<p>I can easily think of a lot of schools at full-ride for which I wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to dump HYP.</p>
<p>What’s w the HYP worship, anyway? It’s a pocketbook-debilitating cult. </p>
<p>Do the ivy schools have a better ROI?</p>
<p>@tk21769:</p>
<p>Again, the Patroit League schools offer athletic scholarships.</p>
<p>To @Gotago:
With regards to ROI, that would actually depend a lot on industry.</p>
<p>I actually differentiate between different Ivy schools. For Wall Street placement, Harvard and Wharton are tops, Princeton and Dartmouth have great networks, and the rest of the Ivies do well too. However, as a Patriot League athlete, you’d definitely do better than most (on-par with an Ivy League non-athlete, I would say; maybe even a HYPW non-athlete). Would you be an athlete at an Ivy school as well?<br>
Then you’d be very well set-up for Wall Street.</p>
<p>The MBB consulting firms definitely do concentrate on HYPSMW (with other Ivies/Ivy-equivalents/Cal/UMich & non-Wharton UPenn a notch lower).</p>
<p>In other industries, I don’t think it matters that much (besides VC and tech startups, where Stanford leads by a mile, followed by Cal followed by Harvard/MIT, but also Illinois CS & UCLA & UMich & other Ivies).</p>
<p>So is the decision Patroit League athlete for free vs. Ivy League athlete at full-pay?</p>
<p>I’ll tell you this: certain Ivy networks are very strong (Princeton & Dartmouth, IMO), but it’s up to you to a large extent as well, and an Ivy degree can’t save you if you don’t have the goods.</p>
<p>When I was at a bank, we were interviewing to fill a few junior trader/clerk positions. It was a place where a Princeton athlete was the head and he stocked the trading floor with Princeton athletes. However, one of the guys we interviewed was a hulking Harvard hockey player. He was gung-ho about working hard, said he’d do any sort of work, etc. He also came across as . . . . dumb. He was not hired. One desk took a Nepalese guy from Dartmouth who scaled Everest, another desk took an Olympic-level Swedish cross-country skier who graduated from New Mexico St., and we took a G’Town football player. </p>
<p>So if the decision is between a scholarship at a Patriot League school vs. full-pay at an Ivy, I’d say that being an athlete from a respectable Patriot League school can already get you in the door on Wall Street while for most other industries, it won’t matter that much. If you <em>weren’t</em> an athlete, I’d say the difference between Patriot League and HYPW would be bigger (and there’d still be a difference between Patriot League and the rest of the Ivies). BTW, I would put Williams/Amherst/(Mudd) there with the rest of the Ivies.</p>
<p>So thinking about this more, as an athlete, I don’t think the difference between Patriot League and Ivy League is worth $250K.</p>
<p>The bigger difference, IMO, is that in the Patriot League, you have to remain an athlete to remain on scholarship, while in the Ivy League, you can quit any time (they can’t kick you out of school). If you don’t play in an injury-prone sport, that’s not a big consideration.</p>