<p>Well, Einstein didn’t get into the Swiss Polytechnic that was so prestigious and went to a lower tier school in Arau (sp) and it didn’t seem to hurt him one bit. And really, how many of these kids are future Einsteins? I think that you make the best of what you are dealt, and you can get a damn good education from just about any school public or private if you put in the effort. I have a cousin in Alaska who is super smart and got into Harvard but couldn’t afford to go there. So he went to U of Alaska of undergrad, and then went to Harvard for law. going to UAF which is not known as a great school didn’t seem to hurt him. He said that he felt just as qualified as any of his friends at Harvard Law, but he didn’t have the debt!</p>
<p>Boomu</p>
<p>You make a strong case. Cheers! We are so fortunate to have so many great colleges in this land. The original poster’s story is probably very typical of top kids at many, many schools.</p>
<p>One thing I love about education is that it is not limited. What got me going was just that the thread seemed to be so much about money, or that the undergraduate school was just there so you could move on to the grad school. What about the quality of education?</p>
<p>In that, I really didn’t get any anwers, except that it was primarily up to the student.
Maybe it is. Maybe the fit for the student is the most important thing. Obviously, money can limit your choices. </p>
<p>I hope you make the most of your education. I wish I could do mine all over again!</p>
<p>Wow, how inspiring!! however i must say that i live in GA (although i didnt apply because i know so many people going there and kind of wanted to do my own thing, although i prob had like a 75% chance of getting in so it wasnt even for sure). So i know manyyyyy people who go to UGA, some are in honors, some not, and i know one person who just got the fellows scholarship, and hes the valedictorian and the only one at our school who got accepted. as you could see from the OP’s list theres obviously VERY few people in this elite program and while i applaud all of their accomplishments I would say that if you are going to a public u and not doing an elite program like that you dont get that experience at all, the reason you get the experience at UGA and not special treatment at a school like Princeton is because everyone at princeton (for the most part lol) is on the same level intellectually and being valedictorian doesnt offer you preferential treatment as it does at public state universities, so that could be a great option if you really want special experiences and to have closer relationships with professors and what not!! i just think anyone who even has the option to choose between going to an ivy and getting an elite scholarship and going to UGA (still one of the top public universities and tough for “average” people to get into lol) are extremely lucky and i wish i had those opportunities!! finances do come into the equation eventually but i think either choice will be correct, because if you are that smart and intelligent/motivated you will honestly do amazing things wherever you go! however i do have to say that in reference to finance, while the ivies are extremely expensive, the fact they dont give ANY aid isnt true on all fronts, it is true that they dont give any academic scholarships (because honestly what would be the cut off grades?! haha) but they are known for giving very large amounts (usually close to meeting full need if not 100% of need met) for people who have financial need, however im sure they have to consider an EFC to be very low to give out substantial aid, but they are known for giving need based aid largely where public universities seriously lack, so if you have exceptional need (ex: i have an EFC of 0 =[) then you should see what private colleges offer because they have more funds and public universities have very limited funds and give out alot more scholarships for academics, so even though i have an EFC of 0 i probably can’t go to the out of state school i want to go to (Clemson… ha sounds dumb compared to the ivies but i like it :/). but i think this is such an inspiring post!!! i wish i was someone as successful/smart because i want to go to a top medical school but after reading this it seems like thats a 0% chance if i go to Clemson and not even be in honors… but congrats to everyone who even has the chance to consider and ivy league school or an elite scholarship at a great public university!!</p>
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<p>The OP posted about the particularly selective type of “Full-Ride State School Scholarship” and my comments refer to that. It is not true that everything available in such a program (academically) is available at an elite. Some things are, some aren’t, and it is quite dependent on major. </p>
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</p>
<p>Some may be ahead. They have a demonstrably more selective matriculation credential to present to those grad schools that are able to interpret that information, and the combination of academic nurturing and support for Rhodes etc postgraduate applications may yield stronger results than at an elite private. </p>
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</p>
<p>Yes, I argued the same in a recent thread about honors programs. If nothing else it’s a questionable use of public money.</p>
<p>Boomu, my son is wrestling with this issue or shall I say, could wrestle with this issue of state university honors program vs. big-name school like an Ivy. He has a chance to go to a state school and be in its honors program. In fact, he has nearly a full ride there – based on his National Merit placement. </p>
<p>Fortunately, he has some wonderful, and I do mean, wonderful friends who have said that he should take such an offer over big debt that he will have if he goes to many schools on his list. In previous years at his school, kids would have said that he should take prestige (and debt) over all else. But his class is different. Three months ago, they worried about getting into school. Now, most are worried about how they will pay for it. They apply for every scholarship – local and national. And if one finds a scholarship that does not apply to him, he passes it on to someone else. His undergrad education is what he makes of it … and like you said, your cousin got to Harvard Law and without the debt.</p>
<p>cellardweller, you have to be more careful in citing statistics to support an arguement. Yes the elites do indeed graduate a higher %age of students in 4 years and their grads are enrolled in top grad/professional schools compared with top public colleges.</p>
<p>But they should!!! Why? Because only the very best students succeed the acceptance process 4 years earlier. While Cal-Berkeley is a great public their overall student body is very different from a university like Stanford.</p>
<p>The question that must be answered is how would a student accepted by Stanford do if he chose to attend Cal-Berkeley instead. The study by Kreuger and Dale determined that post grad success would be similar, the exception being minority students who do better at the more selective university.</p>
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</p>
<p>The top 20% at Cal is already an extremely selective group, let alone the top 2%. I don’t know if anybody can be assured they will be among the best coming out of Cal. Lots of students have AP credit and still can’t manage to graduate in 4 years. If you work you a** off (which many students do at Cal), you MAY get into a good program. You may just as well be weeded out along the way. Look at the number of starting premeds and how many actually get into med school. The majority were at the top of their class in HS and stll didn’t make it. Agains, SOME students at Cal will make it into top programs, MOST won’t. That’s the reverse from places such as HYPSM. </p>
<p>originalgoog:
</p>
<p>Actually, the Dale Krueger does not say that at all. You should really read the actual study as opposed to all the misquotes.</p>
<p>Apart from the fact that the number of students admitted to elite colleges and do not enroll in some other elite college is extremely small, differences between attendance at most selective colleges and less selective colleges was shown to offer a significant advantage.</p>
<p>The Dale-Kruger study concludes with:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The 23% difference was just between the most competitive and the very competitive colleges. The difference in income was even much greater with the next tier of competitive colleges. </p>
<p>An often quoted finding of the study was that when colleges were rated based on average SAT score, students who were admitted to schools with different SAT average scores and who decided to attend a school with a lower average SAT score didn’t earn any less money then their peers at the school with the higher SAT averages. This was wrongly interpreted to mean that it doesn’t matter what school a student attends. </p>
<p>But what the study really said is that the average SAT score of a school is a poor measure of future income, not that selectivity was not important.</p>
<p>You can see that quite readily when assessing PhD productivity for instance. It does not correlate well with average SAT scores but does quite well with selectivity along other metrics such as the USNWR ranking or various international rankings. Cal and UCLA have very similar student populations and SAT averages, but Cal has twice the PhD productivity. </p>
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<p>They also discovered that there was a benefit to attending a more expensive school. The more expensive the tuition the higher the lifetime return. </p>
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</p>
<p>They speculated that the greater investment per student by private colleges, greater quality signaling effect with employers, and peer spillover effect were the principal causes for the higher return.</p>
<p>Quite the opposite conclusion from your statement that which college you attend does not matter.</p>
<p>If you want the actual study you can find it here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf[/url]”>http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf</a></p>
<p>
Actually, he did, on his second try. His PhD thesis work at ETH Zurich is what eventually led him to the Nobel prize. </p>
<p>Most Nobel prize winners are actually graduates of top universities: the top 5 are Cambridge, U Chicago, MIT, Harvard and Columbia.</p>
<p>cellardweller –
Post #108. Are those there Undergrad degree universities or grad degree universities?</p>
<p>They are combined. All these schools have a number of both undergrad and grad alumni Nobel winners. I have seen a list for undergrads that claims that Caltech is first followed by U Chicago, MIT, Harvard and Columbia in that order. In many cases though, work that leads to a Nobel prize is based on PhD thesis or postdoc work. A good example is Paul Krugman this past year. Undergrad at Yale and PhD in economics from MIT. All of his advanced research work that got him the Nobel prize was performed at MIT, where he then taught for 20 years. Then, you have the example of Richard Feynmann. Undergrad from MIT, PhD from Princeton. Most of his advanced work that got him the Nobel Prize was performed at Cornell which does not get any credit. It becomes very hard sometimes to untangle which institution should get the credit for the Nobel Prize, which by definition rewards a specific research breakthrough, sometimes performed by multiple people at different institutions who may not even have been working together.</p>
<p>OP, thanks for sharing your story. It confirms what many of us on CC believe: that large state schools, particularly honors programs within them, offer tremendous opportunities at a tremendous value. The Ivy League and other elite schools are no guarantee of professional success – and success is not limited to those within their walls. </p>
<p>Congratulations.</p>
<p>But one of the points that should be reiterated is that the OP’s program is not just a plain vanilla “honor program”! It is an extremely selective honors program with exceptional benefits, which serves a very, very small group of students! Given the choice of the O.P.'s program vs. HYPS - it is easy to see that Foundation Fellows is a great choice. Full-ride plus travel and laptops and seminars and access to profs and research and mentoring; choosing that is a “no-brainer”. But given other levels of honors programs vs. HYPS or elite privates, it is a more difficult decision and should be weighed with affordability and quality of undergrad experience in mind. For example: the honors engineering program at UT-Austin did not seem to offer much when we looked! The administrator said
My son was not interested in the opera or in the huge overcrowded classes! Compare that to his private U (not HYPS level, but well-ranked), where , even without previous research experience, he has been offered a great job as a research assistant this summer which will involve advanced training and travel and further opportunities for papers/publications etc. (And this with a resume of grocery clerk and Target cashier!) There would have been 30+ students with research experience under their belts vying for that position at the big state U, and I’m sure DS would have been passed over for the opportunity.</p>
<p>christina01</p>
<p>Do not be discouraged. We have been lucky to know a true genius for some time so we have come to the grips with the fact that in this large world, there will always be someone who is better. So what? It is a very big world and we need lots of doctors, scientists, lawyers. Go for it!</p>
<p>In fairness to the elites, I do not think any college wants their students or families to take on large debt loads, and to simply compare sticker prices without really knowing what they will do for an individual is unfair to them.</p>
<p>Education is so important, and we are so thankful to have the opportunity to go to college.
We know kids struggling through the JC’s. Don’t stop. It is worth it. The benefits of education for the standard of living to both individuals and our society as a whole far outweigh the sacrifice. </p>
<p>It is easy to become complacent. It is easy to become cheap. Wherever you go to school don’t do that. Work hard. Even the laws of randomness reward the ones who stick to the task.</p>
<p>Cellardwellar - “Actually, he did, on his second try. His PhD thesis work at ETH Zurich is what eventually led him to the Nobel prize.”</p>
<p>Thank you for proving my point. We are talking of undergrad here not post grad. The fact stands that Einstein DID NOT get into Zurich as an undergrad yet he still was able to complete his studies in a manner worthy of getting admittance as a graduate student. This is all we are talking about, undergrad. No one is arguing that the Ivy’s don’t deliver a great education, or that you don’t make great connections there. The argument being made here is that you can get an equivalent or close to equivalent education for free then by all means take it. It is idiotic to start life in debt if you have another option. My dad is a president of the largest company in the world in his industry…it is super huge, fortune 500 and guess what? All of the people that he works closely with except for TWO went to public schools or private schools that are not HYP types. ALL BUT TWO! And guess what else? My dad only has a bachelors from a public u. and he is their boss!!! It has always been his opinion that it does not matter what college name is on your degree but what you did while you were in that college that is important. He said that when he was a new graduate employers recognized the fact that he worked his way through college, stayed on the honor roll, and found time for philanthropic work. College is what you make of it and the name of a school on a diploma won’t change that. It may open a door for you but that same door will hit you in the a** if you don’t perform. And you all can make the argument also that what is a perk at the UGA program is standard in an ivy, yes you are right but the student has to take advantage of it for it to do any good. So you went to Harvard, big deal if all you did was go to class, sleep, and party. I’ll take the super motivated UGA honors grad over that any day. (And yes, Harvard students do party…a lot, I have pictures from friends that prove it!)</p>
<p>cellardweller,</p>
<p>Either you have no idea how to read a research paper or you’ve just done a masterful job of mis-using quotes from Krueger & Dale as I have ever seen. </p>
<p>I don’t know where to begin in a reply. And the final published paper is no longer available for free, only an earlier working paper, so I won’t try to respond point by point. But it is interesting to quote the conclusions of the paper:
they state further, in a quote from Hunt
These are not my words, but the authors. </p>
<p>Others, most notably Hoxby while she was at Harvard, claim to have found a small income effect, on the order of a few percent - nothing like the quote above, which is completely out of context. </p>
<p>Finally, keep in mind that the data on which these studies was based is now decades old. Whether there is an effect or not I will leave for you. But K & D does not say there is.</p>
<p>Geesh.</p>
<p>Boomu</p>
<p>I totally agree that no matter where you go you have to work hard to succeed.</p>
<p>Let’s say the elites accept you, and they see you need aid and they offer a nice package. Your goal is to be “all that you can be.” Is there no point where you would say, OK, I think elite school “X” is my best choice, because a lot of their kids become scientists, so they seem to be doing a good job of educating there. Or the UC’s, or other privates just below the Ivies, even though you have to pay something there. </p>
<p>And if you say,“no, free is always better,” is it because you have deep aversion towards debt of any kind, or is it because you do not believe that the education is any different at any of these schools.</p>
<p>newmassdad:</p>
<p>You obviously didn’t read the full conclusion or didn’t undertsand it. I quoted the entire conclusion, so I definitely did not make quotations out of context. </p>
<p>They did find that SAT is not a predictor of future earnings but that school selectvity based on the Barron’s ranking measure was such a predictor. The top category in the Barron’s ranking (most selective) consists of the top 25 universities and LACs. Their study did find that students who were admitted to these colleges enrolled instead at colleges in the next most selective category (more selective) made on average 23% less in income. The income effect was even much greater when comparing to the next level of schools. </p>
<p>D&K have NEVER said that attending an elite college does not matter. They just found that average SAT scores of a college does not measure the financial success of its future graduates. But we already knew that: elite colleges do not admit based on SAT scores alone and use many other factors in admission. </p>
<p>If you want the detailed analysis and can understand the statistics they are right there in the report that I attached. See Table 7. </p>
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</p>
<p>In layman’s terms, it means that with 95% certainty, selectivity measured with the Barron’s ranking is significantly correlated with income, after accounting for matched applicants. </p>
<p>That’s the proof for you. </p>
<p>The income effect of between 23 % is the one actually from the study and also in the conclusion. </p>
<p>There is also an extensive discussion in the report on the correlation between tuition and future earnings. </p>
<p>If you are trying to separately argue that the Dale and Krueger study results may no longer be valid, that is an entirely different discussion, (and there is much evidence of a widening divide not a narrowing one), but don’t try to have the study say what it does not.</p>
<p>Your quote from Hunt has nothing to do with the study. </p>
<p>BTW none of the schools among HYPSM were in the D&K study as not enough matched applicants could be found. The number of students turning down these schools for less selective colleges is simply statistically insignificant. Had they been included as a supercategory above the most selective category, the income effect would have been even much larger.</p>
<p>cellardweller,</p>
<p>It is too bad that you missed the whole point of the K & D study. </p>
<p>This is no place for a statistics debate, nor of the importance of controls and norming of data.</p>
<p>If you want to think it matters, go ahead and think that. If you think K & D says that, more power to you. </p>
<p>I’ll bow out of this discussion and unsubscribe from the thread.</p>
<p>Well…of course there are students who are sooo super smart and are interested in a particular field where the sheer number of intellectual peers at a public could not satisfy them. Take Stephen Hawking for example, he is brilliant and his brilliance needs to be accommodated even at the undergrad level. But again, he would probably get support in terms of financial aid, just like the 16 year old genius who has already graduated high school with a lot of Ap’s etc. So, yes, there are people who have to be surrounded by Ivy peers and professors. But most students who go to these schools, I would venture to guess, would be satisfied in a top public honors program. When I look at the kids from my school who have gone to Ivy, versus those who didn’t, there isn
't that much of a difference in intellect because none of them were in that stratosphere of exceptional genius. They are merely (???) very smart, capable, and hard working students. I have never met a true genius, but I would venture to say that a true genius would be identified by all concerned and would receive enough financial aid to make it possible to attend an Ivy.</p>
<p>I am not averse to debt, I just want to be responsible about it. I just don’t want to start out with a financial noose around my neck. My parents bought me a car that is now 6 years old and I intend to take great care of it so that I don’t have to buy a new car right after college graduation. I know I won’t be able to pay cash for a new car but when the time comes I want a hefty down payment. I know I will also need a mortgage someday and that I will probably get a credit card of some sort. I want to enjoy my salary when the time comes and save for important things and not have to pay off a student loan for the next 10 years when I could be buying a house.
I have received several scholarship offers and I will go to the school that offers me the best package because all in all it will be the same education for me no matter where I go…I am no exceptional genius. My dad knows a guy who went to Harvard and to Harvard Law…he is still paying for that friggin education even though it has been 13 years since graduation! He will be the first to tell you, don’t do it if you have another alternative, but then he is just your average really smart person, not a genius either.</p>
<p>Genius or no genius, Ivy financial aid is ENTIRELY need-based. So if the family income is too high to qualify, there’s no negotiating room.</p>