The Ultimate Decision

Parents Forum
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As others have said, Duke doesn’t have an undergrad business program, so that might be a deal-breaker right there. . Also agree that visiting as many as possible before time crunches is ideal. Some of this will fall into place with the visits.

Agree (as usual) with Blossom that there are full pay folks who can and will write those checks. If it doesn’t affect your lifestyle, retirement plans, etc, then that’s fine. IMO, its a better use of $ in many cases than losing it in the volatile market. Hopefully both will be good returns on your investment.

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As someone whose kiddo got a fair amount of scholarship/FA at a private – enough to make it fairly close to what we would have paid at CU Boulder – I’m enormously grateful for the full-pay families. That’s who helped to pay for my child’s degree.

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It it were my kid (and I realize advice is cheap) I would be looking at the applied math programs, not an analytics program in a business school.

Analytics and Big Data is a “flavor of the week” academic offering. The actual discipline and content and quant skills required- this isn’t new although the ability to manipulate large datasets is greatly enabled by both computing speed/power and the addition of mobile data which is somewhat recent.

The actual career path- go do biostatistics for the CDC helping to predict where the next outbreak of Ebola or Zika or cervical cancer is going to be… vs. doing that same thing for Pfizer modeling demand for antibiotics around the world… vs. helping retailers figure out where the optimal store location is via geospatial modeling… vs. working for the NFL on Moneyball type analytics… vs. working as a political consultant calibrating voting trends and zip codes…

It’s the same discipline. Math math and more math, with programming, excellent writing skills, and the ability to use graphics to demonstrate complicated relationships (maybe some graphic design courses or a class in semiotics or psychology). I see the optimal academic program as being a math major in a college of arts and sciences… not in a standalone business program.

But to eliminate a university like Duke because you can’t study “buyer behavior” or “organizational design” or some of the core classes in a BA Business undergrad program if a kid really and truly is interested in Big Data… to me that’s crazy.

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Most schools say that the cost of tuition (and fees) does not cover the cost of educating a student. Scholarship money at private schools likely comes from donations form alums and endowments, not someone’s tuition check.

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@ShouldBeWorking I get it. S16 applied to several middle to upper tier schools and has, so far, been accepted to all. There was only one school that we were willing to put it all on the line for. Surprisingly to her, not us, she was accepted. However, there were prior discussions as to which would be the best place for her. We all have our lists of what qualifies as important. Some examples of ours were 1) the strength of the program she is interested in 2) strength of the school in other areas (in case she changes her mind) 3)location (she wanted out of Fl) 4) future help with career placement.
We will most likely forgo many of the schools who have given her scholarships for the school she/we feel fits her best that happens to be the one that has not given us any help. But that was after visiting many of the schools. The best advice I feel I can give you is if you do visit the school make sure your child sits in on a class. That sealed the deal for my D. She felt prepared to attend the school.
Ultimately, in my opinion, that is the key.

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Nobody needs to have a business major to make a business career. A kid who is interested in data analytics with hope eventually to go into business can major in economics, statistics, or some applied social science field. The main thing is to develop core skills in those courses. Re reference to Nate Silver earlier in this thread, his college major was economics. But he was doing statistical analysis focusing on sports (baseball mainly) from an early age – before college. After graduation, his career path was: consulting firm (KPMG) --> BaseballProspectus (baseball analytics blog) --> FiveThirtyEight (blog on political, election forecasting; sports; etc.).

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From what I’ve seen with my 2 kids, it’s really really good to go to college in an area where what they are studying is valued and thriving … So like for business ,SMU in Dallas should be preferable to a more prestigious college in a location that isn’t a growing hotspot for business.

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Wow, so much advice I can’t possibly address it all.

In broad strokes, rest assured if we opt to cover a college full pay, it will be without touching retirement accounts or jeopardizing our future. It’s not so much a matter of WHAT we have to spend, as much as how smart it is to do so. It’s ingrained.

My father was the first in his family to attend college (geophysical engineering). He did well for our family, but we definitely did not come from old money. We were raised to NOT spend money simply because we COULD, but because it was the best thing for those involved. On the other hand, he always told us, if money can solve it, it’s not a problem. So, this is not really a problem.

I have had a successful career thus far, own a company, investment property and other investments that afford us financial independence if I were to retire today. If I opted to pay in full at the most expensive school, it would be without grudge or expectation of repayment. He is our only child – whatever we do, we only have to do it once. (Or twice at the most, if an employer doesn’t step up for grad school.) So we’re good.

The math expertise recommended by @blossom is definitely something S is considering possibly even as a double major. It’s ALL good advice.

We will visit all contenders before he commits anywhere. And we will NOT wait till April to do so. Just don’t see the necessity to visit single campuses, more than 1,000+ miles away, that he has not yet been accepted to. For one, I don’t want him to fall in love only have his heart broken by their rejection. Or waste time and money on colleges that are falling on his list because of available programs, or other things. Or simply the knowledge that he is now accepted at a school that checks more of his boxes.

He can only attend one school, after all. At a time.

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ShouldBeWorking – I get you. You can afford it. But are those $65,000 schools really worth it?

And ultimately that’s a question that only you can answer. It boils down to…what value do you place on a dollar. And what value do you and your son place on each of these schools.

For my husband and I, we told them that we’d only let them apply to a high sticker school if they were in a marketable major and if we felt that the school might be worth it. So for our EECS kids, we let them put MIT, Stanford, and CMU on the list. For my kid who doesn’t know what she wants to major in but is leaning toward the liberal arts – not so much.

Also, one kid said that he’d rather be the small fish in a big pond than vice versa. He’s also the kid who has always leaned toward the “best” and was willing to pay for it for everything that he gets (shoes, cell phone, laptop, etc.) – even with his own $$ – but he doesn’t buy often and, what he owns, he REALLY takes care of. LOL, the school backpack that he bought in 7th grade lasted almost until he graduated?! So I had a feeling that this was where he would end up when he got admitted to those high sticker schools.

My younger one looks for backpacks that are 2 for $10 (and ends up with a broken zipper in half a year). She’s already shooting for a NMF scholarship school. She wants the deal.

So my kids have already started to develop their own individual sense of dollar utility/price elasticity mindsets (I think that’s the right term – been awhile since I took Econ 101).

So have we as parents. While we might be able to swing it, we don’t want to – unless there’s a good reason to. It’s up to them to justify the higher sticker price to us.

Lastly, for my kid in the high sticker price school – we cost shared the difference. So he knew from day 1 that he’d need to – work/take out loans/live on ramen when he got out of school until he finished paying us back – if he really wanted it that badly. Turns out that we made the right choice. So far, he’s been able to make enough in his summer internships and other jobs to actually be able to pay his portion IN ADVANCE! So he’ll probably graduate with no debt – having gotten to have his cake and eat it too – win-win.

My second guy applied to the same schools as my first, but he’s already told me that he’s debt averse…so he’ll be looking very carefully at the financial packages. Whereas my first guy was all in from the get go and figured that he would make it work somehow (and has).

So my answer doesn’t exactly answer your question, except to say that it’s a value question and we each place different values on different schools. And, as you can see, each of our kids probably place a different value on them as well. For us, it has helped to pass on some of that financial responsibility so that each kid has some $$ skin in the game. That is helping them to look at the value proposition very realistically.

Oh, one more thing. My first guy initially said that “any” school that was tops in his major would be fine.Then we started visiting schools – nope, that one’s too small, sorry too quiet, oops too rural, no place to run (track athlete). In the end, we discovered that he actually had a LOT of distinct preferences…he just never realized it until he started to see and feel the differences on a wide variety of campuses. So now I’m a HUGE proponent of visiting – there really is no substitute for experiencing being on campus for themselves.

Okay, sorry for the novel.

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I sympathize with not wanting to visit and have him fall in love. I told DS he didn’t need to visit Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton. If he got in, he was gonna go there. The next tier down is where we focused. Schools like UChicago, Duke, CMU, and a few others in that league. We did travel to a few of those and it was worth it. He did fall in love, and fortunately got accepted to one. Those schools are lottery tickets too but the odds were a little better and it seemed more practical than doing a bunch of Ivy tours with an unhooked white kid with a 5% chance.

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Congratulations on all your son’s acceptances - and my sympathy as well. Sometimes, you actually do want rejections to winnow the choices down to a manageable number. This would be the time to schedule trips to the schools he thinks he wants to attend. I’d order the list of accepted schools and see which schools he would NOT want to attend, now that he’s been accepted to XYZ (e.g., Notre Dame or SMU) school. Visit the top three or four accepted schools now. If he says he can’t decide, tell him he may be visiting a lot of schools in a short period of time, can he do that? Usually when kids look at their schedule and see all the things they still have / want to do in the school year, they realize they have to do some serious thinking. This is one reason why stress levels actually increase for successful applicants - too much to do in a short period of time.

I can’t speak to whether or not it’s worth spending $70,000+ a year for any school. That’s up to you and your family to decide. In my family - my siblings said “yes” and I said “ah, I don’t have $70,000 but if I did, probably.” I definitely would NOT drop Duke just because it lacks an undergraduate business program. That seems very short-sighted. Often what you study in undergrad and what you end up doing need not be directly linked; nor is life linear.

72

It’s quite possible to visit Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton and find out that you don’t like it.

There’s someone who posts here regularly – and I apologize for forgetting the name – whose kid chose CMU over Harvard because it was a better fit. It happens. Can a kid really make an informed choice if he’s not allowed to visit the most selective schools that accept him? Or is it that you would not permit your son to choose UChicago/Duke/CMU over Stanford/Harvard/Princeton?

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Not the big guns, but many very good schools do consider demonstrated interest, so a visit or an overnight could tip him into acceptance with $$. And as many of us have experienced, often a school that you think they will like, or love, they HATE when they visit. For DS#1, he’d always talked about one particular school. He thought it was where he wanted to go. Looked perfect on paper. But when he visited, toured the labs, sat in on a class, visited frats and dorms, he said “they are more interested in their grad students. This is for grad school, not undergrad.” And off it came from his list. Did not even apply. He also almost did a “driveby” at one school I thought he’d love. He hated it. He suffered through the day and couldn’t wait to leave. Did not apply. So there can be good reasons to visit before an acceptance, especially if time and finances allow.

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@Marian, definitely true. My D2 did not care for Stanford when she visited. You can’t really know without boots on the ground.

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On the other hand, the visit is only one data point, and the student should consider other things as well.

My daughter loved Columbia when she visited. But after further reflection, she decided that her dislike of the Core Curriculum was a dealbreaker. She didn’t even apply.

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"told DS he didn’t need to visit Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton. If he got in, he was gonna go there. The next tier down is where we focused. Schools like UChicago, Duke, CMU, and a few others in that league. "

Rolling eyes that this is a “tier down.” Same tier.

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That is @mathmom, @Marian

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It’s funny because we did visit a number of the lottery schools and both my kids who are VERY different took a strong dislike to Princeton which was among the schools I thought they would like the most. 1 hated Yale and the other felt uncomfortable in New Haven. Neither wanted to visit Harvard even though we visited other schools in Boston. Both loved Stanford, UChicago, CMU, Penn, Columbia, MIT, and the Claremont Colleges (different ones for each). Plenty of kids do turn down the lottery schools for various reasons. Each kid will apply to a few and see what happens but only the ones they really liked and no pressure if they get in and don’t want to go for whatever reason. @Marian that researching what you actually would be taking at these schools is vitally important. At one school where they have generous AP credits my STEM kid would have nothing STEM left except his major classes and with an extensive core he would have 2 years of classes that are not typically his favorites. No matter how neat the school seemed to him it wasn’t worth not taking classes he was interested in for 2 years.

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Is he a NMF? If so, then IF he is accepted at USC, [ and with his stats he has a very good chance of acceptance] then he would be awarded a 1/2 Tuition scholarship if he decides to go there and notifies NMSF that USC is his first choice. .

DS was in a very similar situation 10 years ago- Only child, hi stats, and was eventually admitted to all the schools he applied to- save one- Stanford. He was fortunate enough to win a full tuition scholarship at USC .
He made the decision to follow the $$ and went to USC, because he and we knew Grad school was in his future. At the time I knew little of how good USC ws becoming, but going there was a great experience for him and the contacts he has made and the first class profs there were key to writing great LOR’s for his grad school applications.
So my rec is if he does NOT get into Stanford, and is accepted at USC, he should strongly consider going there.
USC is NOT the school it once was, only a few decades ago.

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In our case we “followed the money.” My son went to a very good school, but not his dream school. We simply couldn’t justify cost of dream school.