Agree with this. A friend of mine was ill prepared and came close to flunking out her first year. Ended up with a Phd from MIT and now teaches @MIT in addition to being a CEO. The issue was high school preparation put her at an extreme disadvantage .This was decades ago. But I’d imagine the it still happens.
You can do well from either place. I don’t like the argument that one can always go to choice B for grad school. You are paying now and have to make the decision for undergrad. Grad is a separate decision. But it could be a plan B, I just wouldn’t use it, since acceptance to any grad program is uncertain.
I have two kids, equally academic. On paper both would probably have an equal chance at MIT. Personally, I think only one would do well there. My oldest didn’t apply. S/he knew it wasn’t a fit. If your kid is an MIT and they know it, then consider the costs. If not and both seem equal take the $ from Vandy.
Does your kid want to work in a specific industry? Local contacts can be helpful esp for the first job/internships.
If money is no issue. If either you have $500-600k to pay for both undergrad and grad school (or grad school would be funded by someone else), undergrad and grad are separate. But if finances are an issue, they often are not separate issues.
That depends on the level of the student in question. If they would be an about average MIT student, then sure… Well, sort of… But if they are truly at the top of their STEM field, there are few places that can even remotely approach MIT, and Vandy is not one of them. (see my post #27 that illustrates this point).
As I wrote above, we did exactly that, and have absolutely no regrets. That is not to say this would necessarily be the right choice for OP’s child. They have to make that decision, but anyone that says there is no meaningful difference between these two places is fooling themselves.
In fact, they barely overlap. Median 50% ACT at Vandy is 33-35 vs 35-36 at MIT. Which means 25th percentile at MIT is at the 75th percentile level at Vandy.
But as you correctly said, the difference between someone with an ACT of 34 and a run-of-the-mill perfect ACT student is much less significant than a difference between a mere perfect ACT student and someone truly at the top of their field.
Not only is it a numbers game (having a perfect ACT/SAT means you are among the top 5,000 or so students in the nation), but the amount of effort and the acdemic level of those that move on from top 5,000 to top 500, let alone top 50, or even top 5, if exponentially greater. It’s like putting a high school chess champion against Magnus Carlsen.
So you have to decide which environment is right for your child. No one on this forum can tell you this. If your child had to take ACT several times to get that 35, then maybe they would be more comfortable at Vandy. But if they had ACT 35 in middle school, and had since moved on into that top 500, let alone top 50, they probably won’t find a lot of peers at Vandy.
You are right, some kids do move onto law or medical schools. I can’t speak from personal experience what their opinion is of the prudence of going to MIT for undergrad from a purely financial standpoint. Some hold that if med school is the goal then undergrad doesn’t matter at all. If OP’s child intends to go to med school, Vandy is probably perfectly fine and even preferable, as it will likely be easier for them to keep a perfect GPA.
Another thing I will point out. Summer internships in STEM fields are very competitive.
A difference between ending up for a summer even at a FAANG (a dream for most students) and at a more competitive company could significantly reduce or eliminate the year’s worth of price difference between Vandy and MIT.
I happen to have inside data for institutions whose students were offered to spend the summer at one of the very top companies from this list:
I think the list speaks for itself:
MIT 10
Harvard 9
Stanford 8
CMU 7
UPenn 6
Princeton 5
UCLA 5
Berkeley 4
UTexas 4
UMichigan 3
Brown 3
Yale 3
Waterloo 3
Cornell 3
Duke 2
UChicago 2
GTech 2
UIUC 2
Columbia 2
Emory 1
N-Western 1
Vanderbilt 1
UMD 1
UBColumbia 1
GWU 1
URochester 1
U Toronto 1
WUStL 1
I understand that some grad programs are fully funded (why I carved out if grad school is funded by someone else). My point is just that not all grad programs are. Which means that costs of grad school are also an issue. I was just responding to the person who said that grad school is separate. It can be no doubt. But for many it isn’t.
I agree with @TheVulcan. The kids who are really off the chart will find most peers at MIT/CalTech are similar. For some kids, this might be the first time they ever meet a kid like them.
Sadly, folks sometimes jump in to prove that you can find smart kids at each place and that is true. But there is a unique thing to having every kid at that level versus a subset.
@TheVulcan also raises the issue of cost v. employment opportunity which I rarely see anyone raise on CC. Cost is a factor. But if you get your first job and it is at a slightly higher rate say just 5K more, over the course of your lifetime not only will you pay off the debt incurred, you will also likely have a higher income throughout your life. This is why the first starting salary can be very very important and why graduating into a recession can affect pay for a lifetime.
If you are talking about a kid taking on 100K of debt for a degree in a low paying field and a kid working at a top company, the debt can be a reasonable number. I’m not pushing debt on college kids. I think kids and parents need to be prudent about it. But depending on many factors, it can also be a wise decision.
Naturally, all factors of cost are under consideration. No one said/implied it wasn’t. I think making your point @saillakeerie that you think grad school can be separate would have been more effective that trying to twist mine.
I quoted what you said and responded to it. You can say that is twisting what you said but having a different view than someone isn’t twisting what they say.
This is raised quite often in the numerous “is it worth it” threads on this site. Different people have different views in those discussions. At this point to be honest, I am not sure there is anything in those threads that hasn’t been raised by others. Many times.
IMHO, the decision should be framed in terms of 1) comparative intellectual intensity of the two (and the type off student/fit) and 2) outcomes which are way of determining a rough ROI. In terms of the latter, MIT was tied for 3 whereas Vanderbilt was ranked 15 (latest WSJ rankings which focus on outcomes in particular). So, a weighted average of these two parameters could apply… I’m sure there are other considerations, however, including funds currently available (I’m assuming this is not an issue if this question is being posed)…
Which I did not say. Nor did I say that every student at Vanderbilt is on par with every student at MIT. People are individuals. This student will have intellectual equals at either school. There is not a dearth of intelligent students at Vanderbilt, though maybe there aren’t quite as many as at MIT. (As a test prep tutor, I’m fully aware that test scores alone do not reliably indicate intelligence—a topic which has been discussed ad nauseum on this site.)
My clear point is that this student will find intelligent peers and can succeed at either school, so the student should probably choose the place she likes the best, assuming affordability.
Just going to throw out there that it’s pretty well known that salaries are typically high for engineering grads. MIT produces a lot of those. But what exactly does a salary say about a person’s intelligence? What about all those highly intelligent people who become teachers or social workers or professional chefs?
D got a humanities degree from an LAC. She was offered a six-figure job in her senior year and turned it down for a pay peanuts job at a prestigious institution. She’s intelligent and poor and happy with her decision.
Right, but I thought the focus of this chain is really on outcomes (assuming only going to undergrad and not doing any further education). QS is more for graduate programs, yes?
I think the simple reason that early outcomes will be better at MIT vs Vanderbilt is that the highly-prestigious and highly-compensating firms (eg MBB, bulge-bracket banks) tend to recruit at MIT and much less so at Vanderbilt. In order to get the job, you need to get that first interview. Without on-campus recruiting, it’s less likely that you’ll get that interview…
It’s an overall university ranking. The word “graduate” is not used in their employer reputation rubric (10% of total) in the same way it is used in the US (as an antonym for undergrad), but covers both undergrad and postgrad programs.
Perhaps. We do not know any specifics about the OP’s child.
But I think my post #27 demonstrates pretty convincingly that there are many MIT students who would NOT have found their intellectual equals at Vandy (at least inasmuch as it is measured by successes in the academic competitions in the fields of mathematics and computer science).
There is a reason Vandy is throwing $200K at some of those kids. They need them. And still, from what I gathered when I last looked into that, their yield rate for those offered these highly competitive scholarships is only about 50%.