I am going into Mechanical Engineering, and right now after all of the help from merit aid/my parents/fafsa my options are either go to Stony Brook for free (come out with 0 student loans) or go to stevens and take on $25,000 in student loans per year under my name ($5,000 of which per year will be low interest federal loans). Which should I choose and why? Stevens is kind of a difficult offer to turn down as their actual price of attending is $60,000 per year but i’d only be taking on $25,000 in debt but it’s also difficult to not attend stony and come out debt free. Which do you guys think is the smarter choice?
I also wanted to add that it’s hard to turn down stevens because of their 96% job placement rate 6 months after graduation compared to stony brook which is most likely around 50%
No brainier…Stony Brook. They’re both good schools. I wouldn’t recommend $100k in debt for ANY school, but especially for one where the margin of quality isn’t huge (if there’s a gap at all).
$100,000 in debt is far too much.
Stevens’ job placement rate is high because it has mostly engineering majors, while Stony Brook has various different majors, not all of whose graduates tend to find jobs quickly after graduation.
It’s unanimous! Stony Brook, starting your career debt-free will give you a lot of financial flexibility.
@xraymancs @ucbalumnus @eyemgh What if I commuted to stevens and i brought it down to $10,000 per year? and to ucbalumnus no the 50% was for engineering majors they said it was 50% at the mechanical engineering reception.
I still vote for Stony Brook, for several reasons. First, commuting will rob you of much of what is so great about college, the time spent with other students, making life long bonds. Second, the money is still not trivial. Let me illustrate.
Your payment over 10 years for that $40k loan will be $460/mo. After 10 years, you’ll have a Stevens degree and that loan paid off. There is something though that you aren’t considering, opportunity cost.
Let’s say you go to SB and instead invest that $460 you’d be paying towards debt. At age 32, you will have $75,000 if you got a return of 6%, conservative by historical standards. Here’s where it gets interesting.
If you leave it alone, continuing to grow at 6%, not adding any more money, it will grow handsomely. By age 65, you’d have roughly $515,000.
So, that is really how much more it would cost you to go to Stevens. Will you make half a million more in your career for the Stevens degree? Probably not.
Now, if you didn’t have Stony Brook in your pocket for free, $40k isn’t unreasonable. Since you do, you have to consider the vet real opportunity cost of that money.
Good luck!
In my experience students who commute find it difficult in engineering. There are several issues involved. One is that they have a difficult time spending the same amount of time working with their peers on academics if they are going back and forth. The second is that often commuter students still have responsibilities at home that might not be compatible with college. This happens particularly in first time in the family college students. Of course if commuting is the only way to make it work, then that changes the considerations.
In your case, you have to weigh all of these issues and also whether you like one school better than another. I think that the placement for an engineering student will be more or less the same at either university. Stevens is certainly smaller and might be a better fit for you than the large state university. Even though I am a faculty member at a university much like Stevens, I generally think that the financial considerations outweigh other aspects and that is how I put it to my own children.
Can’t beat Stevens ROI. It is very impressive. Plus the small size of the school mKes the average class size about 20, not huge lecture classes like at SB. More community at Stevens. Engineering is very hard. Students at Stevens are not competitive with eachother they all work together. It is a very civilized community. Can’t beat Hoboken either. Nothing to do in SB. No NYC in your backyard, no Washinton St, in Hoboken, no amazing NYC skyline view. My,vote is for Stevens. SB students do not appear to be as happy, although it is a very good school. ROI is 50% for engineering students.
I honestly think you will be better off at Stony Brook, which has great academics and for you, no debt. Something to keep in mind is that, as student loans pile up, there can also be a psychological burden which may drain you, both during college and after. Being debt-free, and living on-campus, you can focus on your studies and career.
What xraymancs says above is incisive. The flip side is that you would have the extra “bandwidth” (e.g., no commute, no living at home, no loans) to make the best use of available resources at Stony Brook, which are impressive.
And the job placement statistics indeed are not apples-to-apples comparisons. I am not even sure if / how SB, spread across a much greater variety of disciplines, accounts for the students who go on to graduate work (many do). In any case, hiring for well-prepared engineering grads should look much more comparable for both institutions. A bonus to be considered is engineering jobs in the New York metro area may well look favorably on SB grads – some due diligence on your part could reveal nice perks for SB engineering in the workplace.
For the OP who needs $100,000 in debt to attend Stevens, the ROI is impressively poor when the OP has another perfectly good option that requires no debt.
Stony Brook - besides finances if you find out you like the sciences or math better than engineering SB is excellent in those areas.