Yes, both DS and DD got some FA, but we had to pay our EFC and they had their work study, summer jobs, and student loans to take care of. Isn’t that a typical situation? I am assuming that since the OP has said s/he can afford Stanford, that the OP paying full price is about the same sacrifice as a lower income person paying their EFC. Maybe it isn’t. However the son of a good friend of mine was full pay at Stanford, and only a year after graduation he is very successful (was featured in Forbes 30 under 30) and totally credits the Stanford environment and connections with his achievements. The family got a fantastic return on their investment and now is really glad they didn’t take the full ride at the lower ranked school in a far less hopping area than Silicon Valley. Everyone has to weigh their options and decide.
As I already posted, we have different considerations for our youngest, and affordability is weighing heavier.
I am always amused by these threads that peddle the notion that there are lots of kids turning down actual offers of admission to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, etc., to attend lower cost directional publics. Not that I think it never happens. I’m sure it does. But there is a very specific, relatively small number of people who turn down offers of admission at any of those colleges: About 500 at Harvard, Stanford and MIT, about 600 at Princeton, and 700 at Yale. And all the evidence is that for the most part those people are turning down one of those colleges for one of the others, or less frequently other peer private universities or a handful of top publics.
A number of years ago, mollybatmit, who worked in the admission office there, reported on the distribution of accepted applicants who turned MIT down. Something like 90% of those students chose an Ivy League college or Stanford. The only public universities that enrolled more than one MIT acceptee were Berkeley and Georgia Tech. And that was before the elite universities put in place their current, more generous financial aid policies.
I know many kids who may have been legitimate candidates to be admitted at Harvard who decided to not to apply, but I have only met two who turned a Harvard acceptance down to go anywhere other than Stanford or Yale. One went to Northwestern because she thought the film program there sounded better. She regretted her decision, and actually left the film program in her second year. The other went to the dance conservatory program at Indiana, and left after his freshman year to join a national ballet company. He returned to college 10 years later – at Penn – and is now in a linguistics PhD program. My mom turned down Radcliffe for a full ride at Mills, but that was in 1948. There have been a few others on CC – one who took a brand-name full ride at Michigan (which I regard as a peer) and another who went to Vanderbilt.
I do see more kids turning down Penn or Cornell or Chicago for a great financial package at a high-quality public honors program. Pitt is popular in my world, especially with kids interested in medicine. But South Carolina over Stanford? That’s going to be a real outlier, if it happens.
May also make sense to take into consideration what a candidate wants to do in life - if they want to be teachers, social workers, work in nonprofit, accountants, or even work for a typical company (yes even Google) - Stanford may not be the holy grail if you are full pay. Personally, I think UCB and UCLA instate deliver a balance of value and excellence to launch most careers on the right path.
Absolutely – I agree with that. Turning down Stanford for Berkeley or UCLA at a better price isn’t an unlikely or irrational choice at all, no matter what you want to do when you grow up.
However, it’s worth noting that not so many people make that choice at the end of the day. I am remembering now that Stanford, at least in the past, actually made public where the students who turned it down went, and Berkeley and UCLA were surprisingly low on the list. I am going to try to find that.
“I am assuming that since the OP has said s/he can afford Stanford, that the OP paying full price is about the same sacrifice as a lower income person paying their EFC.”
Maybe, but a school like Stanford may seem " worth every penny" if your EFC is relatively low and you are paying about the same or less than what you would pay at your own public schools. If you would be full pay and looking at $65,000 a year, a family may very well decide to look at cheaper options.
With net price calculators, there may be more self screening before application. I.e. students from high income families who cannot afford even the generously low institutional EFCs at the elite schools, or have uncooperative divorced parents, may not even bother applying in the first place, instead of applying, getting admitted with insufficient aid, and choosing a lower net price school like an in state public or merit scholarship school.
Looking at the kids who win the big merit awards at schools like Georgia (Foundation Fellows) or Clemson (National Scholars), these are kids with stats that would have been in the top quartile of any school in the country. Did they apply to elite schools and turn them down? I would guess a few may have, but I bet considerably more did not. They made an informed and rational decision upfront that the value proposition wasn’t there for them. That it wouldn’t have mattered if Stanford or Harvard admitted them, they weren’t going to pay the sticker price.
I have a low EFC but I’m turning down MIT for Vanderbilt. Part of it is because I don’t want to take out loans and Vanderbilt’s financial aid packages are entirely grants, but mainly it’s a personal fit thing. If I really wanted to go MIT, I wouldn’t let cost keep me from it. I think the 500/600/700 that don’t go to these schools are doing it out of preference more often than for finances.
@LexRex - the original question concerned itself with turning down HYPSM-level schools for significantly lower ranked schools such as community colleges or non-flagship state schools. Vandy – tied at 15 in the USNWR rankings with Cornell, Rice, and Northwestern – while lower ranked, hardly fits into that category.
And I do think that money plays a significant role more often than not.
Just being the devil’s advocate here – would you have chosen Vandy over MIT if MIT’s aid were significantly better than Vandy’s?
Anyone who gets accepted to top ten colleges, wouldn’t end up at a community college. They’ll have stats to get full merit ride or at least full merit tuition at a 4 year college. Anyone with those stats wouldn’t find a good fit in a community college.
I had one friend who turned down Chicago and Vanderbilt for an accelerated BS/MD program with full tuition for first four years and another who turned down Rice and NYU for an Honors full ride plus Scholarship at local state school. Both were waitlisted or deffered by top 10 and said they would’ve gone there if accepted there. One was deffered from Yale and went to a full ride BS/MD in a low rated state school but hated it there.
I believe sports plays as big a role as money in these decisions, when they happen at all (as I agree with @JHS that it isn’t very often). My D18 has a friend who turned down being green lit at 2 Ivies to compete for them and is choosing a hundreds lower ranked OOS public school to compete there instead. Her parents struggled mightily with her decision, frankly still do, but are allowing her to do it. I know a few other stories like this one. Money is never the issue but rather sports and the student simply falling in love with the lower ranked school.
We are full pay at a top private U. Last month, there was a big (positive) fuss on Facebook about a local kid who received a “full ride scholarship” to this U through Questbridge. My first reaction was envy that this family would be sending their daughter for free while we pay $250K+. My second reaction was that I’d rather be the family that can pay the $250K. So I’m good with paying a lot more money for DDs education than (some of) her classmates. And yes, she is/was NMF.
Bit different but a kid we know turned down Harvard Law for a full ride at a Law school ranked 70+. Reportedly the lower ranked law school is very strong in the area of law she wants to practice and she didn’t want to end up with student loans…
Honestly, you will always have people paying different prices at schools as long as the current system is in place, where parental income/EFC is used. We were full pay, but at our publics. We just paid what we were told! As others did, according to need. Would have been nice to not have to pay the full price, but lucky that as a family we could.
My H turned down an offer from MIT(some money, not full ride) for full ride at UIUC for his PhD in Engineering. Now we feel that we have means so that our kids don’t have to make those choices.
For grad school I turned down UNC-CH (ranked #2 in my field at the time) for in-state tuition at UT-Knoxville. It was all about the money, and I don’t think it made a difference career-wise.
Honestly, turning down one school for another has been going on forever. I was a first generation college student, decades ago, with little guidance in figuring college out. I only applied to three public schools- Pitt, Penn State, IUP. Got into all. Didn’t want to commute to Pitt, PSU was so large it seemed overwhelming when I visited after acceptance. IUP was just the right fit, despite being the lowest ranked ( and I was clueless about all that ). I did end up at Pitt for graduate school but loved my time at IUP.
My husband turned down acceptances from Yale and Brown to go to CMU. This is nothing new.
Some students get completely shut out or financially shut out (all admissions are to colleges that are too expensive), due to not applying to any safeties. After a shut out, their options are likely to be limited to community college, non-college or gap year(s) activities, or applying to the usually not-very-selective four year colleges that failed to fill their classes.
@ucbalumnus - the question is whether kids reject higher ranked colleges for lower ranked ones, not whether kids are rejected or can’t afford higher ranked schools. One is a knowing choice; the other a necessity.