<p>@dividerofzero
Your original comment indeed seemed strange; however, according to net price calculators with an EFC of 0, Duke stands at the same level as Notre Dame, Haverford, Davidson, Bowdoin, and Amherst. Not sure how veridic this data is since everything is theoretical, of course.
If anything, the best example for student debt is NYU. You could also consider Stevens, Rose-Human, and other privates that are awful when it comes to financial aid, although the popularity of engineering at these schools lowers the impact of students’ debts.</p>
<p>@Fredjan Or GWU. But I think people graduating from Duke having debt issues is a more striking example since Duke is ridiculously reputable. In any case, I’m no expert on college finances but just grew a little familiar with the debt issues in the just-below-Ivy tier since finances factored heavily in my decision.</p>
<p>@dividerofzero
Ah, forgot about GWU… stingiest school in the nation, and one time they even forgot to specify that Stafford “awards” were in fact LOANS!
In your case, top ivies are able to give financial aid even to families with six-digit incomes. Below-ivy-tier can’t be that generous.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Interestingly, before the full merger, PINYU had much better financial aid than NYU.</p>
<p>Pennsylvania public schools are relatively expensive with poor financial aid even for their in-state students.</p>
<p>dividerofzero, it’s really unfair for you to be casting aspersions on Duke based on anecdotal evidence. Can you provide links to any credible articles which state that Duke graduates are more indebted on average than people who attended Cornell, Brown, Penn or Dartmouth?
I am willing to wager that you cannot. </p>
<p>Daughter was rejected by Northwestern, accepted by UChicago. Northwestern was her target. Ended up in Hyde Park. Loves it.</p>
<p>“One of my friends (who is in her 30s) said her parents would sell their home to pay for her to go to Stanford if she could get in.”</p>
<p>Getting into Stanford and not going because your family’s money is tied up in real estate is like winning the lottery and not claiming your prize.</p>
<p>Um, not getting into NW but getting into UChicago happens often. That’s really not “unlikely” because both schools are incredibly difficult to get into.</p>
<p>Often is a stretch. And we were quite surprised.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus
Sorry, meant NYU as a whole (not necessarily the engineering division). The popularity of arts majors combined with the city’s extreme living expenses and poor institutional financial aid all lead to a recipe for disaster.</p>
<p>I seriously don’t understand what’s so surprising about that. It makes me laugh when people get denied by, say, Bowdoin but get into Stanford and are just unable to process the fact that both are highly selective schools. Neither was likely to begin with.</p>
<p>There are some colleges that take their essays very seriously. A high stats student could submit essays that were quickly thrown together, and find themselves rejected. In effect, the attention paid by an applicant to their customized essay questions may be used to gauge the level of interest by the applicant. Also, when an admissions officer is comparing two students with similar stats, it is natural to want to admit the student who comes across as more interesting, motivated and likeable in their essays.</p>
<p>There are other very large public universities where admissions are mainly driven by a formula of GPA and standardized test scores, and their admissions are extremely predictable. In the recent past, Penn State has even published a diagram of GPAs and various SAT scores that shows the chances for an applicant. That chart was mainly intended to be used by high school guidance counselors.</p>
<p>As mentioned earlier, some other public universities mainly emphasize high school class rank (such as being in the top 10%). Some of those policies were driven by the elimination of formal affirmative action programs. The 10% rule allows students who are at the top of largely-minority city or rural public high schools to be admitted, even though their average test scores may be lower than competing students from suburban or private high schools. </p>
<p>Once a college’s admission rate falls below 25%, it becomes unpredictable, because they have so many highly qualified students to choose from. </p>
<p>There are many colleges with similar admission standards where one college accepts a student while the other college denies them, and visa versa. For instance, that happens frequently with William and Mary vs. UVa.</p>
<p>@Misanthrope1 Alright; I actually had a free hour today to play around with the data. Before anyone views it, a few disclaimers and clarifications:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>My intent is not to persuade people to avoid schools in what I consider the “Duke-tier.” These schools are excellent and definitely worth attending. As for why “Duke” popped into my head- it’s the only school in that mental classification that I was going to apply to.</p></li>
<li><p>I neither support nor oppose the “brands” labeled in the spreadsheet. I merely classified schools as “HYPMS,” “Ivy,” “Magnolia” (Southern Ivy), “Public Ivy,” “Public Ivy OOS” (out-of-state), and “Unbranded” because I was interested in testing the validity and homogeneity of these common brands (and comparing them to schools I consider “unbranded”). I believe this adds an additional layer to the data, especially in cases where these brand categories are either right next to each other or spread out over the entire spreadsheet.</p></li>
<li><p>These data come from myriad sources (listed in the second sheet) and I do not claim any of them to be valid; while I hope that they’re methodologically consistent enough with one another for me to use them in conjunction, I didn’t have the time to read through the methodologies in their entirety. I’m very open to challenges here.</p></li>
<li><p>Once again, I don’t have anything against Duke.</p></li>
<li><p>These data should not be used to make individual college/financial decisions; keep in mind that averages are misleading and one’s own situation could make for a completely different set of scenarios than that represented in the spreadsheet.</p></li>
<li><p>Starting salary comparisons can be misleading; some schools tend to send more kids (including their best and brightest) to grad school, skewing the starting salary data downward- you can see this effect in their sudden growth when it comes to mid-career salary. Grad school obviously makes a huge difference, so this data should not be used to make individual decisions about colleges.</p></li>
<li><p>All comparisons incorporating salaries will get confusing; don’t use them on an individual level. I wasn’t able to factor in issues like the glass ceiling (which seems to have disadvantaged Emory a little bit) due to lack of data and time.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Alright, so an explanation of what I did:</p>
<p>I went through the top 27 National Universities as per the USNWR ranking (just needed a group to compare Duke to) and found information about starting salary, mid-career salary, return-on-investment, annual cost of attendance, financial aid, endowment-per-student, and debt for each college. I attempted to analyze these through a number of methods, represented as column categories in the spreadsheet:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>“Average Effective CoA” is the annual cost of attendance minus effective average financial aid (the average need-based scholarship/grant package multiplied by the portion of people receiving financial aid). This is supposed to represent (on average) the “real cost” of attending a college, based on the assumption that the stated cost of attendance doesn’t accurately represent what the average student pays every year.</p></li>
<li><p>“Adjusted Averaged Student Debt” is something similar- the portion of students who take loans multiplied by the average debt per borrower; the intent is to spread the average debt throughout the entire student population- this is also a reason why these data aren’t useful for making individual decisions. </p></li>
<li><p>“Years to Pay” data are based on starting or mid-career salaries and the effective cost of attendance (per year) or the adjusted average debt. They’re obviously hypothetical (as they assume people don’t have other expenses) and are intended for the purposes of visualization and comparison; it wouldn’t be fair to just say a school has on average $X in student debt without contextualizing that amount in terms of the student’s starting salary. In other words, a starting salary of $200k in exchange for $20k debt is probably a much better deal than a starting salary of $50k in exchange for $15k debt; these values are based on such assumptions and I believe they’re the most useful methods for determining how “screwed over” a college’s graduates are- personally, I think “Years to Pay Debt (S)” (how long it would take an average student to pay their debt- earning their starting salary- if they ignored all other expenses) is the most valid means of comparison here because debts are the best measure of how much of a college’s cost of attendance was outside a student population’s reach and starting salaries are probably the best measure of early earnings. However, keep in mind that some schools have their starting salaries skewed downward because their smartest graduates tend to go on to graduate school.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>With that said, the spreadsheet: <a href=“Paranoia is in bloom - Google Sheets”>Paranoia is in bloom - Google Sheets;
<p>My analysis seems to confirm that Duke (Magnolias are color-coded red) is not quite in the same financial category as HYPMS (color-coded as yellow); the endowment per student is also lower at Duke than it is at the HYPMS schools. There’s interesting data involving Caltech, Rice, Vanderbilt, and MIT- which tend to be a little bit removed from the rest of their brand category. It should also be noted that, among private schools, HYPMS have the lowest Average Effective Cost of Attendance- along with Rice and Caltech (both of which should be noted for their small student populations).</p>
<p>I didn’t really have much time to look at this, so I’ll revisit it later, but here’s the Duke vs. HYPMS comparison in a few categories (keep in mind that I was never calling for comparisons between Duke and Cornell/Brown/Dartmouth so I won’t be focusing on that). For rankings, lower is always better:</p>
<p>AVERAGE EFFECTIVE COST OF ATTENDANCE</p>
<h1>4 Princeton: $28,280</h1>
<h1>5 Harvard: $30,691</h1>
<h1>6 MIT: $33,890</h1>
<h1>7 Yale: $34,968</h1>
<h1>10 Stanford: $37,060</h1>
<h1>17 Duke: $40,372</h1>
<p>ADJUSTED AVERAGE DEBT (an interesting case of MIT being the outlier in HYPMS)</p>
<h1>1 Princeton: $1223.04</h1>
<h1>2 Yale: $2098.99</h1>
<h1>3 Harvard: $3274.50</h1>
<h1>5 Stanford: $4708.25</h1>
<h1>15 MIT: $8525.54</h1>
<h1>10 Duke: $7607.34</h1>
<p>ENDOWMENT/STUDENT:</p>
<h1>1 Princeton: $1,622,013</h1>
<h1>2 Harvard: $1,367,765</h1>
<h1>3 Yale: $1,333,567</h1>
<h1>4 Stanford: $826,950</h1>
<h1>6 MIT: $667,131</h1>
<h1>15 Duke: $276,323</h1>
<p>YEARS TO PAY DEBT (S):</p>
<h1>1 Princeton: 0.022</h1>
<h1>2 Yale: 0.042</h1>
<h1>3 Harvard: 0.059</h1>
<h1>4 Stanford: 0.077</h1>
<h1>8 MIT: 0.124</h1>
<h1>11 Duke: 0.136</h1>
<p>Based on this, this is what I think the “Duke-tier” kind of looks like (obviously open to debate): Duke, Vanderbilt, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Emory, UChicago, Northwestern, Georgetown, USC, UC-Berkeley OOS, UCLA OOS, and UVA OOS</p>
<p>These are definitely some great schools, so please don’t take this as insult or attack. I’m only “singling them out” because they seem to have some cash/FinAid issues.</p>
<p>^ That’s a great analysis, but you’ve definitely got your per-capita endowment figures wrong (they’re all out of date). </p>
<p>@Misanthrope1 Yeah I couldn’t find any lists after 2001. Duke’s per-capita endowment should be well above Columbia’s by now. Fortunately the rest of the analysis doesn’t depend on it. :)</p>
<p>Also, now that I think about, the big gap isn’t really between HYPMS and Duke (especially after those few upsets over MIT and Yale); perhaps Notre Dame could be the poster child of risk here. In any case, financial risk and return-on-investment on an individual basis anyway, so this data’s pretty meaningless outside our little discussion.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to do another one of these tomorrow- I had an idea about determining just how strict a college is when it comes to SAT scores. Thanks for the inspiration.</p>
<p>^ I think we’ve been talking past each other. My intention was never to suggest that Duke is on par with HYPSM. All I was trying to say was that it is definitely capable of holding its own against any other school in the country. By using Duke as an example of a school whose financial aid is not up to HYPSM standards, you were inadvertently reinforcing the notion that all Ivy League schools are superior to non-Ivies (which is a notion that has absolutely no factual basis). Perhaps you could have said schools like Duke, Penn and Cornell or Duke, Chicago and Dartmouth… :)</p>
<p>@dividerofzero – kind of off topic --but if you are using data from Payscale.com for salary samples-- you might want to take a look at their methodology:
<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/methodology”>http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/methodology</a></p>
<p>Keep in mind that their numbers are medians, not averages – so even if accurate, those numbers mean that half of all grads will earn less. And by “starting” salary, they mean figures they have collected for anyone within 5 years of graduation.</p>
<p>Their methodology also skews the sample upward, because they only count data from survey respondents who have full time employment. So college grads who are under-employed working part-time, or who are self-employed, or doing project work on a contract basis – aren’t counted. </p>
<p>I understand the point of the exercise you were doing and certainly can see why you might want to use those numbers as a comparative metric – and certainly appreciate your taking the time to undertake that task and to share it. </p>
<p>I just would hate to see any student using those numbers as some sort of baseline expectation that they use to justify taking out higher loans. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that when you compare the student average debt figures, that doesn’t include loans that parents take or outside private loans. Unfortunately on CC we are always reading about kids whose parents take on large PLUS loans with the expectation that the kid will take over the loans upon graduation. </p>
<p>So, the figure for Duke of $55,600 - means that of the students who secure full time employment after graduation, more than half will be earning under $55.6K. (That’s assuming that most of the uncounted non-full time employees are probably earning less). Unfortunately I think that all too many students and parents will read the number to mean that if they attend Duke, they can reasonably expect to land a job paying $55.6K or more immediately upon graduation. </p>
<p>Keep in mind the “Bill Gates effect” as well – A lot of people will tell you that the ‘average salary’ figure can be extremely skewed if, for example, a select few of your grads go off to Silicon Valley to make big bucks, or to Wall Street, etc. It doesn’t mean that your English degree from Harvard or Stanford is going to guarantee you the average salary – since the average is arriving at by pooling the extremely high salaries as well as the regular salaries and the low ones. </p>
<p>I think that the average salary, as well as the median salary figures are probably also really off-base when your student body might include a lot of kids that are going to walk into jobs in family businesses where they will likely be overpaid, including wealthy foreigners.</p>
<p>It’s also possible that the lower end of the scale in terms of both average and median salaries for recent graduates is skewed by the fact that good undergrad schools send a lot of kids to good grad schools, where a good student stipend might be between 20-30,000 a year. (If one in three students thus goes to grad school, joins the Peace Corps, does Teach for America, then that would significantly alter your data).</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s really any clear way to look at this data and be able to answer the question “How much more money will I make if I go here rather than there?” unfortunately. </p>
<p>Any degree from Harvard or Stanford, with a good GPA, can lead to a high paying job in finance. But you have to sell your soul.</p>
<p>Also, most Payscale reports do not account for the mix of majors chosen by students at various schools. Many of the top schools in Payscale lists are heavy with engineering and CS majors, and many of the others are favored recruiting grounds for Wall Street and elite consulting companies.</p>