Full-Ride at State School or No Aid at Ivy?

College Search & Selection
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family’s income is above the financial aid cut-off for most Ivies, but my parents will not be helping me pay for college in any way, unfortunately. The University of Minnesota is a safety school for me, but based on information I have gotten from my guidance counselor, I feel confident that I could get a full-ride scholarship there.
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It’s just hard for me to tell how important an Ivy League education is. I get the impression from a lot of posts on this site that it is embarrassing to go to a state school rather than an Ivy, and that people are sometimes “looked down on” for doing so. If that’s the case, I think I would be willing to take on the debt for a better school.
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Whose posts? Posts from other 18 year olds? Lol. Who cares what they think?

NO MATURE ADULTS look down on others for going to state schools. Only naive and insecure kids do that…and they’ll wise-up quickly when they’re in the real world and they have smart colleagues or bosses from state schools or non-top-privates.

My younger son, a state school graduate (near free ride), recently completed his interviews for residencies. He’s a 4th year med student…and also at a state med school. Oh no!! TWO state schools!! He’s doomed!! Lol. He was invited to interview at over 40 residency programs, including Harvard Mass Gen, Harvard Brigham and Women’s, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Yale, Northwestern, WashU, NYU, Vandy, Emory, Duke, UCLA, USC, UT-Southwestern, Baylor, UWash, UWisc, and some other reach/match/safeties that escape my mind. I don’t know how he ranked them, but he’ll find out on March 17th on National Match Day where he’ll end up.

do you think that the medical residency directors at Harvard, JHU, Mayo, etc, “look down” on students who went to “state schools”? Obviously not. They only really cared about his class ranking, his STEP scores, and his research.

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Thirding the above. No one “looks down” on Public universities’ graduates, especially not flagships.
Ivies DO provide a different experience, it’s true. But you can’t afford to go to an Ivy, so let’s focus on where you CAN go.
As a NMSF/NMF you’ll have lots of choices. Start comparing the honors colleges, the offerings in your major, the type of research they’re doing at the university (that, as an Honors Student, you could try and join). Do some of the large universities have a Residential College that’d create a closer knit community for you?
You can also try to earn merit aid at a private college, but since your education fund wouldn’t be usable there, it may be better to focus on exploring your opportunities at various public universities.
Are you from IL or from MN?

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What is your major and career goal?

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@Newb3476 I have 21 people working for me. I know where 3 of them went to college, and only bc I asked when my S1 was looking. The rest, either I was not the hiring person, OR, I really don’t know that I even looked. After a few years experience, it rarely comes up.

No one really cares. Don’t worry about it. If someone looks down on it, there is probably something wrong with their value system, not yours. My BA is from a very low ranked State U 28 years ago. I wear it as a badge of honor.

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I graduated from a directional / city-name undergrad where I double-majored and nailed my GPA. I got into top tier grad school - twice! Once for my M.A. and again for a doctoral program. My M.A. program was maybe half Ivy and near-Ivy grads, half state flagship and then maybe two of us from Podunk Us. I never felt under-prepared, and there were times where I had to keep from looking sideways at a few of my classmates because they’d never heard of / never read something I thought was foundational for our discipline.

I am now a Hugo and Campbell shortlist author. Nobody, not even once, has sneered at me based on the name of my undergraduate university.

My husband graduated from what was then a mid-range UC with a degree in - wait for it - Studio Art / painting. He taught himself to program on the side. He started out in graphic design, then moved into GUI / backend / cross-browser compatibility. He is now employed by a top tier tech company whose products run some 25% of the internet.

Never, not once, has anyone hinted that he’s less desirable because he didn’t have a degree from an Ivy, or Stanford / MIT / CMU, etc. His interviews in his most recent job search all involved substantial coding tests, some done live, some take-home, and some that involved working as a (well-paid) contractor for a couple of weeks to make sure fit and skills were good.

They were. And if he’d come from an Ivy or a top tech school and the skills weren’t there, there’s no way he’d have been hired.

I am not knocking Ivies. I am saying that a college education is much more dependent on your own drive and effort than the name of the school you choose to attend. Take the scholarship to the state school and don’t look back.

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@mom2collegekids I am planning on majoring in computer science, but I’m not sure what I want to do for an actual career yet.

@MYOS1634 I am from Minnesota. I have only looked into National Merit scholarships from the U of Minnesota, but I believe my grandparents’ plan should apply at any state school (at least in the Midwest).

Thanks, guys!

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So, you have tuition reciprocity with Wisconsin, which happens to have a nationally-known program in CS. Look into their scholarships too.

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Is UWisc still accepting apps and awarding any merit?

Student…if your grandparents purchased a prepaid, then it has a value that can be used at schools outside of IL. The issue, of course, is that its value wouldn’t be high enough to cover high OOS tuition or private school tuition.

You’re a NMF…you still have choices for big merit.

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^ isn’t the student a junior? (“college application season coming up”, 2/08 vs. for a senior “coming to a close”…?? Or am I not parsing that right?)

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OP, I do not believe UW has a full ride scholarship let alone one that pays student thousands each semester.

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@ShrimpFarmer I’m in the so called 1%. My social circle has grads from Ivy, other private, and state schools of all types. Socially, we respect who we are and none of us care where each other went. Many of us don’t even know.

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@ShrimpFarmer
Your social circle, life-long relationship as well as your world perspective is influenced by where you went to school. I don’t remember whether you said if graduate school is in your current plans but if they are not I would suggest that if you do get admitted to an ivy you should seriously try to take that opportunity.


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That is so last century. :wink:

Seriously, this was probably true prior to the 1950’s, but it’s not been true for a very long time.

This student will be a CS major. Going to an ivy will mean nothing and his social circle will likely consist of work friends who didn’t go to ivies. If he works on the west coast, many of his coworkers/friends will be UC, Cal Poly, and CSU grads. If he works in the Midwest, many of his colleagues/friends will be Big 10 grads. If he works in the South, he’ll socialize with grads from those schools. And on and on.

The idea that an Ivy grad CS major is going to be rubbing elbows with the NE country club elite is just not realistic.

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Two of my brothers got their undergrad degrees (EE and CS) from CSUFullerton. They got their grad degrees from USC. They both have achieved VP positions at their respective Fortune 500 companies.

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51 I'd agree if poster is going to college just to get a job. In that case it doesn't much matter and the decision should be based on cost and where they wish to live as an adult. In fact perhaps living at home attending the local CC and trying to get real world experience is the best bet in that case. If person is interested in graduate school and research it most certainly does. While of course you can get a great education anywhere, it's just significantly easier and you have a better chance of "ruling the world" and meeting people set up to "rule the world" at an ivy. If that is not true then why is there an ivy thread and basically "other" thread set up in college confidential. While a big Midwestern research university probably has more people able to change the world, the fact is that an ivy has a greater concentration.

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^^^ so what? He’ll be a CS major. His dept, his college, will have a high concentration of high stats students.

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@Newb3476 I concur with most of the opinions expressed here – you don’t need an Ivy League-caliber college to get a great CS education, so why pay extra! However, I’d suggest you also think about what you want to do when you graduate.

  • Do you see yourself as an employee...working as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company? Great - get a CS education as inexpensively as you can...zero debt if possible.
  • Do you want to create the next instagram/facebook/twitter? Then consider a school where you'll interact with a higher density of like-minded students, entrepreneurial professors, and venture capital firms. Not surprisingly, Stanford and Cal are at the top of that list. (Example: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236912).

There are never any guarantees, but the environment + network in for example, Palo Alto, is far different than in the Twin Cities.

Good luck!

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And Cal/ UC Berkeley is a state school!

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^But one that doesn’t offer full rides and where, OOS, you pay private school costs.

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My daughter is in a similar situation, but she is not being offered “full-rides” but getting merit money and scholarships from less competitive schools. I feel bad having her turn down her “reach” schools but my husband feels (a University of Penn grad) that you have to make something of yourself regardless of where you go. I sometimes wish my husband made less money and we would qualify for financial aid so my kids could go anywhere they were accepted but at $69,000 a year, why would anyone want to pay that??!!!

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^Well, you’d “want” to pay that, if you can, because of more comfortable amenities such as smaller discussion sections, better career services, better health services, better library, better connections. People who choose that aren’t foolish or stupid. But many families can’t make that choice.
Many upper-middle families also choose not to and “chase merit” instead.
Problems occur when kids are told they can go after their dream schools… and then the parents pull the rug from under them and say, oops, didn’t think you’d get in/sorry I changed my mind.
They’re often heartbroken.
The mature ones figure out quickly where they can go and how to find better places but the relationship with parents changes.
The issue is that of trust: if you told your daughter she could apply to those schools and you’d pay if she got in, isn’t there a problem if she respected your financial perimeters, got into the schools, and then you renege on what you’d said (if financial circumstances haven’t changed, of course)? Many kids could have done without the expensive, difficult applications to reach schools and knowing right away that you’d pick the merit over prestige would have saved much heartache.