Maryland, Northeastern, or Bowdoin for business/econ

College Search & Selection
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My take: Bowdoin, in my mind, is out. $80K of debt is way too much for undergrad, regardless of what you are planning to do post-college. And I don’t think Northeastern is so much better than Maryland that you should take on $25K of debt if you can have $0 debt. You like them nearly equally, and you’ll be in the Maryland honors college. Honestly, Maryland is overall a better-reputed university than Northeastern.

Noooo, do not go where you want and worry about loans after you graduate. That’s not good advice. You can get a good education at any of these three schools, but $80K is life-constraining type of debt - the type that makes you have to move back with your parents after college, or makes you miss out on that Fulbright or low-paid, high-reward internship because you can’t afford to make only $25K for a year, or that prevents you from buying a house because all of your excess income goes to loan repayment.

Bowdoin’s president has a vested interest in discrediting the survey if the sticker price of the college is twice that of your local public, but the mid-career salaries are the same. I do partially agree with him, though - Payscale data is based on who uses the service to find jobs or information about salaries, and given that it’s a non-probability sample the data isn’t necessarily that reliable.

Alumni are not the only ones who give money. Parents give, wealthy unrelated donors give, corporations give, etc. What is the fraction of that $50M in gifts that came from alumni, and what is the median gift per alumnus? That will give you more information about how much alum give. The fact that they have a large endowment says nothing about what post-college salary outcomes are like. Endowment is based on SO many other factors besides alumni giving.

It’s not a specious argument, and there aren’t a “few outliers.” I went to an Ivy League PhD program, and I was in the program with students from all kinds of other colleges - from other Ivies and their ilk to places I’ve never heard of. Top colleges may be disproportionately represented at top business schools, but that isn’t necessarily because they are more likely to get in. They may be 1) more likely to be motivated to go to graduate school, because their family and social networks went and they are more aware of jobs that required graduate school, and/or 2) they may come from wealthier backgrounds with parents who are more likely to help pay for those top grad schools and/or are more knowledgeable about the amount of money they will make post-grad school and that they can repay those loans.

A look at the [undergraduate institutions of the HBS class of 2015](Undergraduate Institutions - MBA - Harvard Business School) shows that University of Maryland is on there. Not only is UMD on there, but UMBC, Florida A&M, Georgia Southern, Indiana, Montana State, Ohio Northern, and University of South Carolina. Plenty of state flagships, regional campuses, a few small colleges I’ve never heard of before.

Maryland (and Northeastern) aren’t exactly tiny unknown schools in the middle of nowhere. Maryland is a well-respected university, ranked within the top 100 universities not only in the country but in the world.

I also have not seen any evidence to suggest that a student from Maryland needs a higher GPA than a student from Bowdoin in order to get into graduate or business school.

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OP, please listen to @juillet. No undergraduate degree anywhere is worth graduating $80k in debt.

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Payscale data comes from about 1.4 million respondents. Perhaps Bowdoin alumni in particular don’t respond at very high rates. However, the Bowdoin starting salary and mid-career numbers are within ~$5K either way of the numbers for Colby, Wesleyan, Pomona, Reed, Davidson, and Claremont McKenna.

The OP’s dilemma might have been avoided by applying to more colleges that are similar to Bowdoin, but that offer $10K-$20K merit scholarships to top students. Examples: Kenyon, Grinnell, Mt. Holyoke, Oberlin, Richmond. If the OP’s family wants to take an $80K home equity loan to finance Bowdoin, fine. There’d be worse ways to spend that money. However, they should do it with eyes wide open. The available data and research findings do not seem to suggest one is very likely to make that money back just by virtue of the Bowdoin “brand”, its “alumni network”, or any other voodoo unrelated to the OP’s own talents and efforts.

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Bowdoin is hardly a feeder school for wall street. If we were talking about Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stern- okay, I could understand that perspective. However, it’s not as if Bowdoin will give a substantial leg up over an NEU or UMD grad in that department. Bowdoin is prestigious, but not in the same way that the Ivies/big name peers are.

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But Nathaniel Hawthorne went there!!!

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I always think about the really small prestigious schools and their obvious lack of numbers in the workforce. Let’s face it, if you got into Bowdoin, you are going to do very well at Maryland or Northeastern. You will be at the tippy top of their food chain and will have ample opportunities. I know that socially Bowdoin may be the better fit for you, but I agree with the majority of the advice given that you should nor incur that amount of debt.

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@juillet, unfortunately the idea that you can go to a mainstream undergraduate and then attend an elite graduate school is a specious argument when it comes to getting into an HBS or equivalent. Let’s look at reality. As a student at HBS my section of 94 students was made up of a foreign contingent (26% of class virtually all from elite US or foreign universities such as Oxbrige, the two top french universities, the top 4 Chinese universities, etc.), a small handful from Penn State (who was PSU student body president and had virtually perfect grades), University of Illinois (a very successful entrepreneur), etc., and the rest (roughly 70%) were from the elite US colleges and universities. Why, because an applicant from a mainstream university needs to have a near perfect transcript (there is little room for error) and have demonstrated a superhuman “specialness,” and because they need to have obtained a job that will be viewed as “interesting” to the admissions committee. Those “interesting” jobs (think analyst at an elite i-bank or consulting firm) are, for the most part, only available to graduates of the elite schools.

From Maryland you need to be the 1 of roughly 7,000 graduating each year that gets accepted while at Bowdoin you need to be 1 of the roughly 5 of 450 that get accepted each year (and the same is true at Wharton, Stanford, etc.). To put it in context there are roughly 600 HBS students annually that are accepted from the roughly 30,000 students graduating each year from the top 15 universities, top 10 LACs and top 4 Technical Universities. There are roughly 50 who are accepted from the remaining roughly 2 million each year graduating from all of the other colleges and universities in the United States.

Please note, the figures above are by no means perfect, but are directionally accurate.

Going to an “elite” school shapes your mind to see the possibilities, be prepared to take advantage of them, and take advantage of them in ways that simply don’t happen often elsewhere. You are paying for the development of a Worldview and set of credentials that makes you more able to identify and leverage opportunities (hopefully in a way that positively impact the US and world at large). That worldview and those leveragable credentials, and the substantially more interesting and exciting life that can result from them is priceless.

1 Like
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I have to go with @am61517 on this one and that’s after giving great weight to @juillet’s typically logical and sound advice. Let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. Agreed that $80k is too much debt for a student to graduate with. But, I’m reading the situation slightly differently than most of the posts so far. This is a “full-pay” family that has signaled their willingness to take out a home-equity loan to finance their child’s education at an elite college. We’ve seen this situation many times here on the CC boards: they’ve been living above their means for many years and haven’t socked away a realistic nest egg to meet the full sticker price. I’m guessing they have been using their >$million home as a credit card for a long time and can probably still get some pretty good terms. The real question is who is going to be responsible for paying back the loan? That has to be nailed down so that whatever the decision is, it can be made in the light of cold facts.

Presumably, the loan will be in the parent’s name since it’s their home equity that’s serving as collateral. Are they expecting the child to assist in paying them back? If so, how much? IMO, a small piece of that, (say, $10-15K) is well worth a Bowdoin education.

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@Qwerty568 you are correct that Bowdoin is not a feeder in the sense that droves of graduating seniors are not heading to Wall Street as they are from undergrad business programs like Wharton, Stern, Dyson etc. That simply does not happen at a small LAC where the students have very diverse interests.

Rather, the point is that for those that want that path to Wall Street, a C Suite or Big Law, it provides an excellent “set up.” As an example, in my graduating class, there were only about 12 of us who applied to law school (from a total class of 450) and virtually every one of us went to an Ivy or equivalent law school. I don’t know the figures for B school in a given year, but I suspect they are very similar. For B school, most students go a year or two after working somewhere, but virtually everyone I graduated with at Bowdoin eventually went to an elite B school. Unless you totally screw up when you are there, which is very hard to do because of the environment (read: they want you to do well), Bowdoin and schools like it “set the table” incredibly well.

@circuitrider I read the OP’s financial situation a bit differently. I think Bowdoin has given him a grant to cover all but $80,000 of his education, so he would be left to borrow that amount (or get it from his parents). Bowdoin is “no loan” and “need blind”, so the $80,000 amount is what the school believes his family could reasonably afford to pay based on their income and/or assets. If I am correct about this, I think it’s a no-brainer to go for the Bowdoin education at a 2/3rd’s discount.

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@alum88, Neither of us can be positively sure where the family fits along the need-based continuum. That’s obviously the missing piece here. I’m pegging my scenario on the parent’s reassurance that the OP doesn’t have to “worry” about the debt until after graduation. That’s something you seldom hear from working class or “middle-middle” class parents. Under your scenario, the family seems unable to come up with any portion of a Bowdoin EFC of $20,000 a year, That’s an indication of much more dire financial straits than my scenario. .

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@circuit rider I recall reading in another thread that the OP said he was going to go back to appeal to Bowdoin after being denied ANY aid in the first instance. So, I suspect that either he was successful in getting the school to offer him all but $80k, or his parents stepped up and agreed to cover all but $80K. Thinking about it a little more, the first scenario seems unlikely unless there was some big misunderstanding in his initial FASFA submissions.

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  1. Going to Bowdoin does not automatically mean one is going to make great connections and go to Wall St.
  2. Not going to Bowdoin does not automatically mean one is not going to do these things.

There are more ways to make connections than just in undergrad school. It’s hardly the end-all and be-all of networking.

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@alum88 - Agreed. It’s unlikely the family would have gone from -0- grant to two-thirds grant overnight. Like I said, there are lots of reasons a full-pay family may want to borrow some or all the cost of attendance. Just because a college says it is a no-loan institution doesn’t mean the family doesn’t have other ideas about it.

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Mandatory an #13, you’re saying a house is a better investment than an education? =;
Attending Bowdoin puts you in a special club among the top NESCACs. That’s worth more than you can imagine.

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Lol

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@urbanslaughter I agree with thinking about this as an investment. We put our money where our mouth is this year. D applied EA (non-binding) to a few schools. One of them – a well regarded private U in the south – admitted her with a 6 figure merit award. Still, her first choice was Penn (not a LAC, to my chagrin) and we strongly encouraged her to apply Early Decision knowing that if she got in it would be binding, and full pay. She was admitted, and will be a freshman at Penn in the Fall. We have no regrets at all because we think it’s money well spent.

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@urbanslaughter - What is a NESCAC? Is it like a NASCAR?

Also, I never said a house was a better investment, I said the amount of money OP would have to pay out of pocket would be equal to a down payment on a house.

Also, I mentioned Buckingham Balance and Willy Wonka’s factory. Both of those WOULD be a better investment.

I just think it’s too much money to pay for a Bachelor’s degree, NASCAR or not.

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The New England Small College Athletic Conference:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Small_College_Athletic_Conference

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They have sports!!!, yes!

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The NESCAC includes all the top New England LACs such as Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Middleberry and Wesleyan