UChicago: Bad Bang for the $ ?

Cue7
Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:51:52 +0000

The problem with this ranking is that the margins between some of the “worst” colleges and some of the “best” colleges is so thin.

According to the link you provided, a Chicago education costs about $195K, and the 30 year return on investment is about $1M.

Then, according to the ranking of the “Best” colleges by this metric, a Columbia education costs about $192K, and the return on investment is about $1.16M. That’s really not a drastic difference than the $1M projected 30-year ROI found at Chicago.

Here’s the link to Columbia’s ranking: The 20 Schools That Offer the Best Value for Your Money;

Interestingly, Brown and Cornell do not make either list, so I’d imagine Chicago is somewhat on par with these two schools.

Moreover, the schools known for having a big, strong, and continuing connection to the finance industry (Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton), and then the elite tech schools that continuingly feed lucrative tech and engineering industries (MIT and Cal Tech) do extremely well, and do seem to distance themselves from Chicago’s ROI.

So to answer your question of “is Chicago overpriced relative to its peers?”, my response would be: it depends. Chicago seems to be in good standing relative to Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Penn (which may be buoyed a bit due to Wharton), but falls back in comparison to Harvard and Princeton.

In any case, would this come as a surprise to anyone - that Chicago isn’t quite on the level of a Harvard or Princeton? If you’re intent on making money and being a captain of some industry, I don’t think it makes much sense to turn down Harvard or Princeton or Wharton for the U of C.

To conclude, as always, when posters look to compare Chicago to “the ivies,” my response is always the same: which ivies? There is a lot of disparity within the ivy league itself. Generally, by pretty much any metric, if you compare Chicago to Columbia, Cornell, Penn, etc., Chicago is a peer on equal standing with these other schools. If, however, you compare the U of C to Yale, Princeton, etc., Chicago falls off the pace a bit.