My D is torn between her dream school, Stanford and a full ride scholarship to Emory(Robert Woodruff scholar). She’s interested in Pre-Med but likes the interdisciplinary classes at Stanford. We didn’t get any aid at Stanford. Logically, Emory sounds right but how do you give up Stanford? Looking for convincing reasons to go to Stanford.
In my opinion it depends on a couple things. What is your daughter’s commitment to medicine and how important is the $250 K you save? If your daughter is firm in her commitment to medicine she can get to any medical school from Emory including Harvard or Stanford. And then she would have the $250k to pay for it. In my mind as a parent it’s like a two axis graph. One axis is commitment to medicine and the other is importance of cost. At the far northeast of the graph it is easy, choose Emory. The closer you get to the middle of the graph the harder it gets.
Disclosure: I have a daughter who recently graduated from Emory in a STEM field. She’s now doing well in industry.
Congratulations to your family on your daughters achievements and best of luck i
Thanks, kaukauna! $250K is a good chunk of our savings but we were committed to paying for her Stanford education since it was her #1 school. Now that she got the Woodruff scholarship, she’s not sure if Stanford is worth giving up the full ride. She’s about 95% committed to going to Med school. She’s also interested in research, so that’s the other 5%, if things change. Our family loves Stanford but seems a little foolish to give up all the money and the perks that come with being a Woodruff scholar. Another thing is Emory is not well known in the parts we live. What was your daughter’s major? Did she enjoy Emory?
Hey @hapymom ! Last year, I was in EXACTLY the same position as your daughter is. I, however, am not as interested in science as your daughter but I think my reasoning for choosing Stanford holds. At Stanford, you essentially have any opportunity you want. The faculty are incredible and always looking out for students whether that’s through offering research positions etc. I just didn’t get the same sense at Emory. Also, even outside of the classroom Stanford just has so many AMAZING opportunities that I didn’t get the sense that Emory has. There are summer programs/trips that are almost entirely paid by the university to learn about new and exciting disciplines in addition to clubs and organizations that host elite speakers CONSTANTLY. Either way, your daughter will make an amazing decision, but I do think my decision to pass on the Woodruff Scholarship was right for me.
Daughter’s degree was BS Applied Math. She very much liked it and she is grateful for her experience. She played a sport and two of her teammates are in good med schools. Another is studying to be a PA at Emory and and another is studying for an advanced degree in a medical field at Duke.
If you can afford it you should go to Stanford for the experience. I’ve spent time on Stanford’s campus (even though I am not an alum) and the atmosphere was simply electrifying. It’s the type of place that makes you want to build rockets, solve puzzles and think deeply about the world. Emory is a very good university. It will equip you with the skills you need to be a good employee but Stanford places a greater emphasis on being innovative and fearless.
If you cannot comfortably afford to send your daughter to Stanford, she should be very proud to be able to attend a school like Emory on a full scholarship.
This is what we did: we told ds how much money we had designated for his education. We are full-pay, so only merit money helped us. He had two offers that were full rides (though not nearly as prestigious of schools as Emory), nice merit at another top 20 school, and three other tops 20 schools (Stanford among them) that were full-pay. Choosing a full-pay would use up all the money, so he would be on his own for graduate school if he chose to attend. Medical school, however, was never on his radar, though the possibility of graduaute school was and is. He chose Stanford and will be on his own for grad school. He has a friend who was a class ahead of him (family is also full-pay) who turned down Stanford for a McDermott Scholar slot at UT-Dallas.
If you are okay with giving her a number that is in her "pile,"and letting her use it as she sees fit, it was a good route for us. My ds loves Stanford.
@hapymom Congratulations! This is a very difficult decision, but if $250K uses up a good chunk of your savings, she should go to Emory. Great as Stanford is, your daughter can get a perfectly fine undergraduate education at Emory and be just as happy there. There was a student on College Confidential a couple of years ago, terminatorp, who, with difficulty, turned down Stanford and Yale for a free four-year ride at Duke. As I recall, his parents could afford the other schools; last I read, he seemed to be doing just fine. Any college will be what a student makes of it—every year plenty of students who attend their dream schools as freshmen are less than happy at them or even decide to transfer elsewhere. Conversely, many students who didn’t get into their first-choice college and reluctantly matriculated somewhere they really didn’t want to go end up very happy and doing well. There are too many variables that can’t be controlled, but $250K in savings is one you can.
Nerdychica, we LOVE Stanford, that’s why it’s so hard to turn it down.
Hoggirl, giving the kid a number to work with for her education is a great idea! I think we will do that. But knowing her, she would choose Emory(she likes money in her bank). But at least, it will be her personal decision that way.
Planner, thanks! I completely agree with your logic. I just hate for her to not be able to attend her dream school since middle school, especially when she actually has the option and she worked so hard for it! That’s life!
^^ @Planner, with all due respect, I think comparing the AB Duke scholarship is apples vs. oranges. Duke is a top 10 school and is the equal of Stanford in most respects (not quite as prestigious, and not quite as strong in STEM, with some exceptions like BME); but the “dropoff” between Stanford and Duke is negligible, and the AB scholarship also provides additional perks and intangibles.
I think these kind of decisions have to be handled individually. The calculus generally would involve (1) how much of a financial strain is involved, (2) how much of a difference between the two schools there is to the applicant, and (3) the applicant’s long term plans. In the case of someone 95% sure about medical school, 4 years of medical school cost down the road plus the relative merits of being pre-med at Stanford vs. pre-med at Emory as a Woodruff Scholar would seem to strongly favor Emory; but if the OP’s daughter really has her heart set on Stanford and is going to be second-guessing herself for 4 years, that may be a deciding factor.
Actually, in my daughter’s case, Emory fares better than Duke : ) In fact, she didn’t apply to Duke at all though she’s a basketball fan.
- The financial strain is in terms of savings: its hard for me to quantify that at this point 2) She LOVES Stanford but she sees herself being happy at Emory 3) Med school is in the future but there is a chance it could change.
@hapymom I agree that the suggestion of @Hoggirl is great—assuming that spending the $250K in savings for undergrad, med school, or a combination of the two won’t pose undue hardship for you later on. Since you said that the amount was a good chunk of your savings, my strong inclination was for you to save it. Important other factors to consider would be your age, income, income stability over the long term, retirement accounts, any potential inheritances, etc. If $250K was just a small portion of your savings, my answer would have been different (though I’d still recommend thinking hard about the decision).
This is spoken by someone whose son had little interest in applying to schools like Duke, Chicago, Rice, Emory, etc., that offer substantial merit scholarships—not because of the scholarships, but because the schools weren’t a good fit for him. He was willing to do it, though, but we told him not to. We were afraid he actually would get a free ride somewhere and that turning down an offer from his preferred schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and one other) might be too difficult and lead to regrets. Our situation was a bit different, though, because we were pretty sure he’d get good financial aid from these other schools (and he did, at all except the unnamed school). The amount we pull from our savings to pay for Stanford is (to us) significant but doable, within the context of our total savings, retirement accounts, etc. Paying for everything would have been very tough and a poor financial decision, though we could have done it.
I’m also speaking from the perspective of a first-year college student parent now. I’ve seen and heard about the experiences of my son and many of his friends and acquaintances, and at this point my view of the value of attending one’s “dream school” has changed, just because so many people do just fine elsewhere. There really will be excellent opportunities at any good college, and a student can be happy anywhere (or unhappy anywhere). My son didn’t have a dream school, though he did have preferences—ones that changed over time. He got in somewhere early and so didn’t end up applying to all the 12 or so schools on his original list, but he (and we) were actually really happy with them. There were two in particular that we all liked a lot. Neither had quite the prestige of his final choices—they were comparable to Emory—but both were very good schools that would have been excellent fits and that I’m sure he would have enjoyed attending.
@renaissancedad I agree with you about the difference between Duke and Emory. I just mentioned the Duke example because I remembered @terminatorp and his situation, which was similar in some respects to that of @hapymom.
AB Duke winners routinely turn down Harvard and Stanford even when money is not the deciding factor. Other schools simply cannot match the individual attention that an AB Duke scholar receives. The AB program is really like the American Rhodes in some ways. Duke is the only top 10 school that offers a full ride merit scholarship. Your odds of being a Rhodes or Marshall scholar are exponentially higher if you are an AB as opposed to a regular student at Harvard or Stanford. Not really an apples to apples comparison.
@NerdyChica Saying that the AB program is kind of the American Rhodes is quite far-fetched. Duke is no Oxford. Also there is probably a reason Duke is forced to give out merit scholarships to attract these very top students, unlike all of the ivies, Stanford,MIT, Caltech. Also I highly doubt that students accepted to Harvard or Stanford ( or Princeton, Yale, MIT for that matter) turn them down in any significant numbers for Duke AB if money is not issue for them.
^ If you think that Penn (or Brown, or Dartmouth, or Cornell) is drawing students away from HYPSM in large numbers you are mistaken. Duke is interested in drawing students away from HYPSM. These students are the ones who go on to win Rhodes scholarships and cement a university’s reputation. Maybe Penn is not interested in those things but Duke has always been committed to excellence 
Also, Duke may not have Oxford’s international reputation but it is wealthier, more selective (although this is a US vs UK issue), has more highly cited researchers, and more home grown Nobel laureates in the last decade.
^ The number of other schools that can make a similar claim: 3 (Stanford, Harvard and MIT)
http://hcr.stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com/
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html
^ 2013 was an anomaly and it makes sense that there is competition because middle class students are getting full rides at places like Princeton so the financial component is taken out of equation.
The AB Duke generally has a yield of +/- 15 students per year. I believe around 23 scholarships are offered, with a, projected yield of about 2/3. In 2013 the yield was unusually low (8 accepted, so around a 33% yield). But in 2014 19 were accepted. I believe that the 2010, 2011 and 2012 classes each had 15, so the 8 does seem to be an anomaly.
http://article.wn.com/view/2014/05/07/Nineteen_Selected_for_AB_Duke_Scholarships_Duke_University/
https://today.duke.edu/2012/05/abdukes2012
https://today.duke.edu/2011/05/abduke11
https://today.duke.edu/2010/05/abduke.html
^ Absolutely correct. Needless to say, virtually every single AB is choosing between Duke and HYPSM.