<p>harvard then berkeley for grad school.</p>
<p>BayMom, several years ago, my niece was facing a similar situation. She was accepted by Stanford and UCB. The family eventually decided for her to go to UCB for the lower cost. She ended up getting into Columbia Law School after graduated from UCB. Your daughter will be very successful in either school. Her chance of getting into a very good graduate or professional program will not be deminished by going to UCB. In my opinion, no ungraduate education worth an extra $120,000.</p>
<p>"Cal: Oakland
Harvard: Cambridge</p>
<p>Perhaps it is just me but that alone is worth $120000 for me."</p>
<p>Of course, to each his own. I was merely pointing out that the total cost of $200,000 simply astounds me. I understand that it does not do the same thing to others on this forum.</p>
<p>By the way, Cal is in Berkeley, not Oakland. And just across the bay is a city that some folks think is rather nice: San Francisco.</p>
<p>It may be helpful if the we think this way: Would the OP regret if her D were not accepted to harvard? (in the OP’s financial situation)</p>
<p>I think the best gift a parent can give their kids is the knowledge that the parent won’t be financially dependent on them in their old age. So don’t jeapordize your retirement. Not for Harvard, not for anything.</p>
<p>But it’s also not clear to me whether the money involved is really critical to your future well being or not. I don’t know how old you are, how secure your job is, if you’d be able to afford your COBRA payment if you lost your job, if you have a chronic medical condition, if you are on the verge of paying off your mortgage, etc. All of these are factors. It’s easy to tell someone else how to spend 200K. It’s harder to calculate how secure your future earning stream is-- which I think is what you’re asking all of us to gauge.</p>
<p>The one thing I can tell you based on my observation of many families… don’t make an undergrad decision based on some far away event like grad school. Maybe she’ll go, maybe not. Maybe it will be for a fully funded PhD. Maybe she’ll take a full ride at Duke Law School and forgo the 60K/year full pay option at Harvard Law School. Maybe her employer will pay for her MBA. Maybe she’ll work in a corporate job for 20 years and then decide to get a Master’s degree in speech therapy. In none of these cases would your income, assets, or retirement even be a consideration, let alone a meaningful factor. In all of the cases I stated above, there was a parent holding tight on the purse strings for undergrad “trying to save it for grad school”. What are you saving it for? The woman I know who ditched her corporate career to work with stroke victims on their language and speech issues could have bought and sold her parents twice by the time she went to grad school.</p>
<p>So make a decison now based on what is in front of you- what can you afford, where will your kid take advantage of the phenomenal opportunities that will come her way, where will she work to maximze what is obviously her huge potential… and then send in the envelope and don’t look back.</p>
<p>blossom, I agree, one shouldn’t mortgage one’s future in the near future, but a job loss in the next four years would probably mean that Harvard’s financial aid would kick in. I have a friend whose daughter is getting a substantial merit aid scholarship at Duke and for many academics Phd programs come with stipends.</p>
<p>
Very true, OP should not make a decision based on where the DD will go after 4 years. At this point I don’t think there is anything that points to a better 4 years experience at Cal over Harvard for Humanities major.
In my opinion think of the worst case, may be this is the biggest achievement for OP’s DD. Many students perform better in high school and may not perform at same level at College and vice versa. Cal will be brutal to a non performing student as there is not much support system. Harvard support system is very good and there are fewer chances to fail.</p>
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<p>Regents scholarships are supposed to go to the top what, 2% of applicants? These people might not be in the top 2% once they go to college, but they are looking pretty good for a 50% acceptance rate to Haas.</p>
<p>
It is easy to play with statistics. The 50% acceptance rate to Haas is of the applicants and not the Cal students both are very different thing. You might would like to find more information as this might be 50% of 2% that were invited for Regents to begin with.</p>
<p>It is like saying that MIT has 100% acceptance to its ME program from EECS department. But the underlying fact is that you are eligible to apply only if you maintain 4.25/5 GPA in the EECS classes.</p>
<p>For some reason, there is always a surprising amount of hostility on CC toward Cal, and also toward Harvard…both are top schools; both have great faculty and offerings for undergrads as well as grads. Both require a lot of self-motivation, to meet professors, do well enough to get into post-undergrad programs (don’t kid yourself that Harvard students with B averages will get into any program they want…I’ve seen Harvard grads rejected at lots of schools). At both, some will thrive and some will fall by the wayside; there are plenty of kids who get depressed at Harvard too, and the administration there is not particularly nurturing. If you want that, a liberal arts college is a better option.
Cal is in Berkeley. It is not in Oakland. Most kids don’t stray from the immediate area. Residents of Berkeley find it to be a lovely place to live. They don’t go to Telegraph Ave. much. I’ve seen downtown Cambridge and was not impressed that it was particularly less grungy than Telegraph Ave. . Harvard’s campus is not nicer than Cal’s, which is far more park-like and serene, even with 30,000 students. The weather is incomparable. The stress level is lower at Cal. But those are not dispositive reasons to select either school. I’ll bet this student goes to Harvard. But the real consideration is whether the finances are in place to do it without making it a great sacrifice, because it is not likely to be “worth” the sacrifice of a comfortable retirement. A student with a Regents at Cal will get a lot of mileage out of it if he/she gets good grades. The world will be his/her oyster to the extent it is for anyone these days…</p>
<p>Baymom66 notes,“This means we have to pay $30k per year more than if she goes to UCB.”</p>
<p>Response: Let me give you some advice that your CPA or a financial planner would give you. Is UCB is a LOT less expensive then Harvard? If that is the case, go to UCB, especially if money is an issue, and your daughter is considering graduate school. UCB is a terrific school with amazing faculty. She could note the scholarship on her resume.</p>
<p>In addition, unlike that of Harvard, UCB undergrads can get exposed to the top faculty. </p>
<p>Moreover, I have several good friends who attended Harvard, including my uncle, and know several folks who want to Berkeley. Without question, the UCB folks stood out in my mind.</p>
<p>One final thing that you might want to try is to call up the Harvard admission office and tell them of UCB’s offer and explain why you can’t afford Harvard’s tuition. Maybe they will match it or come close to it.There is no harm in asking.</p>
<p>Lets summarize:Assuming Harvard doens’t give you more money, top state school in the US at a fantastic price vs. Harvard… What do you have to think about? Take UCB… That’s my vote.</p>
<p>This is a decision that many of us parents in California have to make, do we send our kids to a UC or a private. My DH and I had to make that decision twice, both kids were admitted to UC Berkeley, LA and SD. Twice, we made the decision to send them to full-pay privates. Do we miss the money? You bet. Did it impact our retirement ? It had to. Do we regret it? No.</p>
<p>One kid (our DD) eventually went on to grad school with merit aid. She is graduating next month with a great job awaiting. My S is working in an industry where most people need a graduate degree to break into but he’s worked his way up where his performance counts more than his lack of an advanced degree. However, he is sure that his undergraduate degree from an Ivy has made this opportunity possible. Through his career path which admittedly is short (5 years),but his contacts are extensive, he’s never met a Haas graduate.</p>
<p>very sensible post mamenyu</p>
<p>
I think the problem is the other way around. There are lots of supporter of Cal on CC. It is a good school but there are lots of better schools than that. But for those CC’ers it is just not acceptable. It is good to be attached to school where your children are going but supporting blindly is not the right way to go.
Please provide one advantage in going to Cal over Harvard if $$$ is out of equation.</p>
<p>
Top 2% according to some holistic view. I know a Regents scholar whose stats are a notch below me. He didn’t do as well as me in almost all subjects in high school. What’s the chance he’d do better than me in college?
For Californians, it would be closer to home.
For everyone else, better weather.
For some people, better majors (engineerings).
Would you do it again now? In this economy?</p>
<p>parentofivyHope, notes,“Please provide one advantage in going to Cal over Harvard if $$$ is out of equation.”</p>
<p>Response: I will give you three advantages: The first advantage is the weather! Secondly, undergraduate kids at Berkeley have had and will continue to have access to some of the top notch faculty at Berkeley. This isn’t as much the case at Harvard. Thirdly, it is closer to home. Thus, less travel costs and better chance of seeing the child more.</p>
<p>Finally, you can’t discount the $$$$$. If money is an important issue, you have to take it into consideration. This is akin to picking a hospital for a surgical procedure without taking into account the reputation of the doctor who is performing the procedure. Money is very crucial in today’s economy.</p>
<p>there could be many reasons apart from money: proximity to home and friends; plans to stay in California where a degree from Cal arguably has as much cache as one from Harvard (there is a segment of Californians, including those who are on hiring committees, who find Harvard graduates too snooty, but in any event, there would be more Cal grads on hiring committees in California who would be inclined to pick fellow Cal grads); much nicer weather; better food; less intense emphasis on extracurricular activities for social life and status; a strong Asian community at Cal and proximity to Asia…)
These are personal/family decisions.
It is ridiculous to think that there are no reasons why someone would choose Cal over Harvard apart from money. But that is buying into the hypothetical that money is not a factor here.</p>
<p>Taxguy- I agree with you conceptually but in this case we dont know enough to know how important the money is in the equation.</p>
<p>I had kids young; I returned to work immediately after my maternity leaves; we’ve had two incomes for most of our marriage; we have life insurance in case one of us is hit by a bus; we bought a house well below what we could technically afford in order to save aggressively for college. We did not qualify for need based aid, and for sure paying full freight for multiple kids is hard and involves a lot of sacrifices and deferred consumption and deferred everything else. So it’s not like I shook out the sofa cushions one day and found 50K in quarters, i.e. the money wasn’t an important issue. Of course it was.</p>
<p>But given the number of years of working life that I had left (i.e. I wasn’t 55 sending my oldest off to college like one of my siblings) and the safety nets in place, as important as the money was, I was lucky enough to be able to set my concerns about retirement aside.</p>
<p>We don’t know what the OP’s situation is like… so it’s presumptous to tell them that the answer is Cal. or Harvard. Or loans. Or taking a second job. </p>
<p>Taxguy- money isn’t everything. For some families, when they tell you that “we’ve tightened our belt to pay for college” that means hanging on to the Lexus another year, going camping for vacation instead of a cruise, and holding off on decorating the family room. For others, it means borrowing against their 401K, canceling their disability and life insurance policies to conserve the cash, and putting off a mammogram for four years. Both families are cutting expenses, but one is cutting clear luxuries and discretionary spending (as much as they may miss their vacation) and the other is putting their family at risk.</p>
<p>Not the same.</p>
<p>One thing to bear in mind is that your kid is still the same person whether he goes to Cal or Harvard. If he is motivated and hardworking, he will be successful wherever he goes. His future regarding grad school or job opportunities will not be diminished if he goes to Cal instead of Harvard. It is the person that counts. My niece who went to Cal and then Columbia Law School became a very successful lawyer. I am sure she will be just as successful if she went to Stanford instead.</p>
<p>
So I was correct that CC is full of Cal supporters.
I cann’t digest that it is relatively easy to have access to Cal faculty with 30000 to 1 odds and is difficult to have access to Harvard faculty with 10000 to 1 odds.
All other factors should have been considered prior to the application itself. If OP’s have allowed DD to apply to Harvard then I preassume that weather and proximity to home is not an issue.</p>