Decisions Help!-- full ride Vanderbilt vs. Columbia?

beard_tax
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:00:54 +0000

The ORFE program at Columbia is so overrated. The professors in the IEOR department are awful and the ORFE program outside of Sales and Trading is not well know on Wall Street.

It sounds like you’re in a position that I was my senior year of high school, trying to tailor my major based on what school I got into. It was BME at JHU, ORFE at Columbia, and Economics at Duke.

First, choose the school with the most academic freedom. I cannot stress this enough. Once you are in SEAS, you will be studying engineering, whether you like it or not (hint: it’s most likely the latter). It sounds as if you have a pre-professional track. Chances are, you won’t be an engineer at UPS or Johnson and Johnson. Engineering is hard and the curriculum is overkill for students who don’t want to become engineers or go into academia.

Second, Columbia is way too expensive at this point. I’ve copied my post from another thread below analyzing the cost for full-tuition. If your parents decide to pay $30,000 a year, that’s a huge burden that they will have to shoulder in addition to what you will have to pay. Plus, there’s a good chance that Columbia will not give you any financial aid next year, when the school realizes that you are in it for the long haul.

Third, to be honest, Columbia sucks. There’s not much campus life and it feels as if the university is a commuter school. Campus life seems to revolve around academic or cultural organizations and organizing and attending events, as well as some closed fraternity parties and 3-4 local bars. Vanderbilt seems to have the typical college experience, an experience that you will not be able to replicate at any other point in your life (who really wants to party with a 24 year old dude on a college campus trying to re-live the glory days?). You can live in NYC in the future and gain roughly the same experience, and I’d argue that attending a stressful university on 116th street really castrates the opportunity to “go downtown anytime you want”. Columbia is 30 minutes from K-town, but a 1 hour subway ride to Chinatown, NYU, St. Mark’s Place, and Union Square.



Graduating with $250,000 in non-dischargeable debt is an ordeal. Even if you work on Wall Street, you’d have a difficult time paying what may total $300-350k when you accrue the interest. To give you perspective, a 1st year analyst can at most save $50k after taxes if the economy is great and they watch how they spend. A 2nd year analyst can probably save $60k. For the next 2 years, you might stay in the bank or move to another firm and may be able to save an additional $140k. However, your debt (after interest and amortization) will still probably total $70k (assuming you pile 100% of your savings into loan repayment).

All the while, you’ll need to think about paying for business school, which is almost always required for career advancement. That’ll set you back another $150-160k by the time you graduate. If you choose Columbia, go work in Wall Street, enjoy an unlikely pre-bubble boom for 4 years, save every penny, and pile 100% of your savings into loan repayment, you’ll still be writing student loan checks until you’re 33-35. All the while, you can say goodbye to your youth.