Whether or not you become a billionaire has VERY little (I would say nothing) to do with which college you attended…
There is no such thing as a “public ivy”, it’s really a marketing ploy and/or rationalization for the non-ivy colleges and students to justify attending their schools. Let the ivies be who they are.
I remember an top athlete (softball pitcher) being recruited by Loyola Marymount University (CA) and ultimately verballed. She stated the reason she chose LMU was that it was an ivy of the West! Lol.
@USCWolverine, it seems as if some here are conflating “intellectual” with “smart” when I don’t see it that way. For example, I wouldn’t consider Penn or even Stanford to be all that intellectually-focused considering that a greater proportion of their student body are career-focused compared even with other top privates.
@cu123 It’s just a data point of reference when someone is overly concerned with prestige or intellectualism debate. My point being only that usc is plenty tough and intellectual to attract that kind of talent. But I agree it’s not always about the school. Which is also my point. It’s about application of skill perseverance and bit of luck in life
I suspect the most purely intellectual college is Reed. That is why it is not interested in playing the rankings game. The rankings game is all about attracting a lot of applicants who - deep down – are more concerned with prestige than anything else.
U. of Chicago was one of the most intellectual colleges back when it had 30% and higher admissions rates. Students didn’t apply there because of prestige – they applied there because they wanted that kind of education.
Chasing prestige is fine and understandable. But it isn’t something that intellectual colleges care about.
@observer12 you are simple dead wrong about intellectual colleges not caring about rankings. They all do because it has a definitive effect on their applications. If you are at the top of the heap and you’re content to do nothing you will soon find yourself at the bottom.
@USCWolverine - In answer to your question, no, I did not say that “USC doesn’t have a very intellectual student body.” What I said was “USC was not a good fit for my D, despite her thinking that it had some interesting programs and that it seemed like a very vibrant campus (just not for her – she would NOT have been happy there).” She felt this more socially than academically; immediately after visiting USC, she went to Grinnell (another school that offered her full tuition) which she thought would be a better social – but not as good of an academic (their art history programs were not as interesting to her) – fit.
Of course USC has many, many bright and intellectually curious kids. And Stanford has no shortage of kids that are not the least bit intellectually curious. But the level of discussion in the classrooms and the level of intellectual engagement she experienced was, in the aggregate, qualitatively different among kids at Yale, Stanford, and U Chicago that they were at schools like Vanderbilt, USC, Wash U., etc. (And I agree, getting an overall feel for a school is a bit like blind men poking at an elephant and oftentimes one sees what one wants to see.) Ultimately, for my daughter, it was a matter of not wanting to be a big fish in a smaller pond; she wanted a bigger pond in which to swim.
(And yes, UChicago was a definite contender but she didn’t want the weather; Yale was initially her top choice until she got to New Haven and hated it; she thought about Reed, but ultimately decided not to apply because they did not offer any merit aid (the only non-HYPS schools she applied to were those that offered significant merit aid and she submitted separate scholarship applications to any school that required them). She would have been all over Deep Springs had they been accepting applications from women last year.
And as @rickle1 points out, there is a “Big difference between “should I pay vs. could I pay?” If you’re fortunate enough to be in the “Should I pay” group, really think about the “why”. If it’s meaningful, pay, if not, don’t.” It seems that OP is in that group. And @MYOS1634 is quite correct, there are plenty of families that are tempted to pull the rug out from their kids’ feet when faced with this type of decision.
My daughter was very, very concerned about the finances and she is very well aware that money that is spent on her undergraduate tuition is money that might otherwise be used for other things (e.g., putting a down payment on a home or investing in stocks). In creating her list, we encouraged her to cast a wide net among in-state publics (UCs), LACs and research universities that offered merit aid, and HYPS, etc. and that we would consider her options when we had the results.
Every situation and every family is different. I’m just adding another data point and another point of view.
@CU123, some schools care more about how they transform their students than whether you or anyone else think they are at the top or bottom. Reed is among the top 10 feeders (on a per capita basis) in almost all major PhD subjects despite what you may think of them and thus, when you tier by alumni acheivements, they’re actually an Ivy-equivalent despite being ranked nowhere near the top by USNews.
@PurpleTitan and they suffer the consequences of that by not attracting tippy top applicants. I’m sure they get a few but far less than they could have.
@CU123, and I repeat again: They Are Among The Top 10 Feeders to PhD programs even without “tippy-top candidates”.
You seem to be one of those guys who measures how successful college football programs are solely by how they do in recruiting rankings rather than, you know, actual wins and losses on the field.
@PurpleTitan No, I don’t, I am simply recognizing THE FACT that rankings are HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL in decision making by applicants and that in turn affects the alumni universities produce. Period, Even Reed acknowledges that fact. Putting your head in the sand and saying rankings don’t make any difference is ridiculous. BTW, Reed does participate is rankings it does like, not that it is hypocritical or anything. Whether you “like” rankings or not isn’t germane to this discussion, in fact any ranking (or polls for that matter) system to include sports, colleges, etc will always be controversial.
@CU123, and again, all that highly influential decision-making leads to Reed producing alums that go in to PhD programs in numbers that almost no other school can match despite their ranking being where it is.
So you’re essentially saying that a college football program that consistently wins a ton of games and sends a ton of players to the NFL should care about it’s recruiting rankings because it’s recruiting isn’t highly ranked.
Goals? For example, if you wanted to pursue engineering or STEM, the quality of the department would be more meaningful than the “overall” school brand.
@mom2022
You are the only person who can decide.
What was your original goal? Colleges with free money or full pay at selective colleges?
I have only read the initial post in this thread. Since the specific Ivy League schools are not revealed, I will assume that this is a USC with full tuition scholarship versus full pay for Stanford thread in which cost is not a major factor. The easy answer is Stanford, but OP has failed to share enough information for any advice to be meaningful to OP’s specific situation.
I’ve spent plenty of time at both USC and Stanford, and rarely overheard discussions at either campus that were on the level of Plato’s Dialogues. The main difference i found between the two schools is that, on average, Stanford students and teachers are more driven and take their academics more seriously than those at USC. But that doesn’t mean the students at Stanford are geniuses, or the student body at SC is unintellectual. I never got the sense that classes at Stanford were any more challenging than those at USC.
After a few beers, anyone at any school can carry on a deeply intellectual conversation.
Since the title of the thread mentions that some schools are tuition-free while others are full-cost, I had the impression that money was an issue.
@simba9 - My D is in an intensive humanities living/learning core program (a sort of Western – and some Eastern – Civilization course) at Stanford. During the first quarter, there were no shortage of conversations that, while perhaps not at the level of Plato’s Dialogues, certainly concerned themselves with Plato’s Dialogues. Discussions spilled out of the classroom and into the dining hall and later into the lounge. They’ve since moved well past Plato and Aristotle and more recent discussions are about Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx and W. E. B. Du Bois.
There are no right or wrong answers to the choice between taking a full-tuition scholarship at USC versus being full pay at Stanford, and it is completely dependent upon a variety of other factors involving all aspects of fit – academic, social, intellectual, and economic.
@LoveTheBard I gather you are talking about SLE (Structured Liberal Education), which they have had at Stanford for a long time (even when I attended). That experience is probably different from that of most students at Stanford, but it’s limited to 90 students a year. Also, because they live in a separate dorm, they are somewhat isolated from other students, and I don’t think I ever interacted with anyone from SLE.
When I attended, students were required to take a year-long course in Western Civilization, which was intended to be equivalent to the Great Books curriculum at UChicago and Columbia, and which was supposed to stimulate common discussion among students on a shared reading list. But we had 9 or so different tracks for Western Civ, each sponsored by a different department, such as history or science and technology, so we never really all read the same set of books. Anyway, Stanford eliminated its Western Civ requirement 30 years ago, due in part to student pressure, so aside from SLE, there hasn’t been a common core experience at Stanford in a long time.
Stanford has long had a cultural divide between those who major in STEM subjects and those who major in the humanities and social sciences. Back then, they called each other “techies” and “fuzzies”, and apparently, those terms are still in use today. See, for example, this recent commentary from the Stanford Daily about the phenomenon:
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/10/31/what-came-first-the-fuzzy-or-the-techie/
@PT, if you told someone they “were not very intellectual,” do you think they’d take it as a compliment?
I disagree with you that USC doesn’t have a very intellectual student body, and I am sure OP would find plenty of intellectual classmates and faculty there.
@USCWolverine, I’m finding out what people aspire to, certainly.
If you like, think of “not very intellectual” as “more practical”. I’d describe my own alma mater as “not very intellectual” and I think they’re rather proud of the fact that they produce alums who go on to do great things in many fields (in part because of the pre-professional focus of many programs there).