<p>Hey everyone! I'm planning to go into Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Columbia (also, CP Davis Scholar here) or if I attend or study Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt. The COA for Vanderbilt for me is ~9,000 after some scholarships (including full tuition). My COA of Columbia (after Financial Aid :( ) is 50,000. My family is ready to pay 30000, but the rest would have to be personal loans from my parent's savings/retirement funds. I would rather attend Columbia-- it's a much better fit-- but money is an issue. We already talked to the financial aid department, the grant amount isn't changing. From talking to an ORFE professor at Columbia, it seems like most kids go straight to Wall Street jobs and such as opposed to grad school. Any opinions/advice? I feel really torn.</p>
<p>Is that an estimated 50k over 4 years? If not, I think that’s too much to pay over Vandy. Although I suppose you would probably make more money from your Columbia degree than your Vandy one after college.</p>
<p>Please read the article on huge debts taken on for tuition in the Chicago Tribune today.</p>
<p>Senior, these are yearly COAs.
Thanks MWestMom for the recommendation! (Was it this one? [Student</a> debt: Student debt seen as threat to overall economy - chicagotribune.com](<a href=“Business News - Chicago Tribune”>http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0413-student-debt-20120416,0,951965.story))</p>
<p>Anyone have other opinions?</p>
<p>Here is the article: [Chicago</a> woman testified before Senate about student loan debt - chicagotribune.com](<a href=“Business News - Chicago Tribune”>Business News - Chicago Tribune)</p>
<p>The poor woman got herself in the predicament, but what a terrible situation.</p>
<p>OP: your situation is not comparable to the woman of Harrington College of Design in Chicago. As an ORFE student, and maybe with an interest in working on Wall Street, you have a very different prospect financially. Depending on your ambition and the efforts you are willing to put in to support such an ambition, a Wall Street job for a Columbia ORFE student is quite realistic. The amount of debt (20x4=80K) is not trivial, but is not something you cannot handle with a finance career. Again, you have to make sure you work hard enough and be competitive for one of those jobs if you choose to take on the debt, but you don’t need to be scared of it.</p>
<p>Do you have ANY other schools that you can attend lucratively? I can understand fit being a problem; I’m a freshman at Vanderbilt and could never see myself going to school in NYC. Rest assured that if you must attend Vanderbilt, you will not be lacking for a social life or academic rigor. </p>
<p>I would advise someone in your situation against Columbia. 80k in debt + interest on that debt + high cost of living in NYC + the 21k a year that your parents would save otherwise and the stress resulting from such a financial situation would make Columbia completely unjustifiable in my book. Then again, you are the only one who can put a price on your happiness.</p>
<p>I am curious about the very different degree paths you mentioned. Vandy’s biomedical engineering program is excellent but that seems a very different major than the one you plan to pursue at Columbia. Which most closely reflects your passion?</p>
<p>Both are excellent schools. I would definitely go to Vandy. That’s a whole lot of debt to take on.</p>
<p>I have the same question churchmusicmom has. The difference in these two paths (both very specific and valuable) is so vast it makes me wonder how certain you are about your academic direction. If you’re not certain, I’d recommend going with Vanderbilt. If you are certain of the ORFE direction, then maybe the debt makes sense. In this day and age, I’d be hesitant to PLAN on being able to comfortably pay back $80K in debt but I’m debt-averse. I do know that people’s notions of what they want to study can change; getting a Vandy education at such a good price is a hedge against that uncertainty (which you must have a bit of, else you’d not have such different paths in mind depending on which school you attend).</p>
<p>ORFE is one of those things that only a handful of schools offer for undergrad. It seems like the perfect combination of math + application for me. On the other hand, with BME, I would look more into the design of prosthetics, etc. I’m sure both would be interesting though.</p>
<p>The ORFE program at Columbia is so overrated. The professors in the IEOR department are awful and the ORFE program outside of Sales and Trading is not well know on Wall Street. </p>
<p>It sounds like you’re in a position that I was my senior year of high school, trying to tailor my major based on what school I got into. It was BME at JHU, ORFE at Columbia, and Economics at Duke.</p>
<p>First, choose the school with the most academic freedom. I cannot stress this enough. Once you are in SEAS, you will be studying engineering, whether you like it or not (hint: it’s most likely the latter). It sounds as if you have a pre-professional track. Chances are, you won’t be an engineer at UPS or Johnson and Johnson. Engineering is hard and the curriculum is overkill for students who don’t want to become engineers or go into academia.</p>
<p>Second, Columbia is way too expensive at this point. I’ve copied my post from another thread below analyzing the cost for full-tuition. If your parents decide to pay $30,000 a year, that’s a huge burden that they will have to shoulder in addition to what you will have to pay. Plus, there’s a good chance that Columbia will not give you any financial aid next year, when the school realizes that you are in it for the long haul. </p>
<p>Third, to be honest, Columbia sucks. There’s not much campus life and it feels as if the university is a commuter school. Campus life seems to revolve around academic or cultural organizations and organizing and attending events, as well as some closed fraternity parties and 3-4 local bars. Vanderbilt seems to have the typical college experience, an experience that you will not be able to replicate at any other point in your life (who really wants to party with a 24 year old dude on a college campus trying to re-live the glory days?). You can live in NYC in the future and gain roughly the same experience, and I’d argue that attending a stressful university on 116th street really castrates the opportunity to “go downtown anytime you want”. Columbia is 30 minutes from K-town, but a 1 hour subway ride to Chinatown, NYU, St. Mark’s Place, and Union Square. </p>
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<p>Graduating with $250,000 in non-dischargeable debt is an ordeal. Even if you work on Wall Street, you’d have a difficult time paying what may total $300-350k when you accrue the interest. To give you perspective, a 1st year analyst can at most save $50k after taxes if the economy is great and they watch how they spend. A 2nd year analyst can probably save $60k. For the next 2 years, you might stay in the bank or move to another firm and may be able to save an additional $140k. However, your debt (after interest and amortization) will still probably total $70k (assuming you pile 100% of your savings into loan repayment).</p>
<p>All the while, you’ll need to think about paying for business school, which is almost always required for career advancement. That’ll set you back another $150-160k by the time you graduate. If you choose Columbia, go work in Wall Street, enjoy an unlikely pre-bubble boom for 4 years, save every penny, and pile 100% of your savings into loan repayment, you’ll still be writing student loan checks until you’re 33-35. All the while, you can say goodbye to your youth.</p>
<p>^tldr: i had a bad college experience at columbia, so you will too</p>
<p>ashenblood, I’d like to hear your perspective on the issue. I’m giving the OP my opinion and you know what they say, “Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone’s got one and they all stink.”</p>
<p>Yeah, well, he wasn’t the only one to whom that post came off like sour grapes. It’s not the #4-ranked institution because people hate the place. Across the 4 years I attended, I met exactly one fellow student who legitimately didn’t like it there. He really wanted to be back home, closer to his brother, taking care of his parents, in the woods of western massachusetts. Every other one of the hundreds of people there seemed to be on a spectrum from “like” to “love”.</p>
<p>I won’t dispute your “too expensive” routine. Going to Columbia would, on average, be a better experience for metalpawn than Vandy I believe, but that is a HUGE difference in price tag. He has a couple of options, and the first is, fax Columbia the financial aid offer letter from Vandy and ask them to work with you on it. The fact that they offered you a CP Davis scholarship is no small thing, these are the people they “Really want”. I can get you in touch with the dean who runs the Scholars program if you want to hear what it’s all about, unfiltered.</p>
<p>Lots of people arrive at college believing that they are hell-bent on, say, Pre-Med or Pre-Law (or pre-Wall Street in your case), and after a few years find that their passion for it wasn’t all that deep to begin with. It sounds like metalpawn believes it’s a better fit for him for other reasons, but $41k difference per year * 4 years = $164,000. That is a boatload of cash. You can buy a pretty decent house in many parts of the country, free-and-clear, for that kind of money. I’m pro-Columbia in just about all things, but I couldn’t tell you with a straight face to have your parents make that kind of sacrifice for you. I’d sooner tell you that they ought to pay for some awesome accommodations and vacations while you’re at Vandy, because you’re saving them a ****-ton of cash and deserve a share of it :)</p>
<p>Everyone has already said what I would want to say, but I’ll add one small thing: I’m a CV scholar (one of the full-tuition scholarships, not sure if it’s the one you have) and I can tell you that virtually every other CV/Chancellors/Ingram scholar you meet will have been in exactly your shoes, turning down a top school of some kind for Vanderbilt. My next door neighbor turned down Cornell, a girl in my freshman bio class turned down Stanford, and we had a well-publicized series of articles in the New York Times (google “Michael Greshko”) about a student who turned down both Yale and Harvard for the scholarship. I also did not consider myself a great fit for the school, but attended because I literally could not afford not to (and I am from the Northeast, had never been to the south, hate country music, am not white, etc) and absolutely love it. I’m having the time of my life both in the classroom and outside of it, and I’m super excited to go onto law school or business school down the lane completely debt free. Also, I’m not sure if you’re thinking about wall street (since financial engineering grads tend to go in that direction, but you seemed more interested in BME at Vanderbilt) but I can tell you that I am interning with a bulge bracket investment bank this summer, and know several others who are as well. Vanderbilt will not close any doors for you, but I feel as though significant debt might. Good luck with your decision!</p>
<p>As an ex-Wall Street quant (Cornell ORIE but spent freshman year at Columbia), I cannot fathom a more useless profession than working for an investment bank. No high school student and few college students even have the remotest idea of what crap goes on within the bowels of a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. And no, I am not a bleeding heart liberal.</p>
<p>Now I would also like to add that the OR degree in its purest form is quite useful, even though you have to look hard to find companies that will utilize your education to the fullest. I also happen to think that BME is a good degree, but very cutthroat because all of the premeds who have flocked to the major in recent years. Plus, the supply of BMEs as of late has exceeded the demand by employers. So think carefully before you head down that path.</p>
<p>If it comes down to money to attend Columbia, I would have your family spend no more than $50,000 over four years more than the cost of Vanderbilt. Any more than that, and you’re talking about serious debt. Do as Denzera says and show the FA office the CV letter and see what they can do. Best wishes to you in your college search.</p>