Scholarships: Ignatius & Magis

eadad
Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:17:38 +0000

Let me elaborate a bit.

My S attended a highly ranked all boys prep school that was an HPYMS feeder. His class of 82 had over 35 students attend Ivies, Stanford or MIT alone. He was one of 7 accepted to Yale (his was SCEA) which was his dream school. At the same time his school nominated him for the Morehead Scholarship at UNC and he was fortunate enough to be named a winner.

His list of schools was Amherst, Dartmouth, Pomona, Princeton, Stanford, Wash U, Yale and UNC because of the Morehead nomination. As I mentioned earlier, he was accepted to Yale SCEA at which time he withdrew his apps from Amherst, Dartmouth and Pomona because he had classmates applying there and he knew he would not attend so why hurt their chances. Yale’s offer of FA initially was ZERO which they later amended to be about 18K a year. We hoped that we could use FA offers from Princeton to negotiate with Yale if necessary. Wash U offered him a name scholarship and over $20K per year and Princeton came with a more generous offer than Yale.

In the end HE decided that he wanted to accept the Morehead. I have to be honest when I say that one of the hardest things I have ever had to do was tell him to not make it about the money…we were looking at approximately $200K for Yale versus NOTHING at UNC. The Morehead included tuition, room, board, books, his laptop and a stipend for living expenses PLUS four fully paid summer “experiential learning” sessions.

He decided that graduating debt free, especially with med school in his future, was a good place to be.

He loved every minute of his time at UNC, and never regretted his decision to turn down Yale. He spent his first (“outdoor leadership”) summer learning to sail off the cost of Maine, his second (“service”) summer working in a small fishing village in Senegal about 90km south of Dakar, his "travel study " summer was in Montmartre living as a Parisian while taking short trips throughout Europe studying the influence of American Jazz on the music scene in Europe , and he spent his “research” summer doing research at a top 10 Medical facility.

He is now a second year med student at a top ten medical school and unlike the majority of his peers he is not piling debt on top of more debt.

It was initially very hard for me (and EAmom) to “get over” not being able to put the Yale sticker in our car windows but when we saw how happy our son was and how he was thriving and in all honesty was happier than we had ever seen him we were able to put our egos aside and enjoy the ride.

He had and has an amazing group of very talented friends who have also gone on to great things from UNC. Several Rhodes and Truman Scholars, Harvard med, Duke and Yale Law, among many others.

Great kids will thrive wherever they are…there are plenty of kids treading water at more “elite” schools…the good/great kids at the other schools tend to walk on water.

brutus

The economic climate has changed many things. The widespread pracrice of employers paying for graduate education is being reduced in many cases because the graduate education is becoming a prerequisite for the employment. Many top law schools are taking less than 1/3 of their classes directly out of UG and want at least 2-3 years of real world work experience BEFORE offering admission. I am NOT saying that one should make a decison for purely financial reasons. What I am saying is that if it is going to put extreme financial hardship on a family to go into 200K plus debt, cause them to take a second mortgage etc, then it doesn’t make sense to do so.

I have classmates, friends and fraternity brothers from MU that have gone on to fabulous careers and who have achieved high levels of success and wealth with their MU degrees. Like many other things, the results of an undergraduate experience will be based on what someone puts into it.