Vandy is a great university. As I wrote many posts ago, if a student’s goal is to get into a FAANG company, it’s just as easy for a talented student from Vandy as from MIT.
For economics, if the goal is to go into investment banking, Vandy again is a good choice. It’s less of a good choice for undergrad if the ultimate goal is to get a PhD in economics.
In terms of placement, MIT is notably better in placement for startup companies, and highly selective finance companies (by that I mean much more selective than say Goldman Sachs). But that’s a small set of people at MIT.
Intellectually, MIT is just at a different level. My son at Harvard has cross-registered at MIT twice so far, and he finds the classes at MIT much more stimulating.
DS is taking upper division and graduate level courses as a sophomore and says that, well, it’s still not exactly a firehose, but the water pressure is finally up a bit, and some of his classes are “good stuff”.
So we know it was the right choice for him.
Though I do joke sometimes that maybe we should have paid for Caltech (they were less generous with need aid, as expected).
Retirement?
You are funny
She is only my second of 4
Her older sister is a sophomore at a BFA MT (Bachelor in Fine Arts for Musical Theater) program hoping for Broadway (a girl can dream)
(At least the engineer will have a paycheck by graduation)
And there 2 boys behind the girls, who knows what they will come up with
There is really not a well thought out plan for paying for it, but we’ll figure it out if that’s her choice (the boys may be in trouble but we’ll worry about that when that time comes)
Thus the scholarship offer has definitely made us pause and take note to make a wise decision
But they are our precious children, what wouldn’t you do for your child?
Thank you again for this community, I truly feel you are going thru this journey with us with very real honest insights and I could not be more grateful for all your responses
The OP (Original Poster!) havanamama herself
Based on what you just wrote, I would choose Vandy.
Your daughter has been given a gift- a tremendous scholarship to one of the best schools in the country. I have no doubt that she will be successful.
If there is no financial plan to pay for MIT, and if your two younger boys may be in “trouble” when it’s their turn, then IMO this decision is easy. MIT is not an option.
To me, that’s the key. Whether that difference is worth the extra $ is up to the student’s family if the student can take advantage of the great difference (like your son).
My parents couldn’t afford MIT for my undergrad, so I took the full ride at my state flagship instead. The money they saved helped fund their retirement, which is itself a gift to us. This was the right choice for them.
Your child is looking at a much better option than the state flagship. IMO, it’s an easy decision.
It sounds like MIT would be a financial hardship, so I would take the Vanderbilt scholarship. If you didn’t get need based aid at MIT, you would probably not get any at Rice.
I read no anger in Blossom’s posts. But if we are going to discuss our perceptions of tone and motivation, I do read plenty of rationalizing. Which is unusual for CC. /s
You can hire whomever you want for your law firm but anecdotes and exceptions do not a strong argument make, counselor. Top law firms hire from T14 law schools regardless of your personal preference. Supreme Court justices pull almost exclusively from T14s for clerk positions regardless of me thinking that fact is unhealthy for our legal system. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of mediocre future lawyers graduating T14s and plenty of great future lawyers graduating night school at City College X but most of the folks doing the hiring for the more selective jobs hire based on pedigree (and yes, pedigree is itself fraught with confounding variables since the T14s tend to have the smarter, better students). That’s the system we have, though, so that’s what should matter when advising others — not our opinions.
The rankings for these two schools are what they are. The rankings for engineering are what they are. The rankings for business are what they are. The CDS score distributions are what they are. The yields are what they are. The post-grad salaries are what they are. The elite summer internship listings are what they are. The post-grad placements in grad schools and places of employment are what they are. None of these comparisons are close. Any claims that they are, that either the student populations, programs, or outcomes are similar, mostly reflect a failure to grasp how long-tail distributions work. Parents are welcome to say that the extra cost isn’t worth the extra value or that it might not be a good fit (and that was supposed to be the point of the thread, I thought), but that hasn’t been what I’ve been reading in many of the recent posts.
Instead, much of the thread has devolved into how those well-documented advantages and superior outcomes are somehow illusory and supposedly result from a combination of self-selection, illogical decision-making by families, “selectivity nonsense”, unreliable data, purchasing power disparities, society selling people a “bill of goods”, T20s really being the same as MIT, and/or whatever other painfully transparent rationalizations that parents need to concoct to lessen their own anxiety over whether or not their kids will be OK.
There’s a difference between MIT and Vanderbilt. There’s a big difference between MIT and Vanderbilt for engineering. There’s a huge difference between the two in the OP’s selected engineering specialty. In the quality of business schools and proximity to entrepreneurship opportunities. Most who attend Vanderbilt for engineering will do very well for themselves. Others might prefer Vanderbilt for a variety of reasons already cited in the thread. But we don’t need to suspend reality and argue that the two academic environments, college experiences, and expected values are essentially at the same levels to make any of those arguments. Although my experience with this website leaves me with no doubt that many will continue to do so.
I agree with you. That being said, not every MIT grad is going to end up at a start-up or in VC or investment banking or some other job that results in a huge salary. Despite not attending MIT, I seem to have acquired a crazy number of friends that did - none of them, not one, is in a career like those that are discussed on CC. They all have good jobs, mind you, and they all loved their time at MIT, but they aren’t appreciably more successful, career-wise, than their neighbors that went to much less selective schools. I would still chose MIT if it were me, but I had to chime in with a bit of reality in terms of possible outcomes.
Since you are also visiting other schools (Rice , GT, and UF/FSU) how do those compare in terms of being able to pay.? For engineering GT is also top notch. I understand that for MIT you would “make it work” but if your D fell in love with any of the other schools would you do the same.
Thank you for coming back and giving us an update. Congratulations to your daughter and all of her accomplishments.
If you have two more children and aren’t sure how the payments are going to be made for them, and “the boys may be in trouble” in terms of what you can afford for them, then you cannot afford to pay for MIT. There was a different thread where a parent had sent an older child to their “dream” (expensive) school because it was the child’s dream, but then were going to need to limit the younger child to in-state public options. That type of situation can lead to a lot of resentment toward the older sibling as well as toward the parents and cause a lot of familial strife. Your daughter has a full ride which is a big gift from any institution, and not only is it a full ride, but it’s at Vanderbilt, one of the top 10% of universities in the U.S.
Based on the circumstances you describe, I highly recommend going with Vanderbilt.
The way it works is that prestige is priceless, but I guess it boils down to money or resource allocation.
Here is a excerpt of D17’s essay when she made her decision “Forget US News rankings or arbitrary assignments of “prestige.” There isn’t a “wrong choice” or a school that will set you up for failure – it’s what you do at the school that makes the difference.”
There was also a poster whose daughter gave up Princeton and other higher ranked schools to take a full ride a state school (I forget which one). I remember reading the thread and wondering if they ever updated on how the DD is doing.
I’ve got numerous family members whose parents made the decision to send an elder child to a school with a “we’ll pay for it somehow” strategy and truly- it sets up a terrible dynamic with the younger siblings.
If “we’ll pay for it somehow” means taking a more modest vacation this summer and eating out less- sure, some belt tightening. If it means being so strapped that the younger kids have to drop out of soccer, don’t get braces, and find their own life’s choices truly constrained- then no, you have other kids to raise and they will be acutely aware that their sisters education is being funded by their sacrifices.
I think it’s different when you’ve got a special needs situation- medical, disability, etc. where everyone understands that one siblings life requires a totally different mindset, financial obligations, etc. But to fund one college over another, fine choice, for a sibling who is going to be fine regardless of what you choose? That’s a slippery slope.
I don’t know how tight the finances would be with one choice over the other- but if it means sacrificing the younger sibs upbringing and financial security- think hard.
I stated, in multiple places, that the point of the thread was about whether MIT warranted the incremental cost, provided that both schools were of equal fit to the student. I also argued, in multiple places, that MIT was the stronger school for engineering and had better-documented outcomes. Nowhere did I recommend that the OP should or should not attend MIT.
I said that some were suspending reality when they try to make it out that the two schools are the same. One can argue for Vanderbilt without claiming MIT is simply about “prestige”, as some in the thread have rationalized. This will be my last post on the topic since I’ve now clearly articulated each of these points, multiple times.
We set a hard budget of $200k all in after merit as we weren’t eligible for need based aid. He didn’t end up at his cheapest option, but walked with a BS/MS from a well regarded institution for $140k. He got a job at a startup and three years in is well into the top 25th percentile for ME salaries, with equity in the company and a patent.
A HS classmate of his too his cheapest route, because his family couldn’t afford anything more. He’s now at MIT for graduate school.
But do they? Posters state these types of things all the time without evidence. I pulled the top 10 employers for CS majors at both institutions and they are virtually identical.
If MIT is “better,” it’s incremental. What is clearly known is that the cost difference isn’t.
We aren’t talking law, finance, etc. Those are non sequiturs in this discussion.
EDIT: I grabbed the top 6 employer of CS majors from LinkedIn, in order. I left out redundant things like Meta/Facebook, Amazon/AWS, etc. I also left off the schools themselves, because many students work at the school no matter where they go. It’s why there’s only 6 instead of 10.
Average salary and top employers stats don’t tell much about the long tail. Besides, many of the very top kids go into academia, which is not where the big bucks are.
I demonstrated where some of the long-tail effect are observed directly in my posts above.
One (post #48), about top competitive internships (not FAANG), and another, about Putnam (the pre-eminent mathematics competition for undergraduates in the United States and Canada, as MAA describes it).
Take a look at these results one more time:
There is nothing incremental about it. Something very special happens at MIT that doesn’t happen at any other institution in North America. Not at Harvard. Not as Stanford. And most certainly not at Vanderbilt.
And the magnitude of the effect is such that it can not be explained away by mere self-selection either.
As I mentioned upthread, the CS competitions results look similar.
Now, of course, if this level of learning intensity for the sake of learning itself is not the sort of thing that gets one’s blood rushing, then MIT might not be an ideal institution for them.
