I got a call today during lunch that I am off the Harvard waitlist. I’m still in shock but I need to make a decision. I never really had a dream school, but I can’t deny the perks of going to Harvard. I need to make a decision in 1 week, and I’m very conflicted. I am premed.
Harvard pros:
-Greater endowment = possibly more money to pursue my interests
-intimate class sizes with a higher number of renowned professors (like Nobel prize laureates)
-Smaller school size: I’ve never really liked USC’s large size because I feel smaller school size is more intimate and more money/resources can be dedicated for each individual student.
-The people: I’m sure so many people at Harvard will inspire me with their curiosity, ambition, passion, and love for learning.
USC pros:
-Will cost 200k less, which I can save for med school. Also not having to pay for my education takes away the pressure of getting a job and having a tight budget for personal expenses.
-I’m in TO and FSH which may mimic the intimate environment of Harvard.
-Closer to home
-Big fish in small pond
I’m attracted to Harvard’s people and close sense of community (as opposed to USC’s 40k student body which imo is far less intimate), but at the end of the day I am going to medical school so cost is important. I am leaning USC still, but so conflicted. What do you think?
Hi @dot228 - Congrats on having amazing choices. Since this is the USC forum and besides the difference in cost being so substantial, you are likely to feel you may be getting some pro USC bias here, I suggest you post in the College Search and Selection forum as well. There you will find more varied opinions from varied sources with no links to either school but great knowledge. However, most are gonna say pre-med, save your money and take the full. But good to hear from different folks.
Well in some ways this is a tough decision and some ways not. If it is easy or your family to pay for Harvard and Medical school, and if Harvard is where you really want to be, then sure, there are advantages to the Harvard brand. However, I’m assuming you are Trustee if you are getting $200K. That is a lot of money and would go a long way to pay for med school. Looking at your list of pros, I think you won’t notice USC being as big as you think. There are so many schools that each school/major isn’t really that big. As for being a bigfish in a small pond, not sure I understand because USC isn’t a small pond and the quality of students in premed/FSH type classes will be pretty much the same as at Harvard. USC and Harvard will definitely have a different vibe - the social vibe of a big PAC-12 school where football is huge will be different for sure. I think wherever you end up, you will do just fine, and when it comes to med school, your grades, MCATs, and other activities will be the differentiator. USC has huge amounts of research opportunities for undergrads.
Can you afford Harvard at full price?
Although H is very hard to give up, many students choose full ride at lesser ranked schools. Only you can make this decision. If you can afford H without debt, then go for it.
Also I don’t think USC is as easy as you imagine(big fish)
Good luck with your decision!!
A lot of Harvard classes are large lectures with TF’s (grad students) leading sections. Where did you hear about “intimate class sizes” ?
There is no premed at Harvard. You can major in anything and go to med school (as long as you do the prerequ’s, and you can do that after graduation if you like). Does USC have “premed”?
Many high school seniors want to be doctors but change their minds. I hope you make the decision without regard to any specific career goal, unless you have significant experience working or volunteering in health care or shadowing a doc.
We don’t know much about your financial situation or your family’s, but without aid Harvard will be quite a bit more than $200k. And USC is apparently free. Or is it only tuition-free and you are paying for room and board? What is the exact difference in cost?
I don’t know what TO and FSH mean. The Harvard house system is a nice feature of Harvard.
I would think that the decision would be clear and that you know the answer but it is hard to give up Harvard. USC is a great school too.
Can you afford Harvard? Can your parents pay for it without taking loans? Without digging into their retirement fund?
Since you say you would have to have a tight budget, that implies loans. Dont’ take loans when you don’t have to.
OP, I feel for you. My D19 really struggled with a similar choice this year (USC Trustee vs. a different Ivy), but she had months to weigh her options, not just a week! The tipping point for her was sitting in on classes and talking to students at both campuses, and I’m guessing it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do that with so little time left.
Something else that helped her was to map out a 4-year course schedule at both schools. (In her case, she realized SC would require her to take certain classes while the Ivy would accept her AP score instead and let her jump right into advanced material. She had to email her adviser at SC for her prospective major to get accurate info. YMMV.)
But there were a lot of areas where SC had the edge over the Ivy - weather, distance from home, the beautiful campus, the “chill” vibe, and of course the scholarship. She had to decide for herself which factors outweighed the others. We told her at the outset, half the people you talk to will think you’d be crazy to turn down the scholarship; the other half will think you’d be crazy to turn down the Ivy. She needed to tune all that out and decide based on what was best for her.
I will say that I don’t think you need to worry too much about SC’s size. You’ve signed up for small honors classes and I assume you intend to live in honors housing. I did both when I went to SC many years ago and I found you could make your social circle as small and manageable (or as big and varied) as you wanted it to be.
Congratulations on working as hard as you must have to have earned such fantastic options. I’m sure you’ll do well at whichever school you choose.
My neighbors are Harvard MBAs. Both do NOT recommend Harvard for undergrad as many/most of the best resources are used for grad students and not undergrads. My kids are both USC alums (sadly neither got full tuition awards). They both found that within their majors, they got to know many of the students so it wasn’t that large.
I agree that if money is at all a factor, $200k sure can help pay for a lot of med school and/or whatever else you need in the future.
Harvard isn’t $200,000 more. It’s $2,000,000 (or more depending on the interest rate you use…I used 6%). You have to figure out opportunity cost of the money. If you choose USC, you have an education and $200,000 to invest. If you choose Harvard, you have an education. Will Harvard be $2,000,000 better? Nope.
@eyemgh It doesn’t make sense for us to assume the OP’s family would invest any $$ that doesn’t get spent on Harvard tuition. It’s completely up to them to do what they want with it, and none of our business.
@Curiosa, I’m not telling them what to do one way or the other. I’m helping them understand a very simple accounting principle, opportunity cost. Paying more for Harvard means losing out on doing something else with that money. What they do with it is their choice, but it is not simply a $200,000 decision.
I have a friend who selected the full ride at USC for similar reasons. However, it didn’t end up being a match either academically or socially, which was a terrible surprise. My friend ultimately transferred out and then paid full price to have a wonderful college experience elsewhere. This is nothing against USC in particular; it’s a truly excellent school and a great match for the vast majority of students considering it. College selection is deeply personal, and all that we well-intentioned folks can do is offer our thoughts. My only advice is to be sure you’re not blinded by the USC money or by the Harvard brand. If both schools are a match for you in different ways, then you are truly set and can’t make a bad decision here. In your shoes, reasonable people would choose differently from each other. From your post, it sounds like you’re doing your due diligence and carefully considering your options, so I wish you the very best!
No bias here seeing as I attend the school across town. Go to USC. Free tuition is a heck of a lot better than full pay. Even if* you made more coming out of Harvard it won’t matter because you’ll come out under being 200,000 in debt. Med school is expensive and 400k in loans is crippling no matter how you look at it. USC is many people’s dream school and is not settling by any means. Classes get small as you progress and you won’t be exposed to all 40k students at once. You’ll find your crowd. Enjoy being a Trojan and graduating debt free. And dare I say it? Fight on!
Both cities, LA and Boston are medical research meccas. USC is 20,000 undergrads, and 47,000 total, but you would be mostly seeing and among undergrads, so don’t count the entire medical school and law school population when you consider “size”. Because LA is just so good for medical research, I would lean towards USC due to the scholarship you won. You can put that scholarship on your medical school resume, it really counts to win a full ride at USC, congratulations, its hard to win that ! . Depending on your own family and high school background, you may find USC really is more open socially and easier to make friends as well.
Harvard, you will go to school with boarding school students, international heads of state children, and other dignitary’s children, as well as a smattering of their diversity candidates who are super sharp. One real plus for Harvard—the sciences, including chemistry and physics are very strong. Chemistry in particular is stronger at Harvard than USC.
What is your intended major at USC and at Harvard?
Where do your parents want you to go to college?
Cambridge weather is awful. Really awful. I am headed there tomorrow, and packing long sleeves, and rain gear. Its been raining and raining this year. Snow can pile so high in Cambridge, that you can jump out a second story window and land in a pile of snow, some years!!! (don’t try that!)
Lots of Harvard undergrads are not there to learn. They are there for other reasons. So I would NOT say that Harvard is loaded with passionate learners. Harvard undergrad has a fair number of students who are majoring in economics because Daddy said so, and have no idea of their passions or interests. Some will find themselves, we hope, at Harvard. A few students at Havard are very very passionate about mathematics, physics, English, chemistry or becoming Senators. Just to get another viewpoint on Harvard! Harvard has concentrations, not majors, and the math people there are superb, as are physics, and chemistry, I mean world class. But the undergrads come from all walks of life. The back door to Harvard is wide open. Harvard grad students are exactly like you describe, but you are getting a bachelors degree, not a PhD.
But Harvard has the most naturally intelligent students in the world along with Cal Tech. Harvard students overwhelmingly fill HLS as well as YLS its rival, and I’m sure they fill JHU’s, Yale’s and its own SOM at the same rates. I know of a Harvard grad in mathematics that stepped right into a top grad E program and made a pretty seamless transition.
Based on these, Harvard would have to be a great place to attend for those who are undecided for careers. Are some attending H “not there to learn”? I’m sure there are, but if you consider that Stephen Hawking wasn’t a very good student at Oxford, this could similarly manifest boredom to those who might consider college to be a fairly rigid learning atmosphere as Dr. Hawking did. And I am not stating that a significant number of H students are of that same (human) intelligence that he possessed, but they are endued of an obviously high degree of (human) smarts.
So if OP with respect to his daughter(?) were to want to meet someone like the future creator of some killer application, then H all day every day against anyone except for maybe MIT. But a pre-deterministic pathway of medicine from its beginnings in Life Sciences premed, then state college or in this case USC will do for someone who is smart enough to gain entry to H.
I think its simple. If your family would have to take loans to pay for Harvard, then go to USC. If your family can “swing it” to send you to Harvard, but will have to stretch, then go to USC. If your family has significant wealth, such that they can easily write 300K worth of checks over the next 4 years for Harvard and then another 300K for medical school, and can do the same for all of your siblings, then go to Harvard if you like it better (sounds like you do).
Your ability to get to med school will be based on how you perform personally, obviously both schools have all that’s needed to get you there.