With the possible exception of Stern and Tisch, NYU’s undergrad divisions tend to be very uneven in academic quality and has been likened by many NYU alums and faculty I knew who taught there as a large academically decent public U experience at a private U price.
IMO, it’s not worth the exorbitant amount they’re charging…especially considering you’ll be fighting much harder to get attention from senior Profs whose priorities tend to be research/publications and grad students before undergrads in that order.
And the OP isn’t even going to NYU CAS, but Gallatin. A division which most NYU students/alums rate as having lower levels of prestige and perceived easier admissions than CAS…much less Stern or Tisch.
And the multidisiplinary/multithematic major emphasis in Gallatin is likely to cause perception issues among graduate departments not too big on that emphasis…such as many top Philosophy PhD programs. In that light, a Philosophy major from Temple Honors who did well and made the most of her time there is likely to look better than her Gallatin counterpart.
I’m in a similar situation. I got accepted to UNC Chapel Hill where I would be full pay (OOS) and to Temple with a full scholarship and 2 $4k summer stipends. I’m currently appealing my financial aid at UNCCH (I originally used Zillow for my home value on the CSS Profile instead of the Federal Housing Finance Agency calculator, which gives an estimate that is $150k lower), but if I don’t get more money, I will probably go to Temple. I have some other acceptances aside from those two, but honestly, I just really love Temple and Philadelphia. I was originally worried about the caliber of the students at Temple, but I figured that most of the students in the honors program were/are probably in the same situation as me (debt at a prestigious school vs no debt from Temple). Temple gets a lot of crap for being in a bad neighborhood, but I explored the area around Temple by myself when I visited last month and I didn’t feel unsafe or intimidated at all. Seriously, in comparison to really rough areas in Oakland or South/Downtown/Central LA, north Philly isn’t that bad haha.
Look, I am a big fan of elite universities, and in my family’s personal case we made an absolutely irrational decision (Prestigious Private University at full freight over full tuition scholarship at Prestigious Public University) for some family-specific reasons, but it should be pointed out that em2424 (among others) is making a serious factual error. NYU students are NOT “much more talented academically” than Temple students. On average, yes, they probably are (and that also probably correlates very well with their relative advantage in family wealth, too). But some of the students who go to Temple are really top-notch.
My son, who graduated from a large, public academic magnet high school in Philadelphia, had several friends who went to each of Temple and NYU. The top couple of students who went to Temple – with great scholarships, and personal reasons for staying close to home – would have been competitive applicants at any college in the country. (One of them was the class valedictorian, his predecessors in the three previous classes had gone to Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, and had pretty much been admitted everywhere.) They were about a quantum better than the best students who went to NYU. Of course, his class sent 60-70 kids to Temple, and only 3 to NYU, and the average stats of the Temple contingent were certainly below those of the NYU kids. But the average stats of the top 15-20 kids who went to Temple were not below those of the NYU kids. The point is that Temple, like any public university, educates a wide range of students, and that range includes some of the very best students. (In the wide world, Penn State is probably seen as more prestigious than Temple and the clear academic flagship for Pennsylvania students. But for many urban students, Penn State is the middle of nowhere with white frat boys getting drunk and tipping cows, and it’s not where they want to be.)
By the same token, cobrat is wrong to conflate NYU’s academic quality with its selectivity. NYU has really strong faculty in many disciplines – much more so than Temple – in large part due to its unparalleled location and its high wealth. It’s silly to sneer at the academic quality of Gallatin; Gallatin does not have separate faculty or classes. Gallatin’s faculty is NYU’s faculty. The average stats of students in Gallatin is basically irrelevant, since they are all working on different things, and mostly they barely relate to one another, academically at least. And of course, NYU can pull in some great students, too, and not just to Stern. A friend of my kids, in a different class – an academically talented long-term foster child with a history of difficult placements who was almost literally penniless – chose NYU over Columbia because it gave him a better aid package. And great students interested in studying philosophy are probably among those most open to being convinced to come to NYU.
This should be a no brainer. We were in a somewhat similiar situation, daughter accepted to NYU, dream school. It didnt make sense financially to spend 200k on an undergrad education. She is now thriving. She went to a prestigious summer camp in high school so she is still friends with a lot of those kids. Some of them went on to Tisch, Cornell, Wesleyan, etc. Well guess who has had the best internships? Guess who has made the best connections? At the end of the day, connections and internships matter, that is what high price tag should get you in addition to a great education. So my child got an internship at a network her freshman year. She was the only freshman there. She has landed another great internship this summer, again in NYC. So dont think your child cant be successful by going to Temple.
I agree with an earlier poster that a lot of the state schools are filled with high achieving, stellar kids. The middle class is getting squeezed. We are too rich for aid, dont have enough saved, or dont see the need to spend 200k on a degree. These kids are all going to state universities, and they are doing well, and raising the bar at these schools.
Case in point, when I was growing up, Ohio State, was automatic as long as you were an Ohio resident for the most part. Now, it is very competitive. There are plenty of kids with high ACT scores who are being rejected.
@JHS With all due respect, your son made the exact choice I advocated, but you suggest others should do the opposite. I would argue it wasn’t irrational.
Of course there are talented students at Temple, and at most selective schools, but we agree that on average NYU students are more academically talented.I shouldn’t have said they are “much” more talented, but I was trying to make general comments and don’t know as much as you do about the two schools.
“Just because a college charges students $70K+ to attend doesn’t mean it’s worth that kind of money.”
That’s what it comes down to for me. I’d encourage the OP to “stretch” to pay for Yale or Pomona. If it can be done without debt, it’s worth it. But NYU liberal arts? Meh. It doesn’t have the kind of excellence that would justify the stretch in my book.
@em2424 NYU’s overall student body may be better than Temple’s overall student body, but OP’s daughter is in the Honors program, where she will be living with other Honors students and taking Honors classes. And the stats for Temple Honors’s freshman profile is slightly better than the stats for NYU’s overall freshman profile (which is probably skewed upward by all the smart kids in Stern).
Temple Honors:
avg GPA: 3.88
avg SAT (CR+M): 1380
NYU:
avg GPA: 3.5
avg SAT I CR: 610-710
avg SAT 1 M: 630-740
Colleges as large as Temple also have a large subset of high achieving students with high scores. OP’s daughter doesn’t need a homogeneous student body of high achievers to be challenged.
@GMTplus7 Substitute another term to describe non-monetary benefits if you prefer. My point is that going to best school (academically and fit) is usually the best choice in the long run, both financially and for intangible reasons - even if it’s not the cheapest choice. I probably could have worded my previous post better.
Driving a Lambourghini may give me non-monetary benefits over driving a BMW-- think of all the networking and increased self-esteem. But the bottom line is if I can’t afford it and it’s not essential, then I probably shouldn’t go out and sell a kidney to get one.
I’m in the minority on these forums, but I think most people are too shortsighted and risk-averse on these forums. I went back and looked at some of your posts on this topic and you present your case well. However, I think comparing a college education which is a long-term investment with a huge potential payoff to a luxury car makes little sense. I commented on this analogy in an earlier thread so don’t want to repeat my argument. I will agree to disagree here.
This is about the OP who said they could afford it, but would be a stretch. I’ve been saving and making sacrifices for years and am willing to take greater risk for a greater long-term reward but that should probably be a different thread. I’m not saying it’s right for everyone, only that in some cases on CC I see too much risk aversion.
While they do have strong faculty in some fields such as Applied Math and Philosophy, the prioritization of attention from the experience of not only many NYU alums I’ve known, but even some faculty is research/publications, grad students, and several levels down…undergrads. It’s a reason why even the faculty likened the NYU undergrad experience as paying high private college tuition to attend a good, but not outstanding public university.
Also, while NYU may seem wealthy overall now, most of that was gained only within the last 15 or so years and isn’t reflected in the FA/scholarships given to most students. In fact, a dead-tree article I recalled reading broke down NYU’s finances per undergrad student and it was an extremely paltry number compared to colleges within its academic peer group or the elite universities it hopes to emulate/join. Only exception are students with Ivy/elite college level stats which existed when I was applying for colleges around 2 decades ago.
Only thing was, even with Ivies and peer elites not offering the generous amounts of FA they do now, most HS classmates admitted to NYU and one or more Ivy/peer elites found the latter to not only be a better deal academically, but also from a financial standpoint. Why risk going into heavy debt for NYU when an Ivy/elite U is offering you a near-full/full-ride FA.
Actually, they have some separate classes/faculty to foster the multidisciplinary/multithematic self-designed major emphasis of Gallatin.
And that very emphasis along with perception by even students/faculty in the NYU community that Gallatin is academically weaker than CAS due to the average quality of students admitted and perceived “lack of focus” is likely to cause issues with graduates applying to topflight academic departments not big on multidisciplinary/multi-thematic self-designed majors. Such as topflight Philosophy PhD programs.
That’s a great reason to go to NYU…for a Philosophy PhD…not undergrad. Especially not Gallatin or Steinhardt for that matter at full-pay.
As I mentioned in previous posts, NYU grad and undergrad are practically two totally separate universes with stark differences in average quality of students admitted and the level of faculty attention given to their respective students on average.
Perhaps NYU offers superior networking and name recognition, but the difference in price will allow the OP’s daughter to pursue unpaid internships, foreign study, and other outside enrichment opportunities she will not be able to pursue if they are draining their coffers to pay for NYU. The student is interested in graduate study, furthermore, and so she will not be able to start earning a substantial income immediately after graduation. I understand the other side of the argument. My younger son chose the least expensive college option so that he would not have to dedicate every discretionary moment to earning money. He can have a car at school, take weekend trips, enjoy a break from campus dining, and is looking into internships that should look great on a resume. We were prepared to do whatever it took, but he made the decision with very little prodding. He admitted that he might have made a different choice had he been accepted into one of his three reach colleges.
@woogzmama I agree totally. As I mentioned my kid got into NYU, and she didnt go, she took a better financial option. As a result, she has been able to take an upaid internship her freshman year, and a paid one this summer. So her freshman summer, we had to pay for housing, and send her spending money. We wouldnt have been able to do this, if we were stretched trying to pay for college. She knows that she can look anywhere for an internship and we can make it feasible, because we saved so much in college costs.
For undergrad, only in certain divisions like Stern and Tisch. And networking events in those divisions are practically closed to undergrads from other divisions unless they have friends who tell them about those events and the event organizers don’t have/enforce the “Stern/Tisch students only” policies.
“Networking” is something that students need to figure out how to do on their own, and the opportunities are tied to he individual, not the university they attend. And large universities do not generally engender good networking opportunities because the network is too big to mean much— the whole point of the network is the sense of some sort of special connection that comes with it. So even within a university, the important “networks” often devolved down to smaller cohorts – such as students who belonged to the same fraternity or sorority. Temple Honors may very well offer better networking opportunities than NYU because of the shared housing & coursework.
My d. attended an elite LAC and got an amazing and unique overseas internship after her sophomore year, through networking… but not through her fancy college. She made the connection through a friend-of-a-friend from her public high school. And my son had an amazing and fully funded internship in college from a regional state u. – he benefited from the “big fish in a small pond” dynamic.
Some do very well and get a lot out of NYU. Some get lost in shuffle. It’s one of the most expensive tuitions in the country-- if you can afford it, and your D has a lot of energy and self-motivation, it might be worth it. But Temple honors is nothing to sneeze at, and the networking opportunities will be there as well. Also-- she has nothing to lose by trying Temple. She’ll get into NYU next year too.