<p>Thank you all for your support in making my decision! For those who don't know, I was deciding between paying the full 54k/year cost of attendance at Stanford, my original dream school, or the University of Michigan with a full ride, honors, Ross, housing, perks, ect. </p>
<p>I was OOS, for both schools and liked them both a lot. I visited both schools and after I returned from Stanford my decision was clear.</p>
<p>I will be enrolling at the University of Michigan this fall, and am ecstatic about my decision!</p>
<p>This thread is just to update those who wished to help and maybe those who are/will be in similar situations to as questions about my decision. If anybody is looking to contact me in the future, just hit me up with a pm and I'd be happy to update you about how my decision turns out. I'm choosing Michigan over HYPS and a couple others and can share how I compared UMich to each school.</p>
<p>Thanks again, and good luck to anybody still making their decisions!</p>
<p>We know a couple of students who have chosen UMich over some tippy top schools over the past couple years and have ben delighted with their choice. You’ll have some fine opportunities at Michigan and no debt after graduation – which opens a world of additional possibilities for your future.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to start by traveling abroad to become fluent in spanish this summer, something I would not have been able to do otherwise because I would have had to work. </p>
<p>I’ll write a post soon outlining how I went through the whole process and ultimately arrived where I did.</p>
<p>Congrats Tyler, I am amazed by your college outcomes and your choice of going to Michigan to save money and to enjoy life! And there’s always grad school.</p>
<p>Tyler, congratulations. Your posts here show you to be an impressively thoughtful person. I am confident that you have made the right choice – in part because you didn’t have any wrong choices to make, in part because I am convinced that you have the ability to make any choice turn out to be the right one, and in part because notwithstanding the general attitude on CC Michigan easily stands comparison to HYPS in terms of the educational opportunities it offers. It’s great that this is going to give you the freedom to do some things that you might not have been able to try otherwise. Good luck!</p>
<p>Right choice. I went to Yale over Michigan in the days when cost was not significant - my old high school now costs over 4x what Yale costs, per year - but most of my family went to Michigan undergrad or Stanford undergrad. And the family has faculty connections at both. In retrospect, knowing what I know about life, I may well have gone to Michigan. I enjoyed Yale but I would also have enjoyed Michigan and I think probably more in certain ways. It’s not the school that makes your life but you - you are the hero of your own story.</p>
<p>We all suffer from confirmation biases. It’s easy to look at successful grads from Yale, Stanford, etc. and think the school made them. We apply their experiences to ourselves as though we were them without recognizing the correlation is directional; more kids who become successful go to Yale or Stanford, after correcting for the leg-up many already have in life. The idea the school makes the kid successful is the application of a confirmation bias backwards from a conclusion. So the good news is that you got into Stanford and Yale and that means you have the ability level these schools generally require and that means you’ll do well.</p>