High end college vs. honors program at state college?

websensation
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:08:48 +0000

@Nomorelurker I see you thought of the same issues as I have. I think it was Univ of Alabama and another Honors College in FL that offered a guaranteed admission to medical school if you went to their undergraduate school. I think Univ of South Carolina had a kind of guaranteed route to law school also. If you plan to practice in that region, I would think it’s not a bad idea to go to Honors College at Univ of South Carolina and then get into their law school.

I think you should note that although many colleges probably do have “better” business schools than Univ of South Carolina’s own Darla Moore Business School, they do appear to have a strong program in the Int’l Business. I believe IB is a sub-category or a combination of business and int’l stuff, so unless a school spends many years focusing on that specific area, it’s not easy to develop a specialty in that area, especially because the IB area is divided into 5 or 6 sub-areas of studies based on the industries needs. Other higher ranked business schools appear to focus on the general business areas and not as much in the IB area. So in the area of IB, it could be argued that Univ of South Carolina is pretty prestigious, not only because they developed this area for long time but other business schools simply do not focus per se on the IB side of business. Of course, I never went there but I did look over their course list, and in the area of IB, they did offer comprehensive courses. As for general business school, I would agree with you that there probably are better, not just higher ranked, general business schools.

Now, let me give you one real life example of where I thought the parents were too pre-occupied with the prestige of schools when making a choice. I met a parent at a Stanford event whose kid was accepted to both Stanford regular admission and Brown’s special program where you are sort of guaranteed acceptance to their medical school if you manage to graduate Brown undergraduate with something like 3.3 GPA (not sure). I told the parent that if I were in his shoes, I would advise my kid to go to Brown for the following reasons:

1. Brown is a darn fine school in its own right.

2. Brown puts less academic pressure so you can use your time to pursue many activities which would help you when you attend a medical school, such as volunteering etc.

3. It's so hard to get into a good medical school that being guaranteed to attend a medical school at Brown is very valuable.

I have no idea what they chose but the parent was really serious about Stanford. I have my own practical reasons for thinking that Stanford will help my kid in his career. I actually feel I am being practical by choosing a full pay Stanford over almost free Honors College. For my wife, it was 100% Stanford. For me, it was 70% Stanford and 30% Honors College. But ultimately, our kid wanted to go there and it was also the best fit for him, even though it was the costliest one. I thought Berkeley was the worst fit for him after the official visit.