Hello @jsnowut, I am not sure if this is you, because there are a few details in your account that do not line up, and certainly there are far more people not on CC than on CC. In any case, I am glad you and your daughter have reached peace with this decision, especially if it was painful. I am certainly not advocating choosing Brown over Tulane. My point was only to reiterate what @carolinamom2boys’s advice: “that’s why my kids don’t apply to colleges that we can’t afford just to see if they can get in. It sets people up for family discord,” which I still believe is good advice. I think Tulane is a wonderful school, as you see I include it as a “tippy-top” along with Brown, and I hope your child has a very wonderful experience there. There is no doubt in my mind that the weather will be nicer!
Hello @carolinamom2boys and @eastgrad. This is the wife of @jsnowut. I also wanted to clarify a few points to clear up the story for future families researching a similar situation.
1 - We were very clear with our daughter that if she “hit it out of the ball park” we would pay for her to go to a top school. We were clear that we meant Stanford, Caltech, or MIT (where she was waitlisted). She chose to apply to some other schools to see if she could get in.
2 - This wasn’t a painful experience. She was on speaking terms with us the entire time. She simply didn’t want to engage in conversation dealing directly with the Brown vs. Tulane discussion for a short period of time. Her hired college counselor (who graduated from Brown and in the end encouraged her to go to Tulane) told her that she needed to mourn either decision and that it was a good decision to have to make. Daughter took that to heart and mourned the loss of the northeast Ivy league experience. We eventually had many heartfelt discussions concerning the decision.
3 - We also told daughter that if she really felt compelled to go to Brown that she should put pen to paper and start looking at the numbers. We told her we would be swayed if she really felt that Brown was the perfect place to be. She made the decision with the help of us and practically the entire neighborhood which is located next to a flagship University. We spoke to many professors from the University with Ivy League degrees.
4 - I believe that although it might be difficult to pass up a great school, the process was beneficial in the end. She gained another interview experience. She went on a really fun trip to Brown and stayed on campus, met students, expanded her horizons, learned first-hand what an east coast Ivy League school is really all about. She knows she can get into an elite school. This experience will surely help inform her decisions for grad school.
Last Sunday is Brown’s 250th Commencement . This story in Commencement Magazine 2018 (http://www.browndailyherald.com/2018/05/25/michelle-zabat-dad-jokes/) is truly moving.
“Michelle, I will have nothing to leave to you when I die,” he said. “But while I’m alive I can try and help pay for your education.”
Even for a top student, there are no guarantees what will happen to one’s career later in life. But the words –
“Four years later, I am grateful to be able to say: Dad, I’m happy. I am so, so happy. College has been harder than I ever imagined it would be, and I have had to survive things that I never dreamed I would need to endure. But there is so much light and love to be had in this world, and I am thankful that you’ve spent the last few decades of your life teaching me how to seek it.”
make every dime spend on education worth it.
This story brings tears to my eyes. I hope parents who are willing to pay for their kids’ education read the whole story. If you can afford it, there is definitely value. Love and Happiness is priceless.
Thanks for the link to the lovely story. However, I’m afraid that you took the wrong lesson from it - one that I doubt the writer would agree with.
“I hope parents who are willing to pay for their kids’ education read the whole story. If you can afford it, there is definitely value. Love and Happiness is priceless.”
You seem to equate “love” with struggling to pay for an expensive college education for your child while a perfectly good alternative is available. You seem to equate “happiness” with your child attending that expensive college.
That wasn’t what the writer was saying. In fact, her first year at college left her incredibly depressed. With support from her parents she came through it and thrived, but your takeaway from the article – that somehow her parents going into debt or gathering resources so their daughter could have a miserable first year and terrific next three years was an example of “true love” – is really off.
The love that her parents showed their daughter was their ongoing support and unconditional love when she was feeling at her very lowest. Not buying her an expensive college education versus one that was more affordable. That was what the writer was saying. You missed the point.
A recent clickbait “Ivy league… Be prepared” thread started by a Rice parent discussed the difficulties some students face in freshman year. You daughter is in for a rude awakening anywhere she goes. There is simply nothing she has experienced in high school that will fully prepare her for the next level. The pace is much faster and the concepts more abstract. An unhappy student is less motivated to overcome the difficulties. That is the biggest risk OP faces. There is another version of this story by another long time poster. I don’t know whose version of this story is more accurate. @jsnowut
The biggest difference between OP’s daughter and the girl in the Brown article is that one is realizing her dream. One is not.
Her dream should be what happens with the college experience. Not the college experience. College is 4 years of hopefully a 90 year life. Please don’t peak in college. There’s a long life after
@nrtlax33 OMG let it go. This student is a STAMPS scholar. She’s going to get a ton of opportunities not available to her at Brown. She’s coming to Tulane with rockstar status.
My D picked Vandy with full tuition scholarship instead of MIT full pay, and a lot of people thought she was crazy and I had some friends shaming me and my DH for not wanting best for our D. In our case, D made the decision, To her, it is more than the prestige–it is what you want from your education. Besides the ROI aspect that she was very keen on, she also wanted to have balance. Having time to pursue ECs, volunteering and still have time to DJ radio shows is very important to her. She also added premed after she decided Vandy. She has been doing extremely well there and is very happy with her decision.
D wrote and published an essay about her decision…I included an excerpt.
“First and foremost, please remember that college is not the end destination; college is not where you should be peaking. No matter what college you choose, more times than not, your happiness and success at a college is a result of self-determination. A result of you, standing up and resolving, “I will be happy and successful.”
May your daughter come to appreciate the wisdom of the decision very soon! @jsnowut Stamps is more than just a scholarship, it is network and experience! Best of luck to her and your guys. You did and will do the best for your D, your past sacrifices made her what a young lady she is today, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise!
@nrtlax33 Thanks for your continued concern and interest in my daughter’s future well being. In the end we are all trying to do our best and hoping that it works out. We all come from different backgrounds and with different life experiences that inform the decisions we make. There’s no right or wrong answer - it’s a long journey with many choices and a never ending series of corrective actions along the way to keep us moving in the direction that we believe is right, good, and satisfying.
Needless to say we are different people. Probably like @privatebanker I don’t believe in a “dream school” likely because that kind of term made no sense to me in my circumstances. I feel that if my daughter can’t take the opportunities that she has been provided and make something wonderful and memorable out of them, then I probably failed as a parent.
Only time will tell and there are so many other events that will occur along the way it will likely be impossible to ever determine if this decision played a material role in where my daughter ends up and what she ends up doing and whether she is happy and healthy - which are really the only 2 things that matter.
Alright - since I am embarking on this post I will put my wrap-up comments in a few following posts, for what they are worth, for the benefit of anyone in this position in the future, and as a form of repayment and expression of gratitude to those that took the time to share their thoughts, opinions and information with me on this thread.
To start here is kind of the background from where we came to this decision:
A. The decision wasn’t about which school is better or whether one is better than the other. The objective, general facts about Brown v. Tulane seemed to be - Brown is Ivy League, Brown has more widespread prestige and signifies that you have been selected through a very highly selective admission process, and Brown would be a better choice if you want to work in investment banking because investment banking firms recruit at Ivy League schools and you have a much better chance of getting your resume seen. Otherwise, setting aside the geographical difference, both offer the opportunity to have a wonderful and enriching undergraduate experience.
B. All things being equal, my daughter would have selected Brown because as I explained above she saw that as a better outcome for her hard work and success in high school and sees herself as a progressive, intellectual that would fit in well at an east coast Ivy League school.
C. I saw the decision we faced as very much financial. It was as if someone put a box with $280,000 in it on your kitchen table and passed it over to you and told you it was yours. Should you push the box back and say ‘no thanks,’ pull out your own empty box, fill it up with your own $280,000 and send it to Brown?
Most people would say no way unless there is an exceptionally compelling reason. That is a <$580,000> hit to your wealth building efforts. It represents roughly $400,000 that would need to be earned to pay that amount. That translates into X years of work to accumulate that amount of ‘disposable’ income.
D. Before embarking on this journey my wife and I believed that there are a handful of colleges and universities that can legitimately change the trajectory of your life by attending them. Our list was not based on thorough research, but more on a generalized understanding of where folks end up that attend these universities. We concluded, that it would be worth turning ourselves inside out to pay for one of these universities if she was accepted. Otherwise, given our financial circumstances, we figured that our children are better off attending the state flagship and conserving money for grad or professional school.
The only reason that this mattered was because I think D was a legitimate candidate for these schools. I had no idea how hard it is to get into these schools and how insane the process is, but her qualifications are stellar and she had a valid right to apply to the top schools with an expectation of being accepted. Ok, so these schools were MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Princeton. She was wait listed at MIT and Stanford, deferred and then denied at CalTech and denied at Princeton. Her classmate and friend with lower ACT, SAT and SAT subject scores was accepted to Stanford [Yay!!!].
I am not going to defend “our list” because there really isn’t too much behind it - so please don’t spend any effort explaining why the list is wrong or incomplete or just plain dumb because I acknowledge it is probably all of those things. It is just a part of the background that was in place when we approached this decision.
Brown was not on “our list.” This doesn’t mean that we thought Brown was a poor school or anything. We have friends who have attended Brown and whose children attend and have attended Brown. But it just didn’t rise to the level in our minds as the kind of school that would automatically motivate us to find a way to pay for it.
Ok, that kind of sets the table. Here’s what we did and then I’ll list what we found out.
- We went to both schools, visited the campus, D attended classes, spoke with students. We researched both schools, etc.
- We invested the money to have a third set of eyes, a financial planning professional, look at our finances so we had a good understanding of what the ramifications would be if we decided to pay for a school like Brown.
- We started this thread to obtain information, thoughts and opinions from people who think about these types of decisions or have confronted them themselves.
- We spoke to parents of Stamps scholars to learn from their experiences and the experiences of their children.
- My daughter spoke with other Stamps scholars that decided not to attend more prestigious universities to learn from their experiences and learn of their plans for the future and whether they had regrets with respect to their decisions.
- We spoke to many, many, many, highly credentialed and successful people in our community to obtain their thoughts.
- We attended a Brown admitted students and alumni gathering and obtained information from alumni and other prospective students.
There is probably more, but that is what I can recall now.
Here’s generally what we found out:
I. By in large most people thought the Stamps scholarship at Tulane was the better choice. This was a combination of the financial and non-financial benefits of the Stamps scholarship. The opportunity to conserve resources and to use them for grad or professional school and reduce debt for those programs was seen as a very significant benefit.
II. Most professionals stated that it was a better plan to try to attend a prestigious grad or professional school as opposed to a prestigious undergrad school because that is where the “weight” of where you obtained your degree can really matter. And your chances of being accepted into such a program were not materially diminished by attending Tulane instead of Brown.
III. It is the student that makes the difference, not the institution.
Okay, so you know the decision - but how did we arrive at it? On the one hand, I think the most compelling bit of reasoning on the Brown side was when my D basically explained that rather than save money for the future and future needs, it might be a better use of the money to pay for D’s education at Brown now. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that reasoning.
That said, as we journeyed further into the information around us, my daughter became comfortable that others before her had chosen to accept scholarships at non Ivy or Ivy equivalent schools and were pleased with their choices.
She understood the significance of turning down the scholarship opportunity and that it couldn’t be done lightly. She understood the benefit of being able to continue her education after her undergraduate degree with money to help pay for it.
She understood the different pressures and expectations she would put on herself depending on which path she chose, and she understood the sacrifices she would have to make if she wanted to make Brown work.
She also understood that Tulane was a super cool place to go to school and would be a great experience - and just how lucky she is.
So, as I said above, after giving things time to sort out and undertaking the information gathering process, the decision wasn’t that difficult.
@jsnowut, I just wanted to commend you on how gracious you’ve been throughout this thread. I know I wouldn’t have been so patient. The logic you applied to making this decision will surely help other parents in the future.
Your daughter has a wonderful future ahead of her, and as parents you and your wife who should feel very proud of how you’ve raised her. Wishing her all the best at Tulane.
Ok to sum it up - We are extremely grateful for the wonderful opportunities that my daughter has been provided, and we are extremely grateful for all of the time, effort, support and help that people have been willing to give us along the way.
A heartfelt thanks to you all - you too @SincererLove - sharing your experience here down the line!
We all try our hardest to do what we think is the best. I am confident that things are going to work out great and am super excited for the future!
All the best to everyone that has read or posted in this thread!
CHEERS x 20!!!
@jsnowut : Thank you so much for sharing your thought with us.
None of us on the internet has any right to comment on others’ financial decision. I think a lesson here is “better expectation management” from the beginning. Parents should let their children know their firm budgets.
We are among the 30% middle class at Brown who got some financial aid. We use Brown’s “better” peers’ offers to get some more. According to WSJ – At Tulane University in New Orleans, nearly 39% of undergraduate students received scholarships without showing financial need. The school estimates it will spend $71.5 million on awards this year not tied to financial need, and $64.2 million on need-based aid. I envy those students who got merit aid.
My child has passed orgo and physiology with flying colors. As it stands now, my spouse and I are joking privately that maybe a more “cut-throat” school has more contenders. Seriously, Brown is the best place to do premed. My child is very happy and actively involved in clubs and activities in school. We cannot imagine there is a better choice for us.
All the best for you and your daughter’s future endeavors.
@jsnowut Hi, I’m an incoming senior and was wondering if you have any tips/advice for getting the Stamps Scholarship in Tulane? I know that you have to apply for the Dean Honor Scholarship or the Paul Tulane Award first. What was your child’s project about? Did it center around a single theme?