An average school on a partial scholarship or a top notch school on no scholarship? What’s more important to you - having less money to give to the institution in the future or the prestige that could help you get a job which earns you money?
Here’s the answer you will get: it depends. Plus, you haven’t provided us with enough information on your financial situation or the schools involved to offer better advice. In general, it doesn’t pay to go into significant debt for an undergrad degree.
It depends on how much the family can afford. I assume that TCNJ is not the top notch school.
This is a false choice; the prestige of a school does not at all guarantee a better paying job. Research has backed this up.
If you can comfortably afford the “top notch” school and feel your child would benefit from it, the by all means send him/her there with no guilt. But if going to the “top notch” school would require loans etc. and you feel the scholarship school is a good fit for your child, then send him/her there.
Oh I just mean in general! This is not related to me at all, I’m just curious to what others have to say about this as my family and I just discussed this over dinner. Thank you all for your input.
There is no “in general”. Some lines of work are highly school-prestige-conscious, while others are not at all.
Of course, this presumes that even the more expensive cost is affordable.
Duke $20,000 in debt at graduation, Penn State debt free, go to Duke.
Duke $100,000 in debt at graduation, Penn State debt free, go to Penn State.
In my opinion, it depends on the schools and how much debt you’d be looking at.
I’m familiar with both USC and Stanford, and would be willing to pay a premium of $15,000/year to go to Stanford rather than USC.
I believe the main difference between top tier and other universities are your future contact network. If you are interested and able to establish such network, I am quite sure it would pay off to go to top tier.
It also depends on your major. My daughter is taking on ~20K debt for her undergrad but based on the average potential salary for her major (chemical eng) and the high percentage of grads who get hired straight out of her university (RPI), she should have no difficulty paying it off and therefore worth it. However, she turned down a more prestigious school (CMU) that offered less aid and would have left her with more debt ($90~100K), because she didn’t feel it was worth the difference.
My brother, on the other hand, took on $20~30K of debt to get a degree in film from Berkeley which he has never used (getting a job in film industry is tough) and still hasn’t paid off his loan years later. Not worth it for him.
I would reckon - to each his own ! I came to the US from India in the late 80s, took a loan of around $80k to attend HBS. Alternatively, I could have attended Tulane and a couple of other B-schools on a free/near-free ride. Fast forward 25 years and I am paying for schooling for my 2 Ds - one in Med school and the other in a Tech school. Full pays both. No loans.
Facts are undeniable. School is what you make of it. Especially undergraduate. I would recommend a student attend the institution where he/she can succeed the most. In otherwords have the largest impact in terms of grades, relationships, activities, research etc. It’s been widely proven that attending a “top notch” (I assume you mean an IVY) far from gtd success. Frankly, in 99% of the cases that is simply not the IVY school. Its’ MUCH better to be a bigger fish in a small pond and have 100% of that ponds resources really pulling for your success. Go for the top notch graduate school.
Sometimes it is not about that. Certain kids need to be in an elite school atmosphere. For some they have always been the best student and while it made school less competitive, it also meant they were not with peers who shared their interests. D has always felt slightly out of place because she is more interested in reading and science than in sports and going out. I am hoping that where she goes next year she will meet people who share her interests and that her grades will not suffer too much because she will have to work much harder than she is used to.
“Need”? Some larger non-elite schools (e.g. many state flagships) have a number of academically top-end students who, while a small percentage of the overall, are as large as some entire elite schools in absolute numbers. So a top-end student can find his/her academic cohort in more schools than just the elite ones.
Academically top-end students may be interested in sports and going out. Indeed, some smaller elite schools have a reputation of raging party scenes, and may have a very large percentage of students in NCAA athletics.
COMPLETELY different scenario from undergrad education.
It’s just limited, in general, to think of colleges as if they are extensions of your own high school, jocks in one corner, brainiacs in another.
Instead of “elite,” I might have said, “more academically competitive” or “more intensity in the major,” which opens up more than just the flat notion of prestige in some general ranking.
Top notch is more than that.
Call it whatever you want. D did not want a raging party school, has never taken a drink (not because we care one way or the other), it just does not appeal to her. If you are in an honors college of a large state school, you are still in a large state school and the predominant atmosphere will be NCAA or Greek or simply Party. She wanted to be in a place where she would be challenged, where chances are her randomly assigned roommate had a love of learning. She did not want to be cloistered in the honors college which often have their own dorms and programs.
Depends on too many things! Some of those elite LACs in the middle of nowhere have a “raging party scene” because there’s nothing else to do in the middle of nowhere Maine/Vermont/NY/etc. It may be confined to weekends (and maybe Thursday nights), but it’s probably naïve to think that intellectual kids and partying are inconsistent with each other. So no, I wouldn’t assume that because a school is highly selective that the kids will be engaged in highly cerebral activities most of the time. They may feel like they have enough brain cells that they can afford to kill off a few!
As for the value of the “elite” (more academically competitive) school, it so depends on the field. If you’re going to need graduate school for whatever you do, it’d be worthwhile to know how well the top performing kids do in getting into medical/law/business/grad programs. If you want to be an investment banker or a management consultant for a while when you graduate from college (even for a while), prestige is the name of the game. The top firms only interview at a handful of schools. For many fields, though, this is just not the case and you may be better off having some resources available for graduate school.
As is so often the case, depends on the kid, the school, and the resources available.