The are no right or wrong answers here - you can’t go wrong with either choice; everything depends on you and your family’s unique situation.
@hackeysack has given some of the criteria for you to consider – 1) your family’s budget for undergrad and what they will are or are not comfortably able or willing to spend; 2) what their abilities / plans, if any, for contributing to grad or medical school are; 3) whether or not you have siblings; 4) what is important for you to have in your undergraduate experience.
If indeed money is a big consideration and are do end up in med school, certainly saving the money now would probably be a good plan.
USC is a big school, but it’s fairly compact and programs like TO and FSH will make it seem smaller.
My D turned town a Trustee’s full-tuition at USC (she had other full tuition merit at schools she like more than USC, so it was a non-issue). She’s now at Stanford. That said, she’s an only child and is in a humanities field where one’s undergraduate school and mentorship will probably matter for grad school than it would for med school.
@LoveTheBard -I agree the prestige/rigor of undergrad school is perhaps most important for a student who wants to get a Ph.D in the humanities. 1) the criteria for graduate admission to the right school are far less clear than for a professional school - a lot of it is who is recommending you and other soft factors. 2) and the field is not exactly bursting with opportunity, so just getting a Ph.D doesnt buy you much, has to be the right Ph.D.
Conversely, for this student’s med school quest, it’s mostly about MCAT and GPA, USC is not some backwater where a med school might discount the rigor.
@firmament2x I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that “Harvard has the most naturally intelligent students in the world”. That’s not what they are selecting for. So some are, some aren’t.
Niall Ferguson didn’t think so when he taught there: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/united-kingdom/2131394-oxbridge-admissions-criteria.html
Quite a few of S’s USC classmates had the choice of a full ride at USC vs. full pay at Ivies or Harvard. They chose the full ride at USC because the parents cannot afford the full cost of an Ivy education. These are the kind of kids USC is trying to attract by offering them a full ride. S studies very hard sometimes until 3 to 4 AM before a test to maintain a near perfect GPA. These full ride kids that were accepted to the Ivies makes the grading curve high.
If financing a Harvard education is problem, you should strongly consider the full ride at USC and have money left for medical or graduate school.
I have great respect for Harvard, but I firmly believe a full ride to USC is a better option than full pay to Harvard, in this particular case. As the OP previously mentioned, the $200 grand can be applied to the cost of med school.
It’s easy to be tantalized by the prospect of attending a very elite university, but USC is no slouch and will save major bucks. If the cost of both schools was roughly the same, Harvard would be the obvious choice, but the cost difference is substantial.
I would choose USC without batting an eyelash.
If Harvard doesn’t offer any FA, OP’s family income is certainly north of $280k/yr, which means affordability is not an issue, but desirability may be. If desirability is somewhat inversely related to rarity, then Harvard no aid offer is harder to come by than USC full tuition scholarship offers in my neighborhood, perhaps others too. At my CA suburban school there are usually 3-4 offers of USC full tuition per year vs one Harvard offer every 3-4 years, and Harvard admits always have USC full tuition too, just an observation.
Wow, I almost can’t believe OP has to ask. We’re not talking about Harvard versus full ride at U of Nowhere. USC is a top-caliber research U. Save the money and go to USC.
@jzducol It would seem that it would be affordable to most people. I get it.
However It’s not even being close to being true. Maybe in this case. For a an average family. let’s take a look if it is actually “totally affordable”
300k less state and federal taxes is 30 percent and 10 percent state. Eliminate local. 180k range net, as an example.
Low range and guesstimate averages.
Health insurance 15k
Mortgage 40k
Property tax 10k
Less two cars 12k
Less car insurance 4K
Homeowners insurance 2k
Food 24k
Life insurance 2000
Cell service for 3. 3600
Internet and cable 1500
Electricity 1500
Heating oil or gas 3600
Gasoline 5000
Haircuts, clothing, dry cleaning, cleaning supplies, shampoo, housing items, prescriptions, glasses, deductibles, dentist, dog food, water or sewer taxes, tools. Etc 10k
Harvard 75
Travel to Harvard and back and holidays. Etc 5k
Books and sundries for year 3k
218k. Less 180k. That’s a 38k shortfall. Every year. Or $152000 over college alone. Ok maybe the may have 100000 saved for college. That’s still 52000 short!
That’s not the worst part. That’s not realistic. Look below.
There’s no retirement savings. There’s no emergency savings. Hopefully there’s no other child. Or future college. Or elderly parents. No vacations. No theatre. No movies. No restaurants. No unexpected expenses. No gyms. No house repairs. No painting. No new roof. No major car repairs. No car servicing at all.
And man. You better not lose your job or get sick.
Hawking may have been somewhat lazy but he graduated with 1st class honors, which is the highest honours degree you can achieve.
@Twoin18 . . . sorry for my lack of alacrity in response to your post.
But do you think that Dr. Ferguson would be the right person to ask concerning the intelligence of Harvard students vis-à-vis those of Oxford’s? In your link, he’s was just regurgitating the anti-criteria of his alma mater related to his experience in teaching at Harvard.
Honestly, how can athlete admissions be important at H, with no scholarships? You have Ryan Fitzpatrick who scored one of the highest Wonderlic’s ever of all NFL prospects – not necessarily saying much in relation to the League, I realize. Jeremy Lin? He was only a 5.0 scholar (on a 4.0 scale) at Palo Alto HS and a 1,500+ SAT. Yeah, he wanted to go to UCLA, but they didn’t offer him an athletic scholarship, so it was Stanford as a walkon until Harvard accepted him. Edit: Full pay, if I am not mistaken.
Affirmative Action does have some play, but it’s at a higher plane at H than any other college in the US; and given that these students typically come from lower income and because of this worse high schools, then who’s to say they aren’t as highly qualified as those from great suburban high schools?
Wrt to legacies? Meh . . . smart people beget smart people. And if they donate to the capital fund, then good for H.
@firmament2x I can’t think of someone more qualified to comment than a professor who has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and now Stanford.
Asking “how can athletic admissions be important, with no scholarships” is very strange. Go look at the lawsuit analyses which show how much of a boost this gives to the chance of getting in, compared to other factors. You don’t have to be both a 4.0/1600 student and an athlete to get in, just the latter, even if some people are both. And if you just want to list well known individuals, I have my doubts that David Hogg would impress Prof Ferguson with his analytical essay writing skills, after all that’s not why he’s there.
As to legacy, sure smart people beget smart people, but it’s obvious that if you pick the smartest from the pool of legacies (though in fact they tend to pick the richest, not the smartest) rather than the pool of all possible candidates, your average intelligence won’t be as high. Same applies to affirmative action.
The simple point is that Harvard aren’t aiming to select the most “naturally intelligent students in the world” as you originally alleged. If you want that go to Oxbridge (or perhaps Caltech).
@Twoin18. . . Okay, I understand, you need to protect the honor of your prior post with link. J/k, I enjoyed reading it…
But here, rather, is an Englishman protecting the honor of his alma mater; in addition, he’s a noted contrarian. I don’t doubt that his purpose, albeit satirically, is to shoot down any colonist institution; he’s undoubtedly old-school British => take a lot of what he says with a grain of salt.
I view persons who play sports in high school as engaging in a high-caliber extra curricular. There is abuse, of course, but it wouldn’t be at Harvard. Additionally, it’s been proven that those who play sports have a greater probability of holding high positions of leadership in corporations, government, etc.
Why is David Hogg at Harvard; does he fulfill H’s social-justice cohort? In your opinion, is he just a great talking head with nothing behind it – and I realize he “only” scored a 1300 on the SAT?
Re, your last paragraph,
A really high % of those who choose Harvard is based on a self-selective process (big word here), and undoubtedly helped considerably by their parents. This is why Harvard’s yield is so incredibly high and of course, the higher the yield, the less students it has to accept. Really smart people with undecided futures will overwhelmingly choose H over any other institution. If they want to be engineers and have wanted to since they were young, yeah, they may choose MIT or some other college.
Edit: second paragraph, “But here, rather, is a Brit…”
@firmament2x You are making a lot of assumptions about Ferguson in order to avoid providing evidence to counter his argument and back up your original assertion.
My point about David Hogg is that he’s a good example of someone who (in Ferguson’s description) “wouldn’t get an interview at Oxford”. If you can’t (effortlessly) get well over 1500 on your SAT then you aren’t getting an interview let alone a place. They don’t care what else you’ve achieved. There’s a reason Malala was really nervous about whether she’d get into Oxford - she still had to get the same top grades in her A levels as anyone else, regardless of the Nobel Prize. At Harvard her grades wouldn’t have mattered.
And your assertion that “Really smart people with undecided futures will overwhelmingly choose H over any other institution” is belied by the advice of multiple posters in this thread. There are plenty of people for whom $200K+ would provide sufficient incentive to choose another institution.
@Twoin18 . . . You missed my previous point entirely. It isn’t a question of admissive policy of a university, in reference to your mentioning of whether so-and-so would be getting interviews at Oxford or not. H, Y, P, M, Cal Tech, and all the rest the US elites all admit a lot of the same incredibly bright people. Given the same conditions, financial packages, etc. – because an offering of a full-scholarship was never an element of my argument as hopefully you can see in my first post in this thread – the student will more than likely choose H over any of the others. It is that self-selective process I brought up previously.
Try not to gain a consensus by turning to the others. I just mentioned that if OP’s daughter wanted to meet the next creator of a killer application, perhaps she might want to attend H. But being that she was going more of a pre-determinisic pathway of becoming (edit: a) doctor (just the way I felt like wording things at that time), I felt that it didn’t matter if she attended a state college or in this case USC. Education of future doctors is essentially the same nationwide with the same requisite core courses for the various med schools.
If you want to keep bringing up Dr. Ferguson as your proof that H doesn’t doesn’t live up to Oxbridge intellectually, then that’s your right, but it’s not any more legitimate.
State what you will and let’s put this argument to bed. Thank you…
@dot228
My DS was also a full tuition Scholar at USC, and was also accepted at other “more prestigious” U’s.
He chose to go to USC. He made the most of his time there , as you can.
He received his PhD at CalTech one of the most prestigious research Universities in the world.
At USC, Trustee scholars rise to the top.
Going to USC was a no brainer for him, as it should be for you.
Dont pay Hundreds of thousands $$ for an UG education that WON’T give you a better chance of acceptance at ANY Graduate degree program.