<p>Where are you going?</p>
<p>I turned down MIT, Rice, Columbia, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, and UMD for Brown =) It was actually a very hard choice... Rice was giving me 12k a year merit... and yea.. it was hard, but im so happy =)</p>
<p>I turned down Columbia, NYU, McGill, and Boston College for Brown.</p>
<p>I have to say, it makes me feel a bit more comfortable that other peopl turned down great places for Brown...It was definitely the toughest decision I've had to make, but I turned down Berkeley, Georgetown SFS, Imperial College London, McGill, Pomona, Wesleyan and Macalester for Brown.</p>
<p>I'm not going to Brown... I'm going to UCLA, which still annoys my parents a little bit. It was a hard choice, between Brown, USC Film, and UCLA Regents, but in the end I liked UCLA the best.</p>
<p>I turned down UT Austin Plan II, Georgetown, and Princeton. It was a very difficult thing to do.</p>
<p>I turned down Brown, UVA Echols, Northwestern, and Columbia for Yale...Brown was most def my second choice (first really, never even thought about Yale as a choice)...but $ and opportunities made it impossible to turn down Yale. I tried to get Brown to give better aid but they didn't even match Yale's. (I'm paying only 16k/year)</p>
<p>It was so nice not having to consider financial aid in my decision...</p>
<p>It would have killed me to have to turn down a school because of financial reasons.</p>
<p>It's really odd that Brown didn't match Yale in barski's case...b/c when they looked at Yale's offer for me, they didn't just match it, they actually surpassed it by a few hundred dollars. And one of the heads of fin.aid over there specifically said at a presentation that competing Ivy (+ Stanford, MIT, etc) offers would be considered and most likely matched.</p>
<p>I had a really odd financial aid experience too: I showed Brown four better packages from liberal arts colleges (good ones, like Amherst, Williams, Vassar, Wesleyan) but they didn't care at all. No change. Then, in a letter a week later, I showed them my Dartmouth offer and they changed my Brown offer immediately, surpassing Dartmouth's.</p>
<p>That is very interesting. I've heard of similar experiences at other Ivies. In each case, apparently, they made a calculation as to what you'd do based on cross-admit data. Brown battles Dartmouth on more or less even terms, so the size of the financial aid package might seem to be a tipping factor.</p>
<p>If Brown thought barski would go to Yale anyway, why wouldn't they update the package? At worst, they'll steal a student from Yale.</p>
<p>Plus, they bothered to make the package better...just not as good as Yale's. I'm thinking about writing them a letter questioning their motives.</p>
<p>The general knowledge around my school is that Ivies will always match each others' financial aid. That's proved true this year as well. Did you write after April 15th, when the money was running out? Or did you make it sound like you had already decided on Brown over Yale despite the financial aid disparity?</p>
<p>I asked before the 15th...both informally in person during a visit on the 8th and officially by post a few days later...I didn't at all make it sound like I had decided on Brown (I MIGHT have hinted at the opposite, but really I made it clear that Brown had always been my first choice but that I couldn't choose it with the $ hanging over me head). Of all things, the student rep, a senior, speaking to my group of admits TOLD me to go to Yale, it had been her first choice. Tough to argue with that.</p>
<p>Their policy is explicitly to only, well, care about the competing financial aid packages of the Ivies + MS.</p>
<p>It's interesting that you should mention that student rep, barski. Brown and Yale seem to have a lot of cross-applicants. When I went to ADOCH, several students asked me where else I was considering. After I said Yale, each one said that Yale had been their first choice; one PLME had applied early to Yale and said that she would have "given her right leg" to go there. </p>
<p>Just curious, did that guide give you any reasons why not to attend Brown?</p>
<p>I chose Brown over Northwestern, Wash U, and GW (Honors Program and Half Tuition Merit Scholarship...). I opted to remain on Cornell's and Harvard's waitlists just to see what happens.</p>
<p>asterstar, you had a very difficult decision to make but you may be comforted in knowing that several other folks faced with the same decision made the same choice.</p>
<p>as you'd most likely expect, most people who are admitted to both brown and harvard or yale choose harvard or yale (something like 80-90%). however, of the PLME admits, half of the folks admitted to both Harvard and PLME, choose PLME, and 70% of those admitted to both Yale and PLME choose PLME.
so you are likely to have a handful of classmates who made the same choice (as i did five years ago).</p>
<p>retrospectively, it's impossible to tell what it would have been like had i chose yale over brown, but i certainly don't have any regrets because my brown experience worked out very well for me in the end. i'm not sure what your personal reasons were for your decision, but i am sure brown will be a great experience for you too =)</p>
<p>thank you for your words, dcircle. Those numbers are surprising and very comforting at the same time.</p>