<p>Is it worth going $15,000-$20,000 in debt for a great undergraduate education if you plan on going to graduate school? </p>
<p>I would like to think that my education is a priceless investment and that undergrad is very important in building a strong engineering foundation. But because of how things are going in the economy it seems like more and more students are choosing to go to public state schools for undergrad rather than their top-choice schools. </p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>It’s a marginal benefit analysis. If your options are Stanford and Virginia Tech, $20,000 is worth it for the better program. If your options are Stanford or Berkeley, it may not be worth all that much extra to go to Stanford.</p>
<p>Oh hell no.</p>
<p>Not really worth it if you’re going to grad school. Of course it does depend on the schools you’re talking about but as long as you’ve got some name recognition you can get into a good grad school if you work hard as an undergrad.</p>
<p>By the way, I think that’s the third time I’ve seen VT’s engineering mentioned negatively on here. No, we’re not Stanford but for Engineering grad school/job placement I’d be pretty surprised if there were that far a divide between the two, depending a bit on which discipline of engineering you were interested in. I’m not trying to take it personally but I’m not sure why you’d use(from what I was able to find) a top 20 program as your example.</p>
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<p>I used them because they’re an example of a moderately easy to get into state school with a huge gap from Stanford (and it is a huge gap, honestly, and I wouldn’t just go by the USNews rankings).</p>
<p>In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best example because a Virginia resident that gets into Stanford probably also gets into UVA, which actually is a pretty close in quality with Stanford.</p>
<p>So maybe I should have said: If your choice is between VT and Stanford, then pay it. If your choice is between UVA and Stanford, don’t pay it. Alternatively, I could have continued the California argument: If your choice is between Stanford and Cal State LA, pay it. If it’s between Berkeley and Stanford, don’t. </p>
<p>Is that better?</p>
<p>When comparing two good schools, are you thinking about one being 15-20k higher than the other? That’s what I understand. </p>
<p>What about comparing two schools like Georgia Tech and UIUC when they are equally expensive? Think it’s still worth it for undergrad?</p>
<p>What would be your lower cost alternative?</p>
<p>I would guess that most students will graduate with Stafford loans or similar regardless of their major or college, and at or near the maximum allowable of ~$25K.</p>
<p>I graduated with around $18k in loans and went straight into graduate school and haven’t found it to be a problem whatsoever. My undergrad school was a perfect fit, I loved the program, I made some fantastic friends, and the opportunities I got were well worth it. I actually paid off the $5k in unsubsidized loans I had by working at my undergrad school after graduating early but before starting grad school. Right now the rest is being deferred, and, really, having $13k in loans with an engineering PhD isn’t a huge concern.</p>
<p>Well I don’t have a lower cost alternative because I haven’t received my financial aid packages yet. I’ve been accepted to some top schools, both private and public, as a transfer student and am trying to decide whether to go to the more expensive private schools(WPI, Rose-Hulman) with more undergrad focus, or to just go directly to the bigger schools with great reputation/grad school(UIUC, GTech) but with larger classes. Despite tuition being about 10k less for the public schools, they would still be more expensive because less financial aid is offered. I am basing this on average statistics so nothing is certain.</p>
<p>"having $13k in loans with an engineering PhD isn’t a huge concern. "
i see that most engineering students dont take the time value of money and opportunity cost into account when they do calculations</p>