Pomona and Stanford

Colleges & Universities Pomona College
6

I just want to say that AnEpicIndian is misinformed. To debunk all of his/her posts as someone who actually turned down Stanford for Pomona (the horror! yes, it happens, and it happens more than you think; at least 5-6 people in each class do so).

  1. The median tech starting salary for a Pomona grad is 95000. The median at Stanford is also around 95000. The mean business/econ salary for a Pomona grad is 64000 (we don’t have business, so most of these people are econ majors). The mean econ salary for a Stanford grad is 65500. Recent Pomona grads have gone to work at Google (the place where the most Pomona alums are, actually), Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, and more. There may be some exceptional Stanford graduates who start their own start-ups but on the whole the average job offer for CS grads for both schools is virtually the same.

  2. Pomona is extremely prestigious in elite circles and heavily recruited by all of the top companies and graduate schools for CS and economics. You seriously will not be at as much of a disadvantage as AEI makes it out to be. My friends who are going to Harvard and Yale are accessing the same opportunities as my friends at Pomona.

  3. “It will be much easier to transfer to Pomona” Not when the transfer acceptance rate is 2.8%- one of the lowest in the country and when half the spots are gone to community college students due to Pomona’s intent in recruiting them to elite schools.

The truth of the matter is that both Pomona and Stanford are distinguished undergraduate experiences that offer different things, and neither is definitively better than the other for undergrad. If you want a more independent culture, with a heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and computer science, Stanford will give that to you more than Pomona can. If you want a more interdependent culture, with a tight-knit relationship with your professors and a place that emphasizes more the liberal arts education and a reflective and flexible vibe, Pomona will be the better place. Yes, Stanford has the Structured Liberal Education, but it’s a short term program with an emphasis on literature and philosophy, whereas Pomona’s LAC benefits extend to every department, including the STEM fields. I was seeking the latter and it was easy for me upon visiting to find a certain element of nurture that doesn’t seem to exist in Stanford. Good luck with your choices and be careful of taking seriously any perspective that puts the matter on a black and white scale. The retention rate according to the CDS 2014-2015 was 98.5% for Pomona and 98.45% for Stanford…students rarely transfer from these exceptional schools.