<p>I recently found out that I was accepted into the College of Arts and Sciences. I thought my stats were decent:
SAT Reasoning: 2050(750M, 630CR,670W)
SAT Subject Tests:
800- Chemistry(senior)
780- Math II(senior)
750- Math I(Senior)
580- Math I(Freshman Year)
650- Biology M(Freshman year)
***I called up about my subject scores( The admissions person said that they didn’t consider the first three because I sent them in too late- only the last two=( which are definitely NOT representative of my academic achievement/ability) </p>
<p>GPA: A( I do well in all of my classes!)</p>
<p>AP Scores:
5- Chem
4-Stats</p>
<p>I feel so devastated right now-.-
…feel as if I have been rejected from CAS( I will never be able to afford it) </p>
<p>Congrats Waitlisted applicants- you can have my spot!</p>
<p>This happens to a lot of kids at a lot of schools across the country. School now costs about $50k a year, unless you go to state school. I consistently tell people to consider cost. In the big bubble days, there was a premium placed on “prestige” that far over-valued its dollar worth. As in, spending $20k more a year to go school ranked 10 places higher - in the junk USNWR rankings - actually would magically translate into earnings. That never made sense because jobs pay what they pay in each region. If you have $80k in debt, you have to make thousands more a year just to break even with someone who has no debt. People over-valued prestige, which is very imperfectly measured anyway, as they did almost everything else in the bubble.</p>
<p>but then again- private schools generally have those rankings for a reason; more connections, resources, private donations and brilliant professors who have published many things in their respective fields.
I too recieved no financial aid- my efc is not crazy high, it’s 3/5 the cost of BU. however with a 2070 and 3.72 I expected merit aid. I can’t go without it.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, private schools are often very good. The only problem is that people assume that public schools don’t have any of those connections, resources, or brilliant professors. Can anyone really say that schools like UNC - Chapel Hill, UVA, or William & Mary are inferior to any private school in their areas? Prestige can be important in some fields, but I’m not sure that it’s worth it to go into more debt that you can handle. Debt might not seem like a lot now, but it can warp your life for years to come; it’ll eat up parts of your income that could go towards apartment, house, or car payments, take away or sharply curtail your luxuries, and make going to a professional school (like law or medicine) more difficult since you’ll have much less borrowing power. It can be worth it if you really love the school, but before you make that kind of commitment you should at least think about whether or not ten spaces up or down the U.S. News ranking is worth that much more.</p>
<p>It is very tough without grants to go to a private school. I don’t think taking on huge debt is a good educational choice. </p>
<p>A short version of my prestige rant: it’s overblown. During the bubble, people over-valued the concept of prestige and thus the highly suspect, almost ridiculously poor USNWR rankings, as though one could actually say with certainty of any kind that school x is really 10 places better than school y or that this difference matters at all. My belief is simple: there are a few tiers of schools and everything within a tier is pretty much relative. Second, as part of that bubble thinking, people thought that prestige directly translated into being “worth” a higher cost, meaning more debt. The numbers have always disagreed. The biggest determinants of what you make are your field and where you live. Third, where you go to school is not as closely linked to graduate school as people think because grad school admissions are mostly by numbers, meaning your grades (which are adjusted for schools that grade inflate) and your test scores. The reason kids from Yale get in to schools is they scored well on the SAT and thus the LSAT/MCAT/GRE. The system puts a lot of emphasis on those score, fair or not, sensible or not.</p>
<p>So go:</p>
<p>where you can afford
where they have your program
where you like</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the flagship public universities in the Northeast cannot begin to compare with state schools in other regions of the country: UVa, Penn State, UNC-Chapel Hill, UMichigan, UCalifornia etc. </p>
<p>UMass, SUNY etc. are not of that caliber, despite what some posters will likely rant about in response to this post.</p>