145k but most privates expected me to pay the full amount.

Not complaining. I’m just saying that’s just the way it is right now.

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It was six years ago but Cornell told me if you had a million, you weren’t getting anything from anyone.

And when I asked W&L why 88% of kids in my income on average got a $38K grant and my daughter got nada, they said average assets. I asked what’s that. They said 2x income - which was less than $400K.

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I might be at a bit of a disadvantage of understanding here in that for what my older daughter studied / majored in, UC Davis is the number 1 university in the world.

I would most likely have made the same or a similar choice. I have seen a lot of this (but not for UC Davis since we live in the northeast). I know a lot of parents who are in the so-called “donut hole” where they make too much to get need based financial aid, but don’t make enough to comfortably pay $100,000 per year per child. They just don’t send their kids to Ivy League universities.

However this has worked out very well for the very large majority of them. Their kids went to affordable universities (some of which might not be ranked all that far from UC Davis in terms of overall ranking) and then four years later the kids graduated and did very well. Some went on to very highly ranked graduate programs (helped in some cases by the fact that some master’s degrees are only one year, and PhD’s are typically funded). Some got great jobs with a bachelor’s degree.

UCLA is a great university. There is nothing wrong with sending a kid to a great university while saving $200,000 over four years, and holding on to some of this money with the thought of possibly using it towards the cost of a graduate degree.

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A kid likely going on to graduate school who generally prefers a top public research university like UCLA does not in fact need to pay a lot more for a top private research university like Columbia. If the kid would overall prefer the four-year experience at the more expensive private university, academically and non-academically, and the difference would be comfortably affordable, then that is a very personal decision. But if they would actually prefer the overall experience at the public, then in this context it doesn’t make sense to pay more.

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You don’t have to answer if you don’t like, but do you mean $400K EACH, or $400K total for all three?

Generally speaking, what is known as the CSS Institutional Methodology (which serves as the baseline for CSS Profile colleges, although they can vary it as they see fit) incorporates assessable parental assets (there are protected assets like retirement accounts and possibly home equity or some portion of home equity, and also a sort of standard deduction) at a marginal rate of 5%. So $400K total in assessable parental assets should at most result in a $20K hit for one child (and actually a bit less when you incorporate the deduction, and also less if you have multiple children in college at the same time). But $1.2M total would be more like $60K, and that could in fact help wipe out a “free tuition” sort of offer.

I note a household income of $150K is right around top 25% these days. $1.2M in net worth even including home equity and retirement assets would be about top 15%. If you exclude home equity, it is just outside the top 10%, and if you exclude retirement accounts, I am not sure exactly but I am confident it would be inside the top 10%.

Point being that $1.2M would in fact be an unusual amount of liquid financial savings for a household with that level of income. In contrast, $400K is right around that same top 25% mark.

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I just did a dummy trial using Columbia’s NPC.

With $150K AGI and $400K in investments, nothing else assessable, I got a net price estimate of $31,681, with a $66,537 Columbia grant.

With $1.2M in investments, that goes to $71,681, after a $26,537 grant.

That reduction in aid of $40K is 5% of the $800K in additional assessable assets, the expected 5% if Columbia is using a more or less standard IM approach.

Another $530,740 should therefore get this to zero. And in fact trying out $1,730,740 in parental investments gets you to exactly full pay. Again, that would be a very atypical amount of assessable assets for a household with that level of household income.

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Folks on CC have a very extreme view of what being “middle class” is all about. Sorry this is a few years old, but the national median household income in 2022 was approximately $74,580.

I am not aware of any college- Ivy or not- that expects a household making $75K to pay 100K a year. Yes, there are colleges that don’t look at financial information and don’t meet need- but they are, by and large, public institutions which are NOT charging $100K.

I think 40K for Davis is a tremendous bargain, but the math ain’t mathing on the 100K claim.

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I think one basic issue is a lot of families targeting these colleges in the first place count as upper-middle/professional/managerial class by normal standards, but they work, reside, socialize, and so on with a lot of other families approximately at their same socioeconomic level, or indeed sometimes observably higher.

Of course the other basic issue is these families may have other ideas for what to do with their relatively high levels of family financial resources. Early and/or atypically-well-financed retirements. Expensive homes (which in some VHCOL areas might not even seem that lavish, but there is a large locational value component). Sometimes second homes. Regularly updated expensive cars. Expensive vacations. And so on.

And I don’t mean to suggest these families are necessarily wrong to prioritize these things. Like, if they want to budget for a high-quality in-state public college and then direct their additional financial resources to other things like the above, that to me is not an inherently bad way to think. Of course I also don’t have a problem if such a family is willing to trim the budget in other ways in order to save up to be full pay for private colleges. That’s what I see as a personal decision.

But yes, most normal people will not see these families as being literally in NEED of aid for private colleges. They may WANT it so they don’t have to face these tradeoffs. But they don’t NEED it in a way that families truly around the middle in terms of financial resources would actually need it.

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Yes, we’d all like to pay less in taxes, get more “goodies” in entitlements without income caps, have our favorite things subsidized (“more art museums, fewer guided missiles” or the reverse).

But it strikes me as irrational for someone skilled enough to be an upper middle class professional NOT to look at the macro picture and understand (for example) that when Yale says it’s tuition free at a certain income level with “typical” assets, they will not consider the $5 million “war chest” you’ve assembled for your early retirement as “typical”. Your IRA/401K? Sheltered. But the Microsoft stock you’ve been accumulating over the last 20 years in a normal brokerage account? Up for consideration, and no, if you’re earning $150K and have $5 million in relatively liquid assets, a beach house worth $1.2 million on Cape Cod, and $100K in a money market for your “emergency fund”, you should probably realize that you are not typical.

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And as I always like to point out, we were warned. Like, I saw the calculators when my S24 was born, and if anything full pay is a little less for him that it was supposed to be. So we knew what we needed to save, and it wasn’t a trivial amount each month. But nor was it somehow impossible. This of course IS professional class thinking, but as you point out, that makes it a fair expectation for professional parents, to be able to do this sort of basic math and plan ahead as desired.

But again, and this is really for the OP . . . this does not mean I think everyone should be paying for Columbia when UCLA is an option! If some people with the means choose to do that, OK! But it is by no means necessary, and again least of all necessary for people going down paths where graduate or professional school is likely anyway.

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I’m still thrown that @Guy_Rien would consider a full cost Ivy after all the threads :slight_smile: I think a top tier UC was the dream all along….at least @Guy_Rien dream!!