If it were my D in this position, I would visit both, sit in on classes, meet professors, and see how it feels to her. A gut reaction is priceless…
I’m in the same boat: full tuition at Temple or 65k at year at Johns Hopkins or Swarthmore.
My family can afford the 65k (no stretching necessary, tbh), but I’m worried about feeling guilty for choosing a pricier option.
@marshmallowpop: if your family can afford 65K without stretching, thank them for their generosity and choose between JHU and Swarthmore, then make sure you don’t squander such a gift and investment in your potential. They saved and planned so that you could choose freely. No need to feel guilty - unless you don’t intend on taking advantage of the many opportunities you’ll be afforded by these colleges. Congratulations 
Swarthmore vs. Temple is a much, much starker choice than NYU vs. Temple. I strongly suspect that you couldn’t find data to support a decision to pay $250,000 more for an education at Swarthmore. (If you have the stuff to be accepted at Swarthmore, you are likely to be just as successful coming out of Temple. And you would likely do better if you started with a nest egg of around $300,000, which is what would be the case if you saved and invested what you would otherwise have paid for tuition.) But Swarthmore is really top of the top in terms of its faculty and students, and it’s a very different setting from Temple. There’s a lot more to argue about, at least in my opinion.
Is there a huge payoff for an undergraduate degree in PHILOSOPHY? Is there even a huge payoff for an graduate degree in PHILOSOPHY? It’s not like there’s a dependable outcome of getting a tenured faculty position. Increasingly, colleges are turning to using to bargain-basement adjuncts.
A case can be made for a Lambourghini being a much safer investment than a 300k Philosophy undergrad degree. At least the buyer can drive the Lambourghini a while and sell it if it doesn’t meet expectation.
If the big value of the NYU school is that its location facilitates access to year-round internships, then there are other NYC options that don’t cost 300k.
College majors don’t have equal investment value. 300k for an undergrad engineering degree at MIT, yes. 300k for an undergrad philosophy degree at NYU, uh No.
@GMTplus7 What about the case where the major is undecided? There is also the possibility of changing your field of study. Should these students always take the cheaper choice? Also, what time frame are you looking at and are you assigning any value to intangibles? One final point is that I know companies that love to hire undergrad philosophy majors because they are often deep thinkers and good problem solvers so I disagree if you’re saying the major has little value.
In this particular case, that question is arguably inapplicable as NYU Gallatin is specifically geared for self-designed multi-disciplinary/multithematic majors in the humanities or social sciences. If one wanted to change to specific discrete majors or ones outside humanities/social sciences covered in this division, it’s not as simple as just declaring a change of major. The student would need to submit a transfer application to another division at NYU whether it’d be CAS, Stern, NYU-Poly if engineering, etc.
Moreover, the academic quality outside of Stern, Tisch, or certain departments in CAS are very uneven at the undergraduate level.
JHU and Swarthmore are smaller, stronger undergraduate colleges than NYU. If the parents have sufficient resources to pay for them, then the student should graciously accept their munificence. The OP stated that paying for NYU - the largest private university in the country - would be a burden. The distinctions between Temple and NYU would not justify the price difference, IMHO. I sent my kids to private boarding school over a highly-regarded public high school, and so I do not always endorse the bargain plan. In the case of Temple vs. NYU, I would have trouble justifying it.
You think only fullpay NYU offer intangibles?
Philosophy majors don’t have a monopoly on deep thinking & problem solving I work w lots of skilled people who are excellent at deep thinking, problem solving, AND they can walk & chew gum doing a specialty.
Sorry - just gotta jump in here again because I am pretty much just giddy over the freshman year my daughter has had as part of Temple Honors. She just had her first a cappella arrangement performed by her group, designed the cover art for their album, and will use her $4K summer stipend to go to an a cappella camp with Deke Sharon & do an internship at a choral music festival. She is finishing up an English class on Tolkien that she just loved. She has an on-campus apartment with a kitchen lined up for next year in the Honors housing. The year exceeded our hopes in every way and without the financial stress that would have come with some of her other options.
“Should these students always take the cheaper choice?”
I don’t think anybody here has proposed an “always” or “never” rule for college selection. I doubt that anyone who did would be taken seriously. It’s always dependent on the specific schools, costs, and financial pictures involved.
The only exception I can think of is “Don’t take on more than $X,000 debt for undergrad,” where many of us have bright-line rules. I wouldn’t recommend a student taking on over $50k debt even for computer science at MIT, for instance.
My D has a similar dilemma.
She could have full tuition plus at Temple (completely free if she commutes), just pay room&board at Alabama or UMBC ($10k/year out of pocket), or pay half-tuition and room&board at Pitt (comes to $19k/year out of pocket).
Or she could go to Villanova almost full pay (commutable, so $43k/year out of pocket) which is too much for us.
She’s leaning toward Pitt because as an undecided Engineering major, it probably offers the best options (UA would be great too but she didn’t feel it fit her).
If she was thinking of a different major I’d probably be urging her towards Temple instead (or if her dream was to work for a defense contractor as a programmer, I might be urging her to go to UMBC).
The point is that for technical careers, the projects you get to work on, the facilities you have access to, the school’s connections to industry - they matter.
For Philosophy, which is a degree which is all about reading, writing, debate, location has almost no bearing. Specially now, in an internet age. Plus she will probably want to go into graduate studies - need money for that too. I’d say go for Temple.
Not nearly as badly for respectable/elite PhD grad programs as students who qualify for admission are usually given a fellowship which covers tuition and sometimes even basic living expenses.
Again, a PSA tip…if one’s accepted to such PhD programs, but effectively full-pay due to not receiving such fellowships, that department has basically given a “soft rejection” because they didn’t feel his/her scholarly track record/potential is worth the investment of the department’s fellowship money or risking their reputation in facilitating applications for outside scholarships.
Accepting a PhD admission as a full-pay student without fellowship is not only exceedingly foolhardy from a financial perspective (both from a monetary expense and opportunity cost perspective), it’s also a non-starter if one intends to have a viable chance at starting out on the tenure track.
The absence of department or outside fellowships providing financial support(usually full tuition at minimum) is one thing academic hiring committees will red flag and thus, render uncompetitive compared to most PhD graduates/near-graduates who are competitive have those fellowships.
“Not nearly as badly for respectable/elite PhD grad programs as students who qualify for admission are usually given a fellowship which covers tuition and sometimes even basic living expenses.”
Right, but it’s a big plus if you don’t have debt from undergrad and you can live in slightly greater comfort than the other ramen eaters. Also a plus for your research if you aren’t dependent on taking on as much teaching as possible in order to pay the bills.
Agreed. I was comparing being full-pay for NYU undergrad and for other professional graduate programs like law where one can expect to pay $200k+ and where fellowships/merit scholarships are rarer.
A fellowship isn’t always enough to make ends meet, especially if living in an a high cost area. A PhD in philosophy from NYU coupled with a B.A from Temple is going to be a more impressive than other way around - (B.A. from NYU-Gallatin, PhD from Temple)… but the PhD students I’ve talked to at NYU gripe about their teaching load. So a reserve of funds might be nice.
And I still agree with others who feel that the "potential’ goal of a philosophy PhD may very well be replaced by a more practical, career-oriented grad school goal (such as a law degree) as the student matures.
Some of that might be due to an increasing trend of mandating more TA hours for all academic grad students due to some departments’ needs to ease the research Prof’s teaching/office hours load and due to increasing calls in some corners of academia to give all grad students in PhD programs more teaching opportunities to be prepared for the teaching part of their future academic careers.
Considering the state of the legal market, heading off to law school may arguably be just as impractical or a worse long-term financial decision than heading off to a Philosophy PhD program.
Especially if said law program is not top-14 or well-regarded within the region the aspiring law student intends to practice in after graduation. Same if he/she ends up graduating in the middle or bottom of his/her law school graduating class with the possible exceptions of the top half of the T-14.
One friend who gave up a full-ride to a local southern school to do his last 2 years of undergrad at NYU CAS and attended a respectable, but not elite law school ended up graduating law school into the 2008 recession. The combined debt from 2 years at NYU, 3 years of private law school, and compounding interest meant his debt has now ballooned to over half a million. Although he was more fortunate than most law classmates in landing an actual legal job, it’s at a non-profit barely making $30k. Considering all that, only a 10-25 year IBR program could hopefully save him from being perpetually buried in debt for his entire life.
If I had foolishly decided to accept the admission offer from NYU CAS nearly 2 decades ago, I’d probably be in a similar financial fix as him rather than becoming debt free six months after graduation after paying off a 3-figured loan so I can devote my last year in college for job interviews and enjoying senior year.