- Medical schools are not going to care about your undergrad major. They are going tomcare about your MCAT score and GPA...and that you took all the courses required for med school consideration.
- If he really thinks he will be going to medical school...then you probably want to save money to help him with that...
- All of the schools are good school. If finances really are NOT a consideration...let your son choose. Presumably you discussed finances, and college choices with him BEFORE he applied. That being the case...set a deadline of April 29 and tell him you need his choice by that day so you can send in a deposit. He will figure it out.
- There is a LOT you can do with the money saved by him attending Villanova. He might or might not care about that (my kid didn't...). Opportunities for study abroad, or unpaid internships. Etc.
- To others posting...I'm not sure I see a real diversity difference between Villanova and Notre Dame.
I personally would choose Villanova because I think it will be a great experience and will enable your son to save his money for graduate school. I grew up just a few minutes from Villanova, have a large number of classmates and relatives who graduated from there, and I attended the school myself for a year (transferred out because I was living at home and commuting and did not like that, though I loved the school itself), so I know it’s a great place. I also like that Villanova is not in the middle of nowhere. Notre Dame is a great school, and I don’t think your son could go wrong with that choice, but my daughter has friends who go there who tired of South Bend pretty quickly.
With respect to the distance, we currently live about half an hour from Northwestern, and a few kids from my daughter’s HS attend there. Those kids do not come home much more often than my daughter does, and she’s 12 hours away. There’s a world of difference between living close and commuting and living close and dorming, especially when you’re at a school that is active on weekends. (Suitcase schools are different, and Villanova is most definitely NOT a suitcase school).
When my daughter was choosing her college, there was a $100,000+ difference between her two final choices. We could afford to send her to either, but I told her she needed to really think about whether one was worth that much more to her. If it was, we’d pay the difference, but if it was close (and I knew it was, since she was agonizing over the choice), then money should really factor into the equation. We also told my daughter that money saved on college would be available for grad school, downpayments, etc. She chose the less expensive option and has been happy with her choice.
“To others posting…I’m not sure I see a real diversity difference between Villanova and Notre Dame.”
Totally.
Nova and ND are both great schools with a lot of strengths, including great tight knit student communities with a strong faith/ethics/service component. But Nova is 75% Catholic and ND is 80+%; U.S. is 24%. So it is literally impossible for those schools to really hit the diversity metrics you see at secular schools.
There’s a lot of reasons to send your kid to ND or Nova, but diversity ain’t one of them.
If he doesn’t love Brown he shouldn’t go there. Forget the term Ivy League. You can get a good job in CS without grad school. If he’s sure he’s going to go for med school you should save your money, but most kids who think they might want to go to med school don’t ende up going that route. If all the options are affordable he should make the choice.
Many years ago my son chose Carnegie Mellon (#24 I think) over Harvard. Never regretted it. He was in CS.
I went to Brown and loved it but going there because it’s an ivy league school is not a good reason to pick it- because most people in America have never heard of it, and are pretty sure that it’s not an Ivy league school even if US News says it is.
CS there is very strong; I have over a dozen college classmates who are physicians who LOVED being premed at Brown (mainly because there is no “premed”- you just study what you want so they majored in Comp Lit and History or Classics or whatever). And because Providence is a small city it is easy to get around and VERY easy to do the kind of EC’s or shadowing or research or whatnot that can bolster a med school application. Brown is still the most significant/high impact organization in the city (if not the region) and so it punches above its weight in terms of the philanthropic and educational landscape of the area.
The academic quality difference between Brown’s Computer Science department and Villanova’s is pretty vast. It’s completely rational to ask whether that vast academic difference is worth the vast price difference, but it’s not rational to pretend that they represent almost the same experience. The difference between Brown and the other schools in CS does not seem as likely to be anywhere near as significant, but I don’t know that much about them.
The lack of general education requirements at Brown is definitely an advantage for students who want to double-major. Also the fact that Brown requires fewer courses. You can get a BS at Brown with 17 courses; at Villanova, 23 will be required for a BS, plus a bunch of other general requirements. Brown also offers a bunch of cross-disciplinary majors, including Computational Biology, which would be a great major for a pre-med or a non-pre-med interested in intersection of technology and basic science.
@PurpleTitan I don’t think you meant to address all of your message to me. It’s not my son who is making the choice. It’s the OP’s.
However, we simply have different views…which is fine. I’m past this stage. I sacrificed a lot for my offspring’s education. Unless I won the lottery, I’d never dream of giving my offspring money for a house or to start a business. Even if i won the lottery, I’d hesitate. If I had a kid who said “I’ll go to SUNY and you can give me the $ you save to buy a house or start a business” the answer would be no. I would NEVER ever give any child or grandchild of mine an incentive to go to a cheaper college by offering them money to buy a better house than they could otherwise buy on their own.
The quality of education matters a lot to me. (It’s not because of any “return on investment.” ) A kid can’t finance a college education if his/her parents can afford it thus making the kid ineligible for fin aid. So, that’s something I sacrificed to make possible. An adult can buy his/her own home and start his/her own business. IMO, these aren’t things adults should expect help from parents to do. YMMV and obviously does. That’s fine; different people have different values.
As for a MBA…there’s nothing in the OP’s posts that makes that likely, so to me, saving money on UG, just in case the S wants to get a MBA makes no sense. Moreover, it’s a lot easier for someone who has graduated from college and worked 3-5 years to finance a MBA than it is for a 17 or 18 year old kid to finance college.
Someone upstream said "
That depends. To me it’s the opposite. I don’t know many people who went to Villanova, but each and every one i do know applied to ND and was rejected. They were usually also rejected at Boston College and sometimes Georgetown. I don’t think top of the class at Villanova is better than middle of the class at ND. Again, others have different thoughts.
I too am a Brown grad. I don’t think the fact it’s an Ivy is a sufficient reason to go there. I do think it’s about the best place in the nation to be a premed. Being able to use the S/NC option for courses outside the premed and concentration requirements takes off a LOT of pressure. Most of the premeds I’ve known who attended other colleges take as many guts as possible to meet distribution requirements. That’s not necessary at Brown. Plus, despite Brown’s artsy/fartsy rep, Brown has great prep for premeds and there are a lot of them. 85% get into med school. Biology/Biological sciences, neuroscience, and computer science are among Brown’s most popular and strongest majors.
I know Villanova has a med school, so this may not be a valid point of comparison. However, one of Brown’s strengths is that it’s pretty easy for students to get involved in research, shadowing, and other activities at Rhode Island Hospital and the med school. Such activities not only make for a better med school application, they also give an undecided student the chance to do things which help to decide whether (s)he wants to be a physician.
Again, I am not saying that Brown is the best choice for the OP’s son. I’ve no idea whether it is.If he was absolutely sure he wanted to go to med school, I’d hesitate to recommend it. However, I’d probably have him visit.
Agree with most of what Jonri has posted. And going to Brown because it’s easy to do med-related EC’s is also not a sufficient reason to go… but for a kid who is pretty focused on medicine as a career goal but has a lot of other interests (art history, foreign languages, etc.) it’s a very good place to launch.
For my own kids, the argument that it’s better to be the top kid at college A vs. “one of the pack” at college B wasn’t terribly meaningful. If you had a kid who was an Olympic caliber athlete, would you want him or her training with a local coach, playing tennis on your local courts with the top ranked kids in your local club, or would you insist on a specialized form of training at an elite level?
I think some kids are ok with being outrun in college. Mine were. Just meeting kids who were clearly “off the charts” was an educational experience- it’s so easy to think you are a special snowflake at your own HS, but pushing yourself in a place with all these special snowflakes- that’s another race entirely.
YMMV. OP’s kid needs to figure out what he wants and then the family needs to figure out what’s a rational financial strategy to get there.
Good luck.
“That depends. To me it’s the opposite. I don’t know many people who went to Villanova, but each and every one i do know applied to ND and was rejected.”
Yeah but this kid obviously did get admitted to ND and he’s the top star at Nova.
I’d agree that “I went to ND” is a better story than “I went to Nova.” But the story “I thought about going to ND but attended Nova instead on a full ride academic scholarship” is at least as good as “I went to ND.”
But it costs $275k less.
@jonri: “If I had a kid who said “I’ll go to SUNY and you can give me the $ you save to buy a house or start a business” the answer would be no. I would NEVER ever give any child or grandchild of mine an incentive to go to a cheaper college by offering them money to buy a better house than they could otherwise buy on their own.”
Yep, we have different values. To me, money is money. And quality of education matters to me as well. Yet
- What “quality of education” means is something much more amorphous. Especially in a field like CS where you can get a quality CS education for free just by going through MIT’s OCR or other online resources if you had the motivation. And yes, many colleges in the US expect you to pay. But in this instance, it’s not the case that the OP’s kid can not go to college if OP doesn’t pay for it, so it is indeed a trade-off between education at School A vs. education at School B + free masters + down payment on a house + seed money money for a business.
- I’m not someone who thinks that you can only get an education at an elite college. School B + starting a business may be both a better education and better investment than just education at School A.
And, of course, Villanova isn’t a SUNY.
@blossom: “If you had a kid who was an Olympic caliber athlete, would you want him or her training with a local coach, playing tennis on your local courts with the top ranked kids in your local club, or would you insist on a specialized form of training at an elite level?”
An interesting but potentially misleading comparison due to hyperbole as
1: I’m not sure the OP’s kid is at the Olympic caliber level
2. I’m not sure Brown, while elite, is at the Olympic-elite level
3. Villanova certainly isn’t at the local courts level. You’re making Villanova out to be some sort of CC or open-admissions directional.
Of course Malcolm Gladwell would tell you to pick Nova over ND even putting the money aside.
Villanova is not a CC and I never said that.
I was responding to the poster who implied that it’s better to be the top of the heap than the middle of the pack. And my view on that is “it depends”. IF the kid prefers to be surrounded by kids who are better prepared, smarter, work harder, more intellectually ambitious, etc. (and that’s an if for sure) then kick the tires on Villanova pretty hard since it’s not obvious that this will be the case at Villanova.
Hence my comparison to how a kid wants to train.
There are plenty of fine tennis players in the world who could care less about elite level training and that’s fine. There are plenty of players who train and train with elite coaches and facilities and never make it to the Olympics. And that’s also fine.
But few people would pretend that a kid shouldn’t at least consider a more intense type of training (if they can afford it, if that’s what the kid wants, etc.) just because both types of training involve hitting a ball across a net.
CS is NOT all the same-- many posters conflate programming or becoming a coding junkie with all forms of CS and that’s categorically not true. I have a friend who just finished a PhD in CS and there are only two universities in the world where this pretty esoteric branch of CS can be researched and taught at a meaningful level (or so he claims). If the OP’s kid wants to learn to code- great. But there are highly theoretical fields and subfields within CS which are going to be MUCH stronger at some colleges than at others (and maybe Brown is the wrong place for this kid- but I don’t see Cal Tech, MIT, Chicago, UIUC, or Berkeley on this list).
Villanova is a great choice for certain kids. Go kick the tires. It may be fine, it may be terrible, but going there because it’s free if the family can afford other options isn’t necessarily the right choice either.
@PurpleTitan I don’t think you can only get a good education at an elite school either. However, neither do I think the OP’s S should just choose the cheapest college.
I also think–apparently contrary to the consensus view on CC —that is very dangerous for anyone offered merit money at a college to assume that on graduation day his/her class rank will correlate with his high school stats when he was admitted. So, I don’t assume that if S goes to Villanova he’ll be top of the class and if he goes to ND or Brown he’ll be in the middle of the class.
Can you afford to “pay into” Brown and ND? Would he have to take loans? Would you? That is a critical question. If you are willing/able to pay for all of these schools the questions are more difficult.
One critical point for a kid that wants to do research is to find out about the research projects going on at the school and whether undergrads are able to get on research projects. Are there projects that match his interest? The other thing to research is the course offerings. Does one offer more in the area of comp science he is interested in?
If he is pretty sure he wants medicine, Nova would be a good choice. If he is more interested in comp sci, one of the others may provide a better education. As others have said, may not be worth full freight at ND or Brown, but both U Roch and Case are strong in Comp Sci, although Brown is probably the highest ranked of the schools he is considering.
Good options, but tough choices.
“I was responding to the poster who implied that it’s better to be the top of the heap than the middle of the pack.”
As noted above Malcolm Gladwell, for one, believe this is always the better call regardless of cost:
“Relative deprivation is why Gladwell takes issue with the belief that elite schools are automatically better. He cites the example of one student, under the pseudonym “Caroline Sacks,” who was determined to go into science until attending Brown University. There, she earned mediocre grades and felt generally stupid compared to her straight-A classmates, though according to Gladwell she was likely still in the 99th percentile worldwide. She eventually quit science.”
“Gladwell chalks this up to relative deprivation. The worst STEM students at Harvard, he claims, may be as smart as the top third at a lower ranked college. But Harvard students compare themselves to their Harvard peers, and that’s bound to make those in the bottom third feel stupid and unsuccessful. Better to have gone to a non-elite institution, he says — to have been a big fish in a little pond — than have had your dreams and confidence crushed.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwells-david-and-goliath-2013-10
“You’re making Villanova out to be some sort of CC or open-admissions directional.”
FWIW, USNWR has it at:
14 Brown
T15 ND
32 Rochester
37 CWRU
50 Nova
None of the schools is HYPS, and none is Podunk U either.
Regarding Gladwell- there’s no reason to believe this student would be the bottom of the pack at ND, so not sure that part of this discussion is relevant to the OP.
It seems as if OP can afford and is wiling to fund any choice. That’s a nice place to be. If he came here and said, I’m thinking of taking a special trip with my wife for our 25th anniversary. Considering either Lake Como Italy or Niagra Falls. Can afford either, but Niagra Falls would be much cheaper. I think most people would say Lake Como. My point here, is that many of us don’t think that education is a commodity or can be reduced to a number in USNWR. It’s an experience too. ND may provide a more lifelong experience than some of the others. It’s that type of place, if it’s your cup of tea.
This OP student has a bunch of great choices. TBH, it’s a matter of personal preference which one he chooses. He will get a fine education at any of the,colleges where he got accepted,
Fwiw, Gladwell’s actual advice is that you should go someplace where you would be in the top one third of the enrolled student body.
From the merit awards, we can assume the kid is top one-third (likely better) at Roch, Case and Nova. Can’t tell (since we don’t have the actual stats) if the kid is average or slightly above/below average at ND or Brown.
I probably entered Brown near the bottom (or at least in the bottom quartile) of the class. My guidance counselor told me it was a waste of $20.
I graduated magna cum laude with the top award in my department. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell on a number of different points but the idea that I should have gone to U Mass where I would have been in the top third vs. Brown is sort of ludicrous as a general rule of thumb without asking other questions to really understand a kid and his/her motivations, aspirations, etc.
Gladwell likes to sell books and appear on TV. Presumably the OP is more concerned with the educational rigor for the kid than what a TV personality has to say.