Sorry, posted too quickly. Anyway, the interns are mostly top 20 college kids, but a few from other schools,as well. So the Stanford kids are working right next to the Wake kids, at the same salary, and there is a state flagship kid there too. It is more about the kid and less about the school, at least at the top tier places my kid is interning.
An important factor is what do employers think about Stanford versus WFU ?
Do employers target WFU ? Or even WFU Stamps Scholars ?
Easy for employers to target (recruit at) large state university honors collegesâsuch as the University of Georgiaâand super select groups within that honors collegeâsuch as Foundation Fellowsâbenefit.
Most major companies have leadership development programs which target certain universities. Investment banks & management consulting firms also have target schools at which they recruit every year. Stanford is a target school. WFU is not. I may be wrong, but I have not even read or heard of WFU being a semi-target. Tech companies also target Stanford.
Stanford is a hot school for employment & other opportunities. Stanford offers a different environment than almost all other colleges & universities.
An extreme example: If you are in search of a high paying job & career, should you move to Detroit / Flint, Michigan or to Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, or New York City ?
Stanford is almost like Harvard & MIT combined into one university.
There is a reason why NFL scouts focus their attention on certain schools year after year.
Students make lifelong connections at Stanford with other exceptional students.
Nevertheless, in the two cases being discussed in this thread, Stanford is not free.
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If you are in search of a high paying job & career, should you move to Detroit / Flint, Michigan or to Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, or New York City ?[/
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âHigh payingâ in a high cost of living area doesnât translated to increased quality of life.
@Publisher, there are 247 employees at Goldman Sachs with Wake Forest degrees. No doubt it is comparble at Black Rock, CS, etc. But I have begun to think the facts simply do not matter to some posters, which is fine. Let deserving kids who appreciate the value of the Stamps scholarship (or the Robinson, Commodore, etc) take them and enjoy all the benefits thereof.
For future readers who may face similar dilemmas: How should one value the Stamps across the different institutions that offer it? The OP @hello_you has a child considering Stamps at Wake Forest v Stanford at full pay. Another poster on this thread @HoustonKen has a child considering Stamps at Ole Miss v Stanford at full pay. Somewhere in this thread, I read that the Stamps awards vary among institutions where offered. I donât know if they are the same at Wake and Ole Miss, but for the sake of argument, letâs say they are. My question is how much should the underlying institution be factored in when considering Stamps v full-pay Elite University?
Righty or wrongly, I think most posters on this board would consider Wake to be âbetterâ than Ole Miss. So do we value Stamps for the sake of Stamps alone, or does one also look at the underlying institution where it has been awarded?
@itsgettingreal17 That was me. Thatâs my opinion. Iâm very healthy and rational too. But ToS states that CC members are to be kind, respectful and nice to one another. 
@Hoggirl It goes back to fit. First of all, no one should be applying for Stamps all over. They should apply because the school is a good fit and the Stamps scholarship sweetens the deal. My D also considered the Stamps at Ole Miss. While it was one of the lowest ranked schools among her choices, it ended up being her second choice at the end of the day. Why? Because Ole Miss has amazing critical language programs, a fantastic honors college, and is strong in her second major. Had she accepted it, my D would have graduated with scholarship money in her bank account, attained all of her academic goals, and had a great 4 years. The Stamps students there are very impressive - Ivy/Stanford level stats and accomplishments. The language students she met there run rings around students at schools people think are top notch in languages, eg, Middlebury (yes she can compare based on experience). We just are not obsessed with rank for undergrad.
If you can afford it, it really depends on your child. My oldest daughter had quite a few amazing scholarships, but she fell in love with Dartmouth, and we told her if she got in, we would pay for it. It was the perfect school for her, and Iâm thrilled we could provide that opportunity. Our younger daughter never fell in love with that one school. She also got in to many prestigious schools, but she decided to take the full ride Stamps scholarship at U of Miami. Both my kids graduated several years ago. Fast forward to today, and both work for Google. The Stamps Scholars program is an amazing program, with many benefits to its scholars. My younger d is happy with her decision. My older d wouldnât have given up her dartmouth experience for anything. Iâd let your child decide. There is no wrong answer.
I think she should think: why did I apply to wake forest? Why did I apply to the Stamps Scholarship?
Do i want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?
@Data10 wrote:
That was not the assumption I was making. @privatebanker and I were having a discussion about peers at each school, Stanford and WF. With a 44% ED acceptance rate at WF, IMO, the overall class profile at Stanford would be much better than WF.
Not sure whether or not one âappliesâ for the Stamps Scholarship at most of the schools.
The Stamps Scholarship Foundation has about 31 partner schools. Annual benefits range from approximately $72,000 to just $5,000.
Stamps Scholarship is a two year benefit at Dartmouth, Chicago, USMA at West Point, The USAFA at Colorado Springs & at the Naval Academy.
Partner schools include:
The University of Georgia Foundation Fellows, the University of South Carolina âCarolina Scholarsâ, Wake Forest, Virginia, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Pitt, Oregon, Texas, Purdue, Barry University, Elizabethtown College, Georgia Tech, LSU, Oberlin, Ohio State, Tulane, UConn, Florida, Illinois, Univ. of Miami as well as its music school, Michigan, Mississippi, Notre Dame, and Oregon.
@roycroftmom : Never wrote or suggested that WFU students do not work at or get jobs at investment banks. Just wrote that I questioned whether or not WFU is a target school for recruiting by the top investment banks.
âStamps Scholarship is a two year benefit at Dartmouth, Chicago, USMA at West Point, The USAFA at Colorado Springs & at the Naval Academy.â
Since the military already provides a full ride plus a small salary to all cadets and midshipmen at the service academies, what is the purpose of the Stamps scholarships at those schools? Genuinely curious.
Networking through organized events like their national convention. https://ssnc.stampsfoundation.org/
@Scipio: Service academiesâ Stamps Scholarships are used for attending conferences, international travel & research expenses. At the USAFA, Stamps Scholars are selected from among the top 5% of the class.
The Stamps Foundation is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Stamps scholarship is more like a grant at the academies and is used for projects/studies during the summer.
Example:
United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) junior James Brahm from Huntsville, AL, is majoring in computer science with minors in nuclear weapons and Chinese. Brahm competes as part of the USAFA Cyber Team and is interesting in hacking, artificial intelligence, and deterrence theory. He has also completed survival training and earned jump (skydiving) wings and is learning to fly T-53s. The Stamps Foundation provided him the resources to study the role of technology in Chinese society, participate in an Aspen Institute Symposium on the future of western democracy, and purchase computing equipment to conduct machine learning research. This summer, he will conduct quantum computing research in Palo Alto.
Whatâs interesting is that, to the OP (per the original post), WF w/Stamps > Duke and WF w/Stamps > Vandy. Perhaps the OP should try to articulate why Stanford is so much better than Duke and Vandy to create this dilemma. Iâm not saying it isnât, but implicitly thatâs the calculus here.
I donât know what the right answer is, and I am trying to wrap my head around what weâd do in the same situation when my junior D applies next year. When I told her your dilemma and asked her what sheâd chose, she first wanted to know if she would get to keep all the money we would save. If you offered, say, to split the savings with your sonâthat half of the cost of Stanford heâd get as a graduation gift if he went to Wakeâwould that make the difference to him?
Obviously, thereâs no ârightâ or âwrongâ answer here, and youâll never know if you made the right choice. Would be be truly happy at Wake? I donât think you said where you are fromâwould he feel out of place in a southern school? I also think that Stanford has more of an urban feel, and is a larger campus (in part due to the grad programs), but could be wrong. My wife went to law school there, and I think it would have been difficult without a car because of the sprawling nature of the campus, but again, maybe thatâs just for the graduate programs, and regards the students who donât live on campusâothers can chime in there better than I. Anyway, Iâd probably chose wherever heâd be objectively happier.
one additional point I wanted to add that I have never seen mentioned before on CC, but when my D (current junior at Stanford) did her last yearâs summer internship at a Startup ( tech , not finance) , she found out from conversations with her two other co-interns ( there were three of them in the same exact department and positions, and these other two are from in state Universities in California) that she was paid much more than them . FYI my D was a sophomore then and the other two were both seniors. This may just be one isolated situation, but wanted to share that as well.
Not that the being one of the largest campuses in the US by physical size matters in this discussion, but a simple bike will suffice to navigate Stanfordâs campus. As I said earlier, Stanford pervades much of everyday life in one way or another. Another example is that I often play pickup basketball on Sundays with a Stanford professor in the School of Medicine and he just bikes everywhere.
@itsgettingreal17 - Iâm quite familiar with Ole Miss. It made dsâs short list as well, though he went elsewhere. He was not offered a Stamps, but all costs would have been covered there because of National Merit, the Croft Institute Scholarship and other scholarships he qualified for there. The stacking they provide is amazing! The Croft Institute and the Chinese Flagship programs are wonderful - thatâs why Ole Miss made his overall list and short list. In the end, he did not stay with IR anyway. I am always a bit reluctant to choose a school for a specific program/major, but thatâs just one personâs view.
I was just asking about the underlying institution because others had been comparing middle 50% score ranges between Wake, Stanford, and Harvard. If one values those statistics, that speaks to the perceived overall quality of the underlying institution and its student body. My assumption is that the middle 50% for Ole Miss is significantly lower for Ole Miss than it is for Wake.
I do hear you on âfit.â But, for some a significant component of fit is the academic stats of peers.