<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>Would you take admission to an ivy and pay the $50,000 or, if offered, a $20,000 merit based scholarship to a selective college with no other financial aid.</p>
<p>well ivys typically give out good aid.</p>
<p>thats really not true from what i heard. Ivy’s will give needs blind and make it affordable for all who can not afford attendance, but if you can afford it then expect to get nothing if you are middle of the pack admitted</p>
<p>well im pretty sure that it’s a given that if you are part of the upper-middle class (like me) then you are screwed out of financial aid.</p>
<p>in which case 20k merit scholarship > ivy</p>
<p>it all depends on the school
Yale and Columbia have a policy where you don’t pay more than a certain percent of your annual income so most people upper-middle class and below get some aid.</p>
<p>I am sorry, I meant it to be about the value prop.
Assuming I will get no financial aid, is an ivy education worth $20,000 more per year than an education from a selective school.</p>
<p>It is if you love the school and can afford it.</p>
<p>And it doesn’t matter where you are in the pack, if the college deems you can afford it, you get zero.</p>
<p>I’m not that into ivy’s really --so I guess I’m biased, but I’d take the merit aid if it was a school I really liked.</p>
<p>If it were merit aid from a state college I’d definitely go for an ivy–but since you said “selective college”, I’m assuming (maybe stupidly) that it’s at least ~top 20ish…so yeah, def. merit aid.</p>
<p>The issue is that almost no ivy peers give merit aid. I know Duke gives a little as does Chicago to kid’s at the top of the pool and Stanford gives athletic scholarships but that’s all I know of.</p>
<p>I am not looking at ivy peers but rather lets say schools in top 100, like Boston U.</p>
<p>I got offered $24,000 a year at Tulane, but i have chosen Bowdoin instead
Im not sure how it’ll play out in the end. But i think that not just a Bowdoin education is worth it…i think the overall college experience will be a ton better for me there than at Tulane.</p>
<p>I would definitely choose the non-Ivy and actually ended up doing so last year in a similar situation. For me, there was about a 15k/year price difference between Vandy and one of the Ivies. It actually turned out to be a good decision in the end since I’ve found Vandy to have excellent, engaging professors and have made several close friends so far this year.</p>
<p>But in the end, it’s really up to you. Visit both schools first, then decide which of the two is a better fit and whether the Ivy is really worth that much more than the other college. It really depends on the person. The added debt may or may not actually be worth it in the end. In general, there is no definitive answer, but I would (and did) choose the less expensive college.</p>
<p>I did exactly that. I chose Rice with a $20,000 per year scholarship over Columbia and Cornell (and Duke and Northwestern and Johns Hopkins). Although, I probably would have chosen it anyway, even if the cost of attendance was the same.</p>