<p>I was recently accepted to Ferris State University and I found out today I was awarded a full-tuition, merit-based scholarship. I think Ferris is a wonderful school, and it has an excellent reputation. However, I applied with the intentions of it being a safety more than anything else. There isn't much about the school that has me jumping for absolute joy. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I just submitted my early action app for UMich, and I'm gonna be on the edge of my seat and biting my nails until I get a decision. I feel like I have a fairly good shot (GPA: ~3.94 unweighted, 4.083 weighted, 32 ACT, plenty of ECs, NHS, work experience), and it is, without question, where I plan to go if I am accepted. I've applied to a few other schools, but UMich has been shining like a diamond at the top of my college list for as long as I can remember. I've been to Ann Arbor more times than I can count and I've been on two official visits already. I'm feeling a little guilty because of the cost, however. I think my stats are good enough to get me in, but I don't find them exceptional enough for much in the way of merit-scholarships, considering the competitiveness within UMich's applicant pool. There's always need-based aid, and I am a Michigan resident, but my parents make just short of $85k a year and I only have one other sibling, who will be a HS junior when I start college. I know I can still apply for outside scholarships and whatnot, but I feel like, given I get accepted to UMich, I would be making a mistake by taking a pile of student loans over a debt-free graduation. Advice? Input? </p>
<p>Are you applying for financial aid? As a resident of the state, you may get some money, although not enough to make Michigan as affordable as Ferris State. I assume you will still have to pay for room and board at Ferris State? </p>
<p>What is your intended major, and what are your career aspirations, if known at this time.</p>
<p>I will definitely be applying for financial aid, yes. I would still be paying room and board at Ferris; I forgot to mention that. I’m not absolutely set on anything, but I’m interested in cognitive sciences, psychology, and molecular science. I hope to earn a PhD, if not a Master’s, in one of these fields, and I’m especially interested in the research end of the spectrum. </p>
<p>All you can do is wait and see how the acceptances come in and how the finances end up looking. And yes, full tuition is not the same as a full ride which would include tuition, room, and meals. </p>
<p>I think the student should apply to more schools. Umich might work out, or it might not. Although UMich claims to “meet need” it uses CSS Profile, so who knows if the parents will pay as much as UMich expects. </p>
<p>There are other schools that will give large merit for his stats. Since he doesn’t particularly like this Ferris State as his safety, he should find others.</p>
<p>I agree with mom2collegekids and happy1. Study the matter carefully, talk to your parents, plan ahead and wait until the final offers are on hand. If the difference between Michigan and Ferris State is manageable, and results in only manageable student debt, I think Michigan would definitely be worth it. But if attending Michigan places too much of a financial burden on your folks and yourself, I would then go for Ferris State.</p>
<p>Have you tried the net price calculator at Michigan to get an early estimate of financial aid? (Also, try the scenario where you are a junior and your younger sibling also goes to college.)</p>
<p>Of course, you will have to wait for the real financial aid offer before deciding. But having an idea of what to expect may allow you to think about the choice with more information.</p>
<p>In any case, I think that you are working yourself up over hypotheticals. Run the NPCs. Right now, you don’t even know how much more UMich would cost you or whether you would get some merit scholarship(s) there. Do you know how much your parents can pay or like to pay? Also, fin aid would take siblings in to account as well. Run the NPCs with various numbers of siblings also.</p>
<p>I agree with the advice to apply to more schools. You might find a full-tuition scholarship school that you really like.</p>
<p>Our ds was faced with similar decisions last yr. He chose his full-ride option and is incredibly happy there. One of the things he did was look into honors programs. He loves the honors program and has a great group of peers.</p>
<p>(Wanted to add that you could also look into departmental scholarships. Some schools will not allow you to combine scholarship awards. But others do. Our ds has multiple stacked scholarships.)</p>
<p>@Alexandre: CONGRATULATIONS on the great scholarship you’ve received. I know nothing about Ferris (in fact, I don’t believe I ever even heard of it until I read this thread). Of course, that does not mean Ferris is anything but good. However, we all know Michigan has a deserved reputation as one of America’s best public National Research Universities. But we also all recognize that a merit scholarship of the sort you’ve earned at Ferris is a real blessing.</p>
<p>I respectfully suggest you consider the following issue. Might a degree from Michigan potentially ever make a significant difference in your future? For example, will employers and/or postgraduate programs be more willing to hire/accept you with a Michigan degree? No one can answer this important question but YOU. However, there is no doubt that in some (a few) situations, that more-prestigious undergraduate degree might be decisive. To illustrate, I am sure that young alumni of Ferris are occasionally admitted to Harvard Med or Yale Law. However, I’d wager that in aggregate their probability of admission is decidedly lower than their counterparts from Michigan. Will that ever make any difference to you? Frankly, it might or it might not. One could have a VERY successful career in the law or in medicine (to carry the earlier example forward) going to less distinguished undergraduate and professional schools, but I suspect faculty members at Hopkins Med or partners at Williams and Connelly are disproportionate drawn from elite universities.</p>
<p>While I would fully agree that for most people this won’t make any substantial difference, the only relevant question is will/could it be important to you and your future?</p>
A full-ride scholarship includes money for not only tuition but books and housing. You got full-tuition, so you’ll still be paying for the latter 2 items. Housing costs are probably $10K/yr or more.</p>
<p>Actually, @TopTier, medical and (especially) law school admissions are among the least sensitive to where you went to undergrad. In fact, for pre-meds, I would discourage UMich as they curve harshly in science classes there and there are an absolute ton of pre-meds at UMich killing the curve. And yes, alums from UMich, etc. would be disproportionately represented on the JHU faculty or top law firms compared to Ferris St., but that is due to the quality of the entering student body at UMich being in aggregate much more impressive that that entering Ferris St. That tells you nothing about your own future chances, however.</p>
<p>Now if you were talking about top companies in banking or consulting (or some other industries), then I agree with you more. A lot of those companies would come to recruit from a school like UMich but would not bother to recruit at Ferris St.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan: I entirely disagree, especially because all my examples intentionally referred to first-tier professional schools (and their likely follow-on career opportunities), not to fully respectable Law and Medical Schools (e.g., those at most public universities) that clearly do not have the same level of admissions or the academic rigor. The simple fact is – all other factors being equal, which isn’t too usual – the applicant with (for example) a 3.8 GPA and an equally high LSAT/MCAT from the Ivies, the elite LACs, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Hopkins, Rice, etc. has a greater acceptance probability for the top-dozen law and medical programs, than one from most state flagships or other good/fully reputable – but not superior – undergraduate programs. Of course, this does NOT suggest that only alumni of elite undergraduate schools will matriculate at elite professions schools, simply that have have an appreciably higher probability of doing so.</p>
Well, the OP can make a guess but the OP can’t answer the question. Only those employers and postgrad institutions can (and speaking as an employer, no).</p>
<p>OP, good recommendations on running the NPCs at UMich and considering Mich State. You really need to have the money conversation with your parents. And I have to ask, ARE you willing to attend Ferris State? If you’re not it wasn’t a safety but a waste of app $. </p>
<p>Figure 1 of that paper indicates the following:</p>
<p>a. Earnings of top-10 law school graduates are very similar, regardless of whether they attended top-25* undergraduate or other undergraduate schools before law school.
b. Earnings of 11-20 rank law school graduates were significantly better for those who attended top 25 undergraduate schools before law school.</p>
<p>*The paper defines elite undergraduate schools as USNWR top 25 national universities.</p>
<p>Figure 5 of that paper indicates that graduates of 21-100 rank law schools are paid significantly less than those of higher rank law schools, although there is still a differential between those who attended top 25 undergraduate schools versus those who attended other undergraduate schools.</p>
<p>Note that the paper is concerned about lawyer pay, not the undergraduate school’s effect on getting into law school. It also says nothing about medical school or physician pay.</p>
<p>The authors conclude that attending a top-25 undergraduate school can be helpful in terms of eventual pay as a lawyer for those who attended law schools other than the top-10. Attendance of a top-10 law school appears to eliminate the advantage of attending a top-25 undergraduate school.</p>
<p>Note that Michigan is just outside the USNWR top-25, at rank 29. So a pre-law student at Michigan would be well advised to aim for a top-10 law school, since his/her undergraduate school is not highly enough ranked for the purpose of law school pay levels. Michigan is a top-10 law school by USNWR and Vault 25 rankings, however, so a lawyer would likely get more value in terms of pay levels from attending Michigan law school versus Michigan undergraduate. Here are the reported results at lawschoolnumbers.com for Michigan: <a href=“Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers”>Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers;
<p>In regards to med schools, your undergrad is largely irrelevant. </p>
<p>And if you are suggesting that “respectable med schools” do not have the “academic rigor” then you are wrong. Med school education is flat at US MD schools…they all teach the same thing. </p>
<p>@TopTier, it seems that you have drawn some fallacious conclusions from that paper (as @ucbalumnus has pointed out, it says nothing about med schools & doctors or even whether it was harder for someone equally qualified to get in to a top tier law school from a less-than-prestigious undergrad). Frankly, your reasoning skills aren’t really what I would expect from someone who is a student of or alum of an elite school.</p>
<p>Since you’ve done some research, I would hope you’ve discovered that which med school you go to doesn’t correlate much with financial success of doctors later on (in a sense, you could say that almost all med schools are elite, given how few they admit), and while some of the top private med schools may be biased towards private elites, the publics are not.</p>
<p>With law schools (and MBA programs, for that matter), where you get your JD definitely does matter, but really only YLS and Stanford are elite enough and small enough that qualitative factors are a big factor. Outside those two, your LSAT, GPA, and race are bigger determinants than where you went for undergrad. Even HLS would be hard-pressed to turn down a state school grad who would be in their top quartile in both the LSAT and GPA.</p>
<p>TopTier, good universities, including many of the universities and LACs you listed, but also some public flagships you omitted, like Cal, Michigan and UVa, appear to place a disproportionate number of alums into top graduate programs. However, I am not sure that is a result of the quality of the academic institutions or of the quality of their student bodies, but I am tempted to say the latter. One instance where attending a top university does seem to influence admissions decisions is in the case of top universities that have top graduate professional programs (Engineering, Medical, Law and MBA programs). Those programs indeed seem to give preference to their own undergraduate students. However, I do not think that is the case with PhD programs.</p>
<p>At any rate, the OP’s first priority is to get into a university with a workable financial package. If it turns out that Michigan and Ferris State are both affordable, then I think attending Michigan makes better sense as the experience there would likely be more well rounded.</p>
<p>If finances are workable, I’d recommend UMich unless he’s a pre-med.</p>
<p>With regards to PhD programs, doing research helps a lot (which is why many LACs place well on a per capita basis and almost all of the top research universities as ranked by ARWU, which includes many publics, place well on an absolute basis). Recommendations from professors well-respected in their field also carry a lot of weight, and they’re invariably in the top research universities.</p>
<p>MBA programs are heavily affected by the quality of your work experience, but for some of those industries deemed high-quality/desirable, going to a target/semi-target school is an easier path in.</p>
<p>In short, whether the school you go to matters varies a lot by your career goals, and which schools are deemed elite also vary by field. As an example, Illinois isn’t seen as a target school by investment banks or MBB consulting firms (semi-target at best), but it definitely is a target school for the top software companies and places a ton of its grads in to STEM PhD programs (in absolute numbers, more UIUC undergrads go on to get science/engineering PhDs than any Ivy besides Cornell; more than any college, period, besides Cal, Cornell, and UMich, in fact). However, Dartmouth certainly is a target school for IB and MBB consulting, but almost no top software companies will bother to recruit Dartmouth, and it sends a relatively small amount of its grads in to science/engineering PhD programs even on a per capita basis (it ranks below Rochester and Case Western by that metric, for instance).</p>