Imo getting the Stamps scholarship is a bigger deal than Stanford.
Publisher, we are talking about a college kid, not a 30 year old MBA candidate at a T7. So we agree the numbers are closer to $1600 per week, for those lucky undergrads who get summer internships in lucrative industries. Those generally occur after junior year, or if you are very very lucky maybe after sophomore year as well. So 2 summers worth of work before graduation, and certainly not guaranteed at all.
@Publisher thanks so much for the information. It is good to know these things before heading down the path of spending money and wondering what the return will be. (almost like going to the doctor and not knowing what the bill will be until you get your explanation of benefits. lol)
Good luck OP on your decision. My advice is whatever you decide, embrace it and make the most of it. Wish everyone and their children much good fortune.
I cannot find my IB (investment banking) summer intern pay notes.
Because I do not want to open up any other boxes of notes, I searched WSO & Poets & Quants (which uses WSO as a source).
Several charts indicate a bidding war that resulted in an enormous pay bump for 2018 interns. The pay quoted for interns exceeded that of first year associates so I will not repeat it here. A chart of averages showed IB summer interns were paid at the rate of $105,000 per year. The highest chart showed pay at more than double that rate for summer IB interns (listing pay at the equivalent of $249,000 per year.) Again, not my notes & not my figures. These are from WSO and Poets & Quants citing WSO as its source.
Tech internship can pay from $6k to 7.5k a month for top companies, like FB, Microsoft of the worlds.
D17 went with Vandy tuition scholarship, instead of MIT full pay. She was the one who decided, as DH wanted her to go to MIT as he passed it up for full ride at UIUC back then for his PHD. Her thinking is that âcan I be where I need to be if I go to Vandy?â Her answer was yes. She did have to hassle harder for opportunities, but she enjoyed work life balance which was another factor in picking Vandy. In addition, she gets more leadership positions and can stand out more at Vandy too!
Best of luck deciding! But I will let you know that two years in, I am glad she picked Vandy as well. With her summer internship, she is already at payback stage!!
@sushirrito-
- Why would someone want to attend a school full of people who stole to get in?
- Who would want to recruit there (other than Wall Street) ? :smile:
@socaldad2002 , you misunderstand . it is not that some posters do not think a top-tier education is worth 300k. Obviously I do, and after 11 full pay tuitions, it appears my family agrees and willingly spent the money. But we werenât given the option of an almost tippy top school for free with internships, travel, and networking benefits galore, as in this case.
From my experience itâs not uncommon to have undergrad tech internships beginning in the freshman summer. Returning interns always make more $$ and most of the big name employers give the choice of providing shared apartments or paying an additional $10k for housing. The highest paid undergrad internship I am aware of was a friends kid, math - CS dual major, to a quant firm in NYC last summer. His gross was slightly over $4k (uncommon). Facebook, Microsoft, Google types typically range $1,600 - $2,000 a week base pay for a 10 week internship (not including housing, or the many perks). Very competitive environment.
How much $$ a student makes is not a big factor (my S has said many times that he would have worked at his last startup for free). The connections, opportunities, and exposure to VCs peculiar to SV are real and compelling especially in the tech space.
I had conversations last year with Penn-Wharton students who claimed that several of their classmates were making salary & bonus beyond what I am willing to write here. These are NOT MBA students or candidates. They were Penn-Wharton with just BS degrees in their first & second years in IB.
As astonishing as the Penn-Wharton IB salaries are / were, 5th year computer engineers were making base salaries of $160,000s to $170,000s and their annual bonuses far, far exceeded their base salaries. This I can swear to. Major employers that are household names.
My point is that Stanford grads are targeted by IB banks & MC firms as well as for the best technical positions. The pay is hard to believe, but it is real.
Would be interesting to speak with seniors at Stanford & Penn-Wharton to discuss earnings of their classmates who graduated a year or two ahead of them.
Again, I have read & heard about a major pay bump & bidding war for summer IB interns last summer.
P.S. Articles should be available with a Google search about last summerâs IB intern bidding war.
@privatebanker âItâs not Stanford vs the universe. Itâs wake and Stamps. Free. Vs Stanford full pay and other needs to fulfill for any family. But especially one with another child to educate.
Thatâs the whole discussion in a nutshell.â
Iâm not disputing your facts and figures or the logic of your arguments, but the counter-point is what if the family has the money and the kid wants to go to Stanford and the family wants Stanford too, then who are we to tell them how to spend their money?
I also had another kid to educate. My daughters were 5 years apart just like the OPâs kids. And back when they were in school I had people both here on CC and in real life telling me how crazy I was to pay for two Ivy League educations. But the bottom line was the girls were getting what they wanted, I was getting what I wanted for them, I wasnât going into debt, the moderate sacrifices I made to fund this were worth it to me, and it was my money. At that point the arguments should have been over. But some people just couldnât stop trying to decide for me.
So that explains why start ups and high tech are the third and fourth most frequent fields of employment for Stamps scholars, after finance and healthcare. Got it.
If you look at Stanfordâs most recent career outcome report, I donât see a single top employer that is exclusive to Stanford. The mean salary doesnât mean much since the top destinations are high cost of living areas. What am I really missing? Nothing. I just donât see $300k-$500k difference between Stanford and Stamps at Wake.
Actually startups can be in finance and healthcare; finance can include tech (quants) as can healthcare (ML radiology). You can probably map the Stamps fields to the field of the colleges they attended.
It is the OPâs money, and of course he can do as he wishes with it. People make unusual financial decisions all the time based on what they value. Leaving the ethics and legality aside, one recent defendant is accused of paying a 200k bribe, plus full tuition, for kidâs admission to Chapman. I guess he thought Chapman was worth the money.
@publisher - There is an existence proof that Penn-Wharton students have a strong tendency to exaggerate when discussing their personal finances.
There may be a few things we can all agree on. The OP will at some point make a decision based on their particular circumstances. Then, in a few years, the OP will be able to access the soundness of that decision.
^ The conclusion could be there is nothing good/bad but different from going to the other school.
ââŠin a few years, the OP will be able to access the soundness of that decision.â
This seems rather unlikely. Confirmation bias suggests that the OP is likely to view whichever decision is made as âsoundâ unless the kid is either desperately unhappy or the family ends up in financial difficulties from being full pay. After all, the outcomes from the alternative choice will remain unknowable.
My son-in-law faced a similar choice for law school. He got accepted to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Univ. of Chicago law schools, among others. HYS offers were full pay but Chicago offered him a full tuition scholarship. And he would have to borrow big bucks to pay for any of the full pay schools.
Now Chicago is a top 5 law school on pretty much everybodyâs list. It gets its graduates into firms and opportunities every bit as grand as do the HYS law schools. So which law school did he choose? Stanford of course.
Why Stanford? Iâm not sure. And Iâm not so sure I would have made that same choice myself since it required going into significant debt, which for me is a red flag. So what did he find at Stanford that, in retrospect at least, made his choice the right one and his debt worthwhile? He found his wife there - my daughter. She was working at Stanford at the time and thatâs where they met.
Sometimes you just have to go with what your heart is tell telling you about these choices and not what the spreadsheet adds up to.
@Publisher - You are correct. Top IB pays first year analysts $200k+. Tech pays similar. Hedge funds pay more. Even for internships, a number of undergrads take home $40k gross. There are a myriad of posts on WSO on this topic.