Lake, hands down.
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I agree wholeheartedly, but all we have beyond that is anecdote and conjecture.
There is a misconception though that if a student gets into School X (insert school name here) that it will be a guaranteed golden ticket. There are plenty of pedestrian engineers (sticking with engineering since that is what the OPs student is pursuing) who went to the biggest name schools. Thatâs not my opinion, but that of a Caltech prof that I know who ran one of NASAâs most famous programs. He told me straight up that the undergraduate institution does not matter, and that some of his worst engineers were from his own institution.
Itâs the person who makes their way. I suspect the OPs student will thrive no matter where they land.
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Perhaps - but being a Fortune 500 CEO might not be everyoneâs desired career outcome.
Would Richard Feynman be Richard Feynman if he went somewhere else for undergrad instead of MIT?
We will never know.
But he spoke fondly of his time there.
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Absolutely.
It is not the places that grace men, but men the places.
As true now as 2000 years ago when it was first written.
And yet⊠Yet there are two sides to every coin. Some places are just graced by more people.
If things were simple, there wouldnât be this web site.
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He would have gone to Columbia if it hadnât been practicing discriminative admissions against Jewish students at the time.
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Any person who thinks there is something deterministic about child rearing (do X, push a button, out comes Y) has clearly never been a parent.
But thatâs ok. We all get it- you buy your ticket, you take your chances. Maybe kid goes to college A determined to go to med school, and takes a class on ethnomusicology as part of a required humanities distribution course and it changes her life. Maybe kid goes to college B and majors in Beer Pong and frat parties- which would have been the case regardless of which college the kid attends.
Nobody knows. That doesnât mean there isnât value in hearing other peopleâs perspectives, as long as we donât worship at the altar of âhigher salaryâ as the be-all and end all of outcomes. A- because the data is wildly inaccurate. B- because there are so many âit dependsâ (is it better to graduate and get a job at Google making 125K plus a 25K bonus, or go to work at your professorâs startup for 50K and a million dollars worth of options? I refer to the lake house example above). And C- because the world kids will graduate into is not going to be what we old fogies think it will be.
One of my kids was an early employee at a company which provides a service which didnât exist, using a technology that couldnât even be imagined, when this kid started college. Imagine our shock when the company went public⊠we could barely describe what the company did to family members who said âHey, heard about the IPOâ.
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IKR.
And who knows what would become of him there 
But thatâs just itâŠwe pretend like we do.
And medical residencies, fellowships, etc are not randomly assigned. With any degree, not all will have the opportunity for the top (by pay, prestige, reputation, stepping stone potential) positions. But presumably they will be better off than not having the degree. The bottom half kids in engineering will still have more opportunities than a high school grad.
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Agree 100%!
Why would you be relieved he didnât get the GT one?
Because our heart wasnât in it.
The day we learned he didnât get it felt like he got into MIT for the 2nd time.
I know it may not sound rational. 
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Sounds like you wanted MIT from the get go and were willing to pay. Not sure what the OP family wanted and the Vanderbilt option sounds great. Many very capable kids would love Vanderbilt. It is a better fit than MIT for many. My older kid , with all the right numbers, had no interest in schools like MIT or Caltech or CMU( his dadâs alma mater). Just not his cup of tea. Know your kid, pay attention to your finances, and hope for the best with any college decision. There are plenty of kids that did not go to the most prestigious schools they could have gone to, but are doing quite well. And some who went to the most prestigious, and are not doing that well. You just never know.
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People make their own decisions based on their own situations. What may not seem rational to an outsider may be very rational to the one who has to make (and live withâand that is a huge factor because in so many of these types of discussions on this site, there are drive by opinions strongly in one direction or another from people who do not actually live with the choice) the decision.
But if your heart wasnât in it, why would the GT offer be impossible to turn down?
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Your daughter might want to consider attempting schedule appointments with a couple professors in Vanderbiltâs Computer Science and/or Electrical and Computer Science Engineering departments to discuss her choice and the opportunities the faculty offer to undergrads. It would take her under 15 minutes to identify two relatively young female professors in these departments who did their undergraduate work at MIT (Catie Chang and Maithilee Kunda).
If your daughter is going to choose Vanderbilt, she may be able to make the Vanderbilt experience even better by asking these professors now how to maximize her experience. When the professors say - âyou should do research with professors,â she needs to be ready to respond with âwould you let me work in your lab?â
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The OP hasnât made an appearance in a long time! I am curious what their final decision was? Do we know?
I must not be the brightest bulb in the ceiling. I picked Vanderbilt without hesitation very early on in this thread, and, after 156 posts, the debate discussion still rages.
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Its not uncommon for the OP who raises the question to be gone from the discussion yet it still continues on. Sometimes for months. And references are made to the OP long after he/she has left the building as it were.
Guaranteed golden ticket? There is no such thing, and itâs a straw man to presuppose that as the counterargument. But one only has to look at the schools attended by current Senators, McKinsey consultants, Nobel laureates, Goldman Sachs partners, Supreme Court Justices, etc. to know that an elite pedigree gives you the best shot at the pinnacle of professional success, if thatâs what you want from life (whether thatâs a good aspiration is another topic, entirely).
More importantly, most of the people we are discussing are very type A â thatâs the drive that got them to where they are. And that personality typically wants to be surrounded by the best and compete against the best. Thatâs why MIT has the yield it has (87%)⊠and Vanderbilt has the yield it has (40%). Parents can say whatever they want about considering if one will be in the bottom half of the class and how both schools are equally super but itâs not a realistic appraisal of the mindset of the kids we are talking about.
Iâve done alumni interviews for Harvard for 21 years and canât recall anyone accepted going anywhere but a T10. Few accepted to MIT think âmaybe it would be better to go to a school that isnât as challenging, without so many awesome studentsâ. That may be rational, that may even be a wise way to approach it, but most super high achieving kids arenât wired that way.
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My DDâs Foundation Fellowship cohort at UGA had several, including my DD, who turned down Harvard. Every cohort above her had a few as well. In fact, of the 20-25 in each class, close to 100% turned down at least 1 T10.
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Many kids and families just donât even get in the game and do quite well. If youâre going to apply to the highest ranked, most prestigious schools to begin with, it doesnât seem surprising to go in that direction if accepted. MIT and Vanderbilt are both great schools and that is what is surprising to me, that there is not a clear choice based on fit and finances. If a family is chasing merit to begin with, like at Vanderbilt, I would guess there is at least some financial reason to do so, but I must be missing something.
And as @itsgettingreal21 says, many high achieving kids are at multiple colleges. They are not all concentrated at just a handful of the most prestigious ones.
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