Having said what I wrote in my post above, most of the UChicago parents here are not taking on $200K in debt, some might have a modest debt of $20-40K which IMO would be well worth it. Most of us have either saved enough and/or received enough FA that our kids will be debt free on graduation. I would agree that if you’re planning on paying your children’s education through a professional degree and don’t have that money available then yes choices have to be made.
My oldest just graduated from art school and got a graphic designer job in Chicago (working as an art director for a publishing company). Her salary is commensurate with the national market, since she attended a nationally-known design school. Just to underscore this point: her salary is entry-level and nowhere near $100k. She took out a “reasonable” amount of debt to close the gap between what her scholarship and our funds could provide for: something on the lower end of @CU123’s range. She will easily be able to repay at her current salary. Rents in her neighborhood for her living situation are about 20-25% of her current gross salary. She’s not living in Streeterville, but there are lots of other places in Chicago to live. She has a colleague who lives five minutes away from Union Station and I’m guessing that’s not cheap. My daughter will need to live frugally but she’ll have money to go out with friends, pay for her transportation (public) and so forth. One bonus is that her employer subsidizes her transportation if she takes public. She’s even contributing to a 401k which is something I didn’t even know existed when I was her age! Right now, she can’t afford to purchase her own place in the area, but she’s only 22 and just starting out. She has years to figure all this out as well as parents who can always help her select an under-priced property, as my older relatives did for me when I was just starting out.
When I graduated from Booth in the early 90’s, my starting salary for my Chicago job was pretty much the same as it would have been in NYC. Tech employers in places like SV and Seattle might well pay a housing bonus or similar to make the transition out there a tad more reasonable nowadays, but they are not paying high salaries to begin with in order to compensate for expensive housing. It’s the other way around: high salaries of employees with highly-valued skill sets in a growth industry will drive up the price of housing in the area unless supply of the latter can keep up with demand.
My kids are both in their early 30s now, and both have benefited in specific ways from having the University of Chicago on their resumes. Which is not to say that they might not be earning as much or more in different jobs if they had gone to different colleges, or different types of colleges, but they are not in jobs that were truly open to all comers. Educational pedigree was taken into account. And they, at least, believe that whatever alternative-universe jobs they might have gotten had they gone to Generic State College would have been less interesting and less fulfilling than the jobs they have.
That doesn’t mean anyone should borrow willy-nilly to send kids to Chicago, or even that there’s a reliable financial analysis that would justify any debt at all. It does mean, however, that a pure financial analysis may not tell the whole story.
That additional bump from a Chicago education into a satisfying job should definitely be brought into the equation. However, I would also suggest something not quite so easy to quantify or even describe.
Chicago grads will carry through life certain intangibles - a sense of having received a unique education, of having acquired the tools required to think and figure things out, of having been part of a truly distinguished institution. All will feel in some measure, whatever their fields, that they were tested at this place and that they measured up. There is an internal power and confidence that comes from such an experience. A Chicago grad will never feel overawed by the people in any room and will never feel incapacitated for dealing with the things that matter in a life. Such a belief can be sustaining in dark times.
A real education is more than a means of solving problems: it is a way of thinking about the world and one’s place in it, it is a gyroscopic guide through the maze of the world. That’s something money can’t buy. It has little to do with prestige or name-recognition. It may not be uniquely available at the University of Chicago, but the odds are good you will get it if you go there, and if you do, it will accompany you wherever you go thereafter. That too should be considered.
This is so good and so accurate that it deserves repetition.
We are getting dangerously close to being in perpetual agreement, @JHS . I sense a provocation coming on, however.
A very similar question to that of the OP was asked on another forum:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/22368013#Comment_22
The question there was whether a generic “elite” school was worth the cost. Many of the answers were similar to those given in our thread, including not only better quality educational facilities but access to enhanced “career and networking” opportunities and the “opening of doors” conveyed by the “social capital” attached to elite schools. However, one of the comments takes up the psychological dimension I attempted to describe but puts it in entirely different terms: “There is a lifetime of psychic income derived from the pleasure you derive from the inevitable question, ‘where did you go to school?’ It makes you feel proud and expresses an immediate indication of intelligence and accomplishment to the world. It’s a powerful drug. It’s a tiny fraction of the world who can say this and it’s impressive at the human level. It also has this effect with interviewers, co-workers and in-laws, lol.”
I’m not unworldly enough to deny the truthfulness of that comment for many a grad of an “elite” school, but I’m also rather repelled by it. That is not at all what I was attempting to describe in suggesting that a Chicago education gave you sources of internal confidence and power. I was describing what David Riesman called a state of “inner-directedness” derived from having formulated through a rigorous education a personalized way of interpreting and acting in the world. The commenter on that other forum (who probably has HYSP in mind more than UChicago) was describing the internal satisfactions that arise when others fawn on you because of where you went to school. That’s “other-directedness” in its crassest form. It’s a moral hazard, and it’s not the Chicago way. That very reaction to a mere name is one of the many reasons that some of us have always chosen the University of Chicago over other elite schools.
I still don’t disagree with anything you are saying here, @marlowe1 , but I have to note: What’s done is done, at least for a few generations. You can’t put the genii back in the bottle. You can’t un-inhale.
The University of Chicago has become one of those elite university brand-name drugs. That has little or nothing to do with the moral education the university still aspires to provide, and, yes, may even interfere with it. (One hopes not too much.) But the drug is there, and I don’t think you can be a University of Chicago student these days without getting dosed sometimes.
Or even an alumnus. Like it or not, the social meaning of your school has changed.
^ There are various levels of “social meaning” - from a “flavor of the decade” popularity to a reputation held in high esteem by others in academia. The more superficial the level, the more pronounced the change with, perhaps, some very notable exceptions - high schools and families who had no clue about UChicago because the school simply did no outreach back in the day were now given the opportunity to learn about it. The old mindset in the College was woefully misguided and has since been corrected. Now it’s an elite-university brand-name drug. People are thrilled to be there. Does that mean the strict academic culture will need to loosen up a bit to make them happy? Or are they finally attracting kids who, by and large, can handle it?
And is this “change” fundamentally different from other major changes that the College and university have made over the years? In true UChicago fashion, we all discuss every “change” as if it’s earth shattering. If you go back and examine the history of the place, you see the same process playing out again, and again, and again. Someone suggests something and suddenly it’s huge news with protests and bad PR. This school seemingly can’t escape controversy - even its admissions policies and outreach to underserved groups are placed under scrutiny. And now that the College has solidified its place among the top undergraduate programs in the world, it’s suddenly an elite-university-brand-name drug, complete with warning label.
Until some of us decide we just don’t care what they do anymore as long as they stay in the top of the UNSWR rankings - I posit that the place has really NOT changed. It remains a catalyst for conversation that is perceived as weird and a tad obsessive, and attracts mockery and insults from the outside world. Same old, same old.
@JHS and @JBStillFlying , this matter requires an Aristotelian analysis.
Thusly - What is the end for which a Chicago education is pursued, that is, its final cause? We are all agreeing that it is not to get access to the drug of self-gratification that comes from answering the question, “Where did you go to school?” But neither are we denying (although to be fair, it is probably only I who have the inclination to deny) that over the last decade or so the growing prestige of the brand provides a bit of that. I would call this the “material cause” of a Chicago education - merely because it is a fact of that education. I would even allow it as part of the “efficient cause” in that it must have some motivational power today (unlike in past years), as must the promise of material success and rewards generally. Young people choose UChicago and persevere in their studies there at least in part for these reasons.
No doubt there is a tension among the causes, and it would be fair to say that the final cause nowadays includes not merely becoming an educated person in terms of acquiring knowledge and understanding but of becoming a leader and productive citizen in the nation and the world. Those features are not as prominent or definitional at Chicago as at the peer schools, but they do exist now more than formerly.
Overarching the other three causes is the formal cause of it all - more than the end result, more than the motivation of individuals, more than the material adjuncts. Call it the ideal of becoming aware of self and world for their own sakes. Even Aristotle has trouble with formulating the content of formal causes. Whatever it is, however, it is definitely not the soporific hit of complacent self-admiration that comes when someone asks you where you went to school.
@marlowe1 Thanks for the quote. To be clear. I was explaining what I perceive as an unspoken driver, not an experience worth going into debt for or one that is ultimately satisfying. Actually, it can be the tonic one consumes when life may have not turned out as expected or grand - they still have that accomplishment to help keep the old ego feeling ok.
But it’s a thing. That’s all.
Greetings, @privatebanker ! I have been interrogating or perhaps torturing your words here because they were arresting ones. You were saying something most elite grads draw back from saying on this board. However, they sound truthful to me.
Sebastian Flyte, dying in squalor in Morocco, was still an Oxford man under it all. An undistinguished colonel of mine commanding a dinky post newspaper in deepest Alabama could say - and often did - that he had been a West Pointer. Going to an elite school doesn’t relieve anyone from bearing intermittently the pangs of defeat and rejection. Some bear them permanently. A crutch is a crutch.
So if I accept your description of the psychological propensity to reach for the name of one’s famous school as a prop in hard times, would you acknowledge that that propensity is just a bit shameful? That it ought to be resisted in the same way as, contintinuing your metaphor, which was vivid, one ought to resist drugs? It’s only honest to acknowledge the pleasure of the hit, but delusions of that sort are what a real education should free us from.
My quarrel with your observation is not entirely a moralistic one. There are many of us (I declare myself as such and would assert that we are disproportionally grads of the U of C) who would find it burdensome to carry around the name recognition of a brand-name school. Isn’t it the deepest longing of all to make ourselves known and understood for what is inside us? The name of a famous school is a barrier; it separates and essentializes. Yes, people may be impressed, but they also put you in a box and think the box contains you. It may be a plush-lined box, but doesn’t being in it become tiresome? The lesser spirits, the Sebastian Flytes and the undistinguished West Pointers, become trapped in those boxes. That’s a psychological observation, not a moralistic one.
In contrast to all that I proclaim “Crescat Scientia, Vita Excolatur”!
There is some personal satisfaction in knowing I’ve made it through three years here, learned a lot, and have yet to flunk out (though there’s still time to fix that). But to the extent going to UChicago comes up in conversation with others, it’s more awkward than anything. I have been through this snippet of conversation literally hundreds of times when meeting people.
I guess one could derive ‘psychic income’ from that moment, but it still feels strange to me after three years, and I’m not sure that’ll ever change. Responding without sounding like a pompous oaf is a challenge in itself - so I’ve settled on one of two responses.
Option 1: “I guess. Where’d you go to college?” (And then steer the small talk to questions about their college experience)
Option 2: “Yeah, only takes eight of us to change a lightbulb.” (Followed by small talk about their college)
Dun - very interesting. I think another good response to a compliment like, “That’s a pretty good school”, or, “Wow, you must be pretty smart”, is, “Thank you”. I’ve honestly found that to be the best and most satisfying response to any compliment, including ones about great schools you or your kids go or went to. It recognizes the giver of the compliment while not being falsely modest or uncomfortable or clumsy. I find it to be the best way to leave all parties happy while moving on to other topics at just the right speed.
Not sure the College’s graduates are in danger of succumbing to self-admiration anytime soon. It simply doesn’t have the “look at me” footprint of a HYPS (and the latter, thanks to Chelsea and Tiger, only in recent decades). UChicago grads leave footprints, obviously, but Hollywood hasn’t really picked up on that yet. Until they do, UChicago alums are going to have to be content with doing relevant work rather than being seen as special or important. No Aristotle here, but I suspect that most of them are attending for reasons of the former, not the latter.
What I have heard as a response is typically more along the lines of “it figures,” “that’s where fun goes to die!”, "ok . . . " (head nodding with polite look), and my personal favorite: “oh no! that’s where so and so’s brother/sister/cousin went!” (didn’t ask what happened to that individual). The most admiring - typically from people my own age - is “wow, they have a great law school.” Neighbors think anything outside the local/reciprocal state system is “foreign,” which is odd because one of our reciprocity schools is the University of Winnipeg!
@kaukauna - I’m going to take your advice. The next time someone gives me the “Oh No!” commentary, I will reply “thank you.”
Parents who have students applying to college and also people who work in finance no doubt know about UChicago. When our S decided to attend, we’ve heard from wallstreeters: “I want to mentor you” to parents: “Wow, not going to get better than that.”
That’s a pretty dress!
Hey, like your new car.
What a nice kid you have.
Great presentation Amy.
U of wherever great. Wow. Great school.
It’s all the same and people are generally nice. It’s ok folks. No reason to play the “i go to a small school in Boston” game. It’s just one reason people like the concept of the achievement of earning a spot at a great school. And the list that elicit these responses is way longer than just hpysm and Chicago.
I went to a state flagship school ug. So it’s not my personal experience But it is nice to have someone say something kind when either my wife and daughter are asked.
Lastly, yes the top schools are that for a reason. But as mentioned on the thread in which Marlowe gleaned my quote, a little out of context FYI and certainly not referenced using the Chicago style. Lol.
It doesn’t really matter. It’s always the person.
Look at the top contenders for what we all would consider a high profile job. Maybe even harder to get than a IB or management consulting offer. Other than Chicago grad. UDel UHouston and Howard. All great but not the same here on CC.
If it were the Wharton grad should win without question
I don’t know if Hollywood is paying attention but they do reference UChicago once in a while.
The Accountant: casts a too-young Anna Kendrick as a Naperville-raised, University of Chicago-educated accountant, also referencing the “where fun goes to die” motto
Arrested development: Buster Bluth at UChicago as a sleep deprivation subject, one of my favorites.
I’m sure there are others, but these two come to my mind right now.
Me, when asked about my undergrad or grad school, I just say: Thank you, how familiar are you with the school? And then, I tell them that if they have kids, they should send them there too because I had a great experience.
It’s an opportunity to sell!
“It’s all the same and people are generally nice. It’s ok folks. No reason to play the “i go to a small school in Boston” game.”
- In our case, at least, people are generally honest. Many of them simply don't recognize the Uchicago name like they do HYP etc., and others recall a more stark environment for the undergrads. We need to remember that UChicago's newfound status is, indeed, newfound.
“It’s just one reason people like the concept of the achievement of earning a spot at a great school.”
- There is consumption value to being at a great school, but there's more to that than mere brand name. Our contractor once shared that he admires the engineering and handiwork that goes into a fine, sophisticated tool or machinery. Likewise, we own a fairly old Mercedes (to use one of @privatebanker's status-symbol brands) that's just a fine car despite its age and (miniscule) blue book value. Perhaps the enjoyment of owning something like that derives from the continual pleasure you get from experiencing - in a small way - the very best of human ability. Not sure that applies to the Chanel purse but it may well apply to an education at the University of Chicago.
“And the list that elicit these responses is way longer than just hpysm and Chicago.”
- True. And it varies by region. Stanford, for instance, was recognized as a "great school" in CA long before achieving its more current national reputation, and the large majority of Stanford grads had no trouble finding employment in that state.