In the unlikely event one of my kids got into Harvard, I’d do what I could to support them. That’s disclosure, not judgment. I have one more who may have more options than her older sibling, but I doubt it will include Ivy League schools.
But if the subject is “payoff” the point is I’d do it for the same reason that I’d support my kids if they were Olympic athletes (another exceedingly unlikely possibility). It is not a cost calculation, just a once in a lifetime thing. It’s also contingent on having the means. I would not take out a second mortgage for something like this.
Without question there are many broad brush strokes on this board. But this is just responding with more of the same.
Need to justify/defend (on both sides) is interesting to me. This is an anonymous message board. People don’t know me here so why would I be concerned how they feel about a decision I made? Why would I feel the need to justify decisions I made to anyone here? I didn’t justify the choice to my parents of where I sent my kids to high/grade school. They disagreed with that choice but that wasn’t my issue/concern. Eventually they saw the light but it wasn’t because I defended it to them. And had they not seen the light, I was fine with that as well.
We had about 100 kids graduate high school in our neighborhood over a 10 year period. Lots of different choices made in the first 18 years of life. I never cared what other people thought. I justify my decisions with my wife and our kids. That is it. Don’t care if you think I am wasting my money on something. Or that I think they are wasting their money on something else. To each his/her own.
This has been an interesting thread for me to follow. I have been, and am still, living through this same discussion within my family.
Since they were born, I was 100% committed to both of my kids graduating from college with zero debt. My oldest is at a state university (and thriving) and wasn’t a realistic candidate for elite universities.
My youngest was accepted to the Honors College at UF with a full ride. He was accepted to 2 private universities that are higher ranked, but didn’t attend for 2 reasons. 1.) They weren’t substantially better STEM schools than UF and 2.) He knows that, if he attends UF on the full ride, I will be able to pay for his grad school. He remains on the waitlist for 2 universities ranked higher than UF that are both excellent for STEM. Even though the chances are very small, if accepted off of either waitlist, he will attend, and I will be happy to write the check to send him. I have the money saved, he will graduate with no debt, and I am convinced that he will have better opportunities and a better life if he gets in to either university.
I would recommend any state university with a strong research program over most “private universities that are higher ranked.” I would only make an exception for Ivies and a few others if I thought my kids stood a chance of being accepted, which so far has not been a serious consideration.
Part of this is personal experience. Back in prehistoric times, I was accepted to Penn State and to Lehigh, which honestly I still don’t think is really any better even for engineering, but didn’t have the “football/party school” stigma that Penn State had. I doubt my family could have afforded Lehigh anyway, and I have no regrets whatsoever about going to Penn State (which in fact had just started an honors program that has grown in prestige since then).
So in that sense, I am a big supporter of public universities. They have all the opportunities for those willing to show some initiative and grab them. I eventually took graduate level courses in my field and got letters of recommendation that got me into grad school and on to a PhD.
However, if in some parallel universe, I had a child who was accepted to Harvard, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford, say, it would be sort of like they told me they had made it to an Olympics elimination race or had just auditioned on Broadway and got the part. I mean I wouldn’t be spreadsheeting it. It’s a no-brainer. You follow your dreams if they’re big enough. “Fortunately” (or otherwise) I am not faced with such a dilemma.
(Added: and to get to the point, you can be a 35-year-old millionaire and still regret your crushed dreams. I’m not judging anyone, just saying the call I would make on something that is truly once in a lifetime.)
It may. I didn’t give it much thought. (My family knew all about Penn State, not so much Lehigh.) The acceptance material suggested a school that gives students a lot more individual attention. On the other hand, I was accepted into what was then the University Scholars Program at Penn State, and it was enough to persuade me that I had nothing to be embarrassed about (confession: I also applied to MIT, which was never a real possibility, but I was a naive teen). I was probably lucky to get in on the ground floor. The honors program got a lot more competitive in just a few years and has turned into the Shreyer Honors College.
Note: does Lehigh also have a strong fraternity/sorority focus? I might have picked up that vibe as well, and it would not have helped. Of course, so does Penn State, but it’s just huge and very “choose your own adventure.”
These are very interesting rankings. At the undergraduate level, if you look at Stanford and Berkeley its quite clear there is a big “payoff” difference. Assuming roughly the same proportion of students in engineering/CS other startup related fields of studies in these two schools you have a Stanford student five and half times more likely to get a million dollar funding than a Berkeley student. Is a Stanford kid five times more capable than a top flagship kid in startups?
Getting funded millions without prior experience is still a low probability event, but if the chance is 500% higher, say 2% vs 10% , that is a big deal.
I didn’t investigate, but Stanford is sui generis. It’s not only prestigious but it’s smack in the middle of Silicon Valley and adjacent to Sand Hill Road. I can see why they’d have an advantage. Plus it fits with startup founders I know. If they didn’t get their undergrad degree there, they at least did a stint for a masters.
But Harvard is three thousand miles away from Sand Hill Rd, if you correct for the number of kids in startup scene you still have more than five times the likelihood of getting funded vs a state flagship like Berkeley.
I always enjoy the car analogy here on CC, where we’re comparing the prestige of a state school versus HYPSM or any of the other Top schools. Being a big car aficionado, the comparison is always humorous to me. I don’t see many Toyotas at the local Cars & Coffee.
Have you tried to purchase a convertible Toyota? Toyota doesn’t offer one. What if you want a purple (or any particular color that’s not ordinary) Toyota, the Toyota color pallete is always staid when compared to other more expensive brands. Have you sat in a Toyota seat versus (insert luxury car here) seat? Toyota seats aren’t as very ergonomic/comfortable.
It’s not always about the 0-60 times, or stopping/braking distance, safety rating or the latest technology being released on the luxury brands and then eventually being filtered down to the less expensive brands. It just might be that you really want a specific color, specific gadget or maybe you just want a convertible to cruise down Highway 1 with the top down.
Sure. I agree with all that. The reason to go to Harvard (if you can) is because you want to go to Harvard. I am not a car person at all and I am forever amused that people put more thought and personal investment into the choice than they do their water heater. But we all have different priorities, right?
Besides cars, I’m very particular about my running shoes. I just bought a couple new pairs for different tasks (e.g. trail versus road running). There are running shoes for $80, $140 or $250. You buy what you can afford, but I know which ones fit better, look better, perform better and last longer.
It’s not about the details though…it’s about personal bias and assumptions.
If you ask 100 people if they’d prefer a free Mercedes or Toyota…how many say Toyota? The people who already own one? The people who know a Mercedes owner and hate them? There are countless reasons to not pick the Mercedes, but a sizeable majority will select the Mercedes.
Alas this thread is about value. If you’re asked to pay sticker price, then a great number of people are going to say Toyota. It’s the better “value”. If you can’t afford the Mercedes, you’re going to make the argument you get where you need to go at the same time. A lot of people here will argue that the Toyota was the wise choice, but that doesn’t make Mercedes drivers foolish and niave.
I enjoy reading posts on this topic in all it’s reincarnations. There are so many dimensions to be explored (which makes it interesting), but what gets lost sometimes is that it’s a very individual decision. Any decision made on the basis of “elite or bust” is, IMO, flawed at best sometimes resulting in massive debt for no real reason. I think that the best results are achieved when the goals of both the student and the parent (the financial backer in most cases) are aligned. Looking back on our son’s path (BSCS 2020, MSCS 2021) I can see how we managed to avoid many of the most contentious topics discussed on CC.
Our son’s goal was very specific (actually micro-specific) – he was interested in machine learning, he wanted to be involved in research, and he was captivated with the whole idea of tech startups. He was not driven by attending any specific school (elite, flagship or other). He was very strong academically (4.0 UGPA, 2400 SAT, multiple 800 subject tests) but never participated in high visibility ECs like ISEF (he was a chess player). He applied to a range of colleges including Stanford, MIT, CMU, Cal, UT Austin, GT, UIUC and a few others. His list includes what CC’ers refer to as “elites” and flagships, but that was not how he binned them up – he saw them as having the strongest value propositions to meet his goals.
My goal was simple – I just hoped his goals were achievable. With favorable investments in 529’s, money was not an issue meaning no debt (should be every parental goal #1). Our commitment to our son (and daughter) has always been that we can/will cover college up to an MS – so money was not a consideration, but they must have clear goals.
In the end he was accepted into most of the colleges he applied to (except for MIT) and chose to attend Stanford. He specialized in machine learning in his BS and MS learning from some of the most well-regarded names in the field – he earned many A’s and a handful of B’s (the first in his life). He participated in ML research with one of the most recognized names in artificial intelligence and was published 3 times. He interned with a 2 of the biggest tech names in Silicon Valley and 2 very interesting start-up. In short, he achieved all his goals (and I mine).
So, my recommendations are – don’t chase “elites”, but rather understand your goals and constraints – it will all be OK.
I sometimes wonder “Are there no Gilmore Girls fans on CC?” Maybe if I had joined 15 years ago… anyway, it’s not my favorite show but I caught up on the whole series during the pandemic and there are just so many analogies here… fixation with Harvard (later Yale)… social vs. financial opportunity… also another thread touching on helicopter parenting comes to mind.
Gilmore Girls is less about reality than Amy Sherman-Palladino’s fantasy of the childhood in Connecticut she never had. But it is really hard to read these threads without projecting Rory, Lorelai, let alone Richard and Emily’s thoughts on all this. Perish the thought that Rory would settle for a state university. (Not that the Harvard education did her a lot of good in the revival.)
Personally, I think all kids should be the driver in where they go. Not everyone who could possibly get into Harvard (or similar) according to stats, etc, has the desire to go there. That’s fine. It may seem strange on here, but a few of these don’t even want to go to college. It’s ok.
There is no single way to success (or failure) in this world.
Success can be defined multiple ways and many don’t have significant earnings or prestige as part of the definition.
In my experience of working in an average public high school since '99, most college graduates end up enjoying where they went even if it wasn’t their first choice. There are two categories of those who didn’t:
those who chose significantly below their abilities - meaning they had a 30+ ACT and went to a school with an average ACT of about 20 with extremely few academic peers in that 30+ group
those who graduated with high levels of debt
Therefore, those are my two cautions for students. Try to pick somewhere affordable where you have peers academically.
Then I have a caution for pre-med wannabies to try to be in the Top 10-25% of students where they go because I’ve seen too many drop their med school dreams if they’ve felt overchallenged freshman year. I suspect if they’d been near the top of the pack in their classes going in they’d have had a different impression.
Otherwise, I root for the kid wanting UPenn and the kid wanting Penn St as well as the one who wants to start at CC and then transfer to X.
Those I feel for are those without affordable options.
Those I try to “change” are those who tell me they plan to be drug dealers or similar…
Only if the underlying details are what you want is the Toyota a good value. If you’re back is important to you and you desire more lumbar support, for example, then the Toyota is not a good value.
My D21 went looking for a particular major this past admissions cycle. Most schools don’t offer it. She’ll be attending a CA state school that has her desired major. And if I want a comfortable seat in a convertible car, then Toyota isn’t a good choice.
Well, I would go with a Toyota for reliability and maintenance costs. I can afford a more expensive car. I’m not “settling”. I just don’t get the whole thing about cars. I fit into the “super saver” category (by a wide margin if you’re going with 15% savings). I would care a lot more about a child getting into Harvard, because you can’t buy your way in (anyway I don’t have Jared Kushner’s dad’s money). If it’s a personal accomplishment, it’s a big deal. If it’s just “stuff” I just want to know if it does the job.
I have a challenging foot to fit. For me its not a matter of affording one or another. Its a matter of what fits better. Rest (particularly looks but also including cost) is totally secondary. More expensive doesn’t always translate into better fit (custom shoes aside).
As the recent posts have been dominated by a handful of users and the posts have been off-topic (even more than usual), I have put the thread on slow mode until tonight. A ologies with cars and shoes are fine; anecdotes about your own car and shoes are not.
My hope is this will allow other users to join the conversation and prompt the more exuberant users to be strategic in postings.
