I have been accepted to these schools and would have to pay this much per year:
Princeton/Full Price
USC/40ish per year
Swarthmore/Full Price
Wesleyan/unknown
Vanderbilt/Housing Only
McGill/Full Price
Claremont McKenna/unknown
Duke/unknown
Cornell ILR School/Full instate so 40ish
I plan to major in Philosohy or Political Science and go on to either a masters program or law school. I want to do some humanities research undergrad. I am a black woman so if anyone knows about the social climate of each school/AA studies course quality please provide input on that as well. I ultimately want to know whether it makes sense for me to take out 30k per year in loans for Princeton or go to Vanderbilt with no loans (considering my major and aspirations).
That’s so impressive ! Congrats
I committed to vandy so I’m biased but I don’t think $120k in loans for Princeton would even be worth it over community college and state school
For your major, Vanderbilt.
You can read about some AA studies profs on ratemyprofessor .com and you can contact students and black/student of color organizations on campus to get a feel for the climates.
What kind of a scholarship do you have at Vandy that makes it Housing only?
I don’t advice any student to borrow 120k if there are choices as good as Vandy at a much cheaper price.
@shimmekittens
$120K in loans to repay when finished? IMO that would be very foolish, despite Princeton being a great school. Especially if law school ends up being your path. You would just be so buried in debt that you wouldn’t see sunlight for decades. But they are all great schools, truly. Vanderbilt is wonderful, has a gorgeous campus, and will be as welcoming to you as you make yourself to others. It appears the latest freshman class was right at 10% AA and the same for Hispanic enrollment, which actually puts them ahead of most of their peer schools. Vandy seems the obvious choice if I were you, since it offers the best of educations and your tuition is paid for. I hate to trivialize what is of course an important decision to you, as it should be, and of course reaching out for input can only make sense.
But in this case, it seems like a no brainer, as they say. You have gotten a nearly full ride to one of the best schools in the world, and your alternatives all leave you with significant debt and the schools are no better, not even Princeton. It might be a little more famous, but how famous does a school have to be? And I can guarantee you that fame is not worth $120,000 to you. This would be true even if you had no plans to go to grad school or law school. But since you do, doing well at Vandy will absolutely get you into all the same schools that doing well at Princeton would. So as long as you have a high GPA and a strong LSAT score, you will get into a great law school. And that is then where people will link you to professionally.
As far as AA studies, I don’t have personal knowledge of Vandy’s program but I have a hard time believing it is anything but excellent. In fact, should this interest you, Nashville was a much bigger part of the civil rights movements of the 1950’s-60’s than most people remember. You are too young of course. If you have not already, read “The Children” by David Halberstam. It is very thick, but a surprisingly fast read and really excellent. I think it would be of interest to you.
Please, please please do not take on those loans.
Chancellor’s Scholarship is full tuition @texaspg
Full tuition is really a great deal at Vandy. Congratulations on winning a prestigious scholarship.
First off congratulations for being accepted to some truly highly selective colleges. My D is one year ahead of you and also focused on Law School after undergraduate. We have only started to research Law School admissions but it does seem to boil down to LSAT score and undergraduate GPA in that order. If, for whatever reason, you end up not going to Law School, a political science / philosophy degree from Princeton is probably going to be more marketable than one from Vanderbilt but not $120K more marketable. Law School is probably going to cost $65K/year for 3 years on top of whatever loans you leave undergraduate with.
I toured Vandy last week and was truly impressed with the number of AAs I saw on campus. I’m surprised it’s as low as fallenchemist says (not doubting). Interestingly, I saw almost no (recognizable) Hispanic faces so I’m surprised that number is that high. Lots of Asian faces. I really liked the diversity.
Have you been on the campus? It’s just beautiful. For the cost differential, I’d choose it over Princeton in a heartbeat.
So, from an EFC standpoint, you’re full pay, but your parents are only willing to pay $30K/year? If that’s the case, I’m not even sure it’s possible to get those kinds of loans on your own.
If you want to go to law school, you’re looking at an extra $150,000+ in debt on top of your undergraduate loans (not factoring in scholarships, but that’s a story for another day). With LS it doesn’t matter where you went to college or what you studied, just that your GPA and LSATs are high. You’ll get an extra boost in admissions as a URM. Go to Vanderbilt. Other than saying you went to Princeton, Princeton will offer you absolutely nothing that Vanderbilt doesn’t for what you want to do with your life. And considering you’ll be boasting about your law school (which Princeton doesn’t even have) when you finish, that fact that you went to Princeton will matter even less.
Go to Vanderbilt or even look at a state school that would cover total costs including COA, get good grades (and push for A+'s in classes that offer A+ over just A’s, as this factors into your LSAC GPA), and spend 3 years doing LSAT prep.
To get a more precise understanding of the numbers, compare the aid packages here: http://www.finaid.org/calculators/awardletteradvanced.phtml
and look at likely loan repayment schedules here:
http://www.finaid.org/calculators/loanpayments.phtml
If you are a US applicant, you cannot borrow 30K each year on your own. You can only borrow the standard student loans ($5,500 freshman year, $6,500 sophomore year, $7,500 junior year, and $7,500 senior year). This means that someone will have to co-sign for most of that money, or will have to borrow it for you. What do your potential co-signers say about their willingness to accept responsibility for that amount of debt? Perhaps they have no problem paying down those levels. That Princeton offered you no aid at all indicates that your family has a very good income and/or other very good financial resources.
What do you need to do to maintain your scholarship at Vanderbilt? Check that out too.
Definitely Vanderbilt. Being $120k in debt after school is miserable. Adding on law school debt is no fun. In fact, since you’re going to law school your undergrad matters even less. They might even like it if you’re coming from a southern school like Vanderbilt where they get less applicants from.
One last thing I’ll say is I have a couple friends who went to Vanderbilt and they absolutely loved it!
@Youdon’tsay
Glad you had a nice visit to Vandy. It really is one of the prettiest campuses of the major research universities.
I know you aren’t doubting, but I thought it worthwhile to say that this is directly from their Common Data Set. http://virg.vanderbilt.edu/virgweb/CDSB.aspx?year=2015 This is the “B2” set of data. Black: 155/1607 = 9.65% ; Hispanic: 162/1607 = 10.1%; Asian: 216/1607 = 13.4%. Of course these are all self-identified, and there is a “race unknown” category: 94/1607 = 5.8% But much more important there is a mixed race category which specifically excludes Hispanics, so one would think it is mostly Black-white, black-Asian and Asian-white. But who knows how literally some people take that description and check it off if they are mixed German-Irish, even though that should be white (for most). But assuming people didn’t go quite that far, that box is 80/1607 = 5.0%. Depending on how many of those students have African-American dominant features, that would add to what you observed. I chose to use the latest freshman class stats as opposed to the whole undergrad class since that is most likely to be representative of the kind of demographics @shimmerkittens is likely to see in her incoming class.
@Youdon’tsay yeah I did visit.
@happymomof1 I meant my parents would take the loans but I think they’d help with law school costs if I did not need loans for undergrad
I would definitely go with Vanderbilt. It’s a great school and you’d be getting a good deal out of it. You’ll have much more money left over for graduate school afterwards. 