Being a junior, I have been thinking about the colleges that I want to apply to later this year. In terms of my career, I plan to go into entrepreneurship or the investments industry. I am wondering if I should apply to Wharton ED this Fall even though I have Berkeley about 30 minutes from my house. By going to Berkeley, I would only be paying around 60-70 thousand dollars for my entire four year education compared to the 200-300 thousand that it would cost if I went to Wharton. If I go to UC Berkeley, I will be staying at my parents house during college due to the cost of dorming. This would be a no-brainer if the prospects of Investment Banking/Private Equity recruitment weren’t so much better at Wharton compared to Berkeley. If I go to UC Berkeley, then I could use that money I would have spent on schooling to create a startup, but won’t be as successful in the investment sector if I chose to go that route. In contrast, if I go to Wharton I will have an easier time going into the investments industry, but it will be much harder to gain the funds to create a startup.
By the way, my household income is 150,000+ but I have 2 other siblings going to college at the same time, so my family doesn’t have enough money to pay for Wharton. I will probably have to take out loans in that case.
Do you think that going to Wharton has enough benefits to offset the immense costs of going there compared to Berkeley which I live very close to?
Thank you for your reply. I was also leaning towards UC Berkeley due to the aforementioned reasons and I will definitely make a larger list of schools in the future. Thank you again.
Commuting to school will certainly take away from college experience IMO.
College isn’t 100% about education - the best 4 years of your life to study, experiment,
have fun, make mistakes (hopefully not too big).
You maybe better off going to UCLA (shouldn’t be too much more expensive and your
family should be able to afford that without coughing up the cost of Wharton)
This pretty much takes UPenn / Wharton out of being a realistic option. Loans beyond the federal direct loan limit ($5.5k first year, increasing slightly later years) require cosigners like your parents, a very bad idea if they and you do not really have the money.
Besides, admission to either is not assured. (Also, the UCB business major is competitive admission in one’s second year of college.)
Here is an older (2012) thread about IB recruiting at UCB:
If the OP gets admitted to UCB and matriculates there, there is the option to live on or near campus or commute from home, depending on the financial resources. More distant campuses would require living on or near campus, which may be an issue if the finances are limited. But if money is not so limited, and the OP goes to UCB, living on campus at least for the first year may be desirable, assuming that things are pre-COVID-19 normal by then. There are also some low cost near-campus living options like the BSC co-op houses.
I disagree with your point about engineering/math majors being better than business degrees for a career in Wall Street. From the research I have done and the conversations that I have had with former investment bankers/recruiters, recruitment is mainly based off of GPA rather than your major. So by taking a hard major at Berkeley, such as math, would be shooting yourself in the foot, since Berkeley is a extremely hard school to get a 3.8+ in, especially for math or engineering majors. Just wanted to let everyone know in case they see this.
Perhaps this may be because business has a competitive secondary admission process, and the math-heavy majors are seen as “hard”.
Note that the linked post also mentions a 3.7+ college GPA, but it is extremely competitive beyond major and GPA (3 out of 150 applicants getting summer internships).
Not trying to discourage, but you should applied to both and likely more schools. I assume you’re talking about the MET program for Berkeley. So Both Wharton and MET are extremely hard to get in. Even for highly achieved kids, getting in neither should be the expectation.
Oh no, I was planning on applying to the GMP program to Berkeley because I also want to focus on entrepreneurship during college as well which would be very difficult with a double major. I understand that both are very difficult to get into but I was asking this question in advance to decide whether it would be a good idea to ED to Wharton or not.
@TaylorDo Did you use Penn’s Net Price Calculator to rule out whether you’d be eligible for any financial aid? It’s not clear from your post that you have already done so. You might not be, but it’s worth looking at to make sure your guess is accurate.
Yes, I have taken a look at it and unfortunately it seems like they do not take into account other siblings going to school at the same time. So to them it looks as though I have the money to pay for the tuition even though I do not.
@TaylorDo If you used the Net Price Calculator carefully, and it’s not affordable, then ED should off the table, period. You might involve a parent in using the calculator to make sure you are doing it correctly. It should take into account the siblings in college.
I agree. This is the reason I am trying to get into a the HAAS school at Berkeley through the GMP program. But again from past experiences with others, a 3.9 GPA in a non-HAAS or math-heavy major would beat out a math-heavy major with a 3.6 for example, even though a math major is much more difficult to get good grades in. This is from talking from a JP Morgan recruiter from UChicago and doing personal research. It may be different at Berkeley but I doubt it.
