Reach vs Match/safety

collegemom3717
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:27:09 +0000

As others have indicated you have some false premises:

[quote[rather than going to a reach school and have a hard time with work and he drowning in debts, yet gaining a better education.


A ‘reach’ can have more to do with the % of acceptances than the degree of difficulty of the work. Based on the feedback from cohorts of students who have come from the same teachers / secondary school, the work at Harvard is not necessarily any harder than say, Vassar or UVa- schools that are selective, but much less ‘reachy’. The student experiences seem to indicate that the degree of difficulty varies more by subject/ course load than by absolute difficulty. Nor is it clear, from either these students perceptions nor their post-graduation outcomes that the overall education at (say) Harvard is per se better.

Whether just carrying debt or drowning in it, debt is more likely to inhibit your post-graduation outcomes more than a less famous name, because servicing the debt immediately will be a big decision factor in choosing your post-graduation path. Even the exceptions usually cited (such as management consultancies and investment banking) do recruit at more than just the tippy-tops- schools like Vanderbilt and Bucknell (again, selective but not super ‘reachy’) get visited as well.