Course Offerings | Office of the Registrar shows economics courses. Perhaps it is no surprise that the upper level elective with the largest enrollment is ECO 362 “Financial Investments”.
Still, Princeton CS courses in the low hundreds are smaller than the ones at Stanford and Harvard, which can get into the high hundreds (like 700).
I am talking about my son’s personal experience.
The CS major has an enrollment of 200. Obviously all 200 kids don’t take the same class. They also split up based in their interests. So the larger classes tend to be 50-60.
I have access to my billing account, and I can see my cost of attendance. The $68k figure is only for those that choose the absolute most “lavish” dorm option, which costs in some cases $10k/year more than the basic option that most freshmen are assigned.
Plus, something many many students don’t know is that UCLA is generous with merit aid that you apply for AFTER you accept your offer of admission.
Without looking back at my cc records, I think it was about $30 in the summer of 2019 when I signed up. It might have been slightly less, but I’m almost certain it was not more. Of course, the price may have changed since then.
Rankings aside, I found the extra layer of info helpful. Admittedly, a lot of it is information that might have been available at various other places, but it was helpful to have everything in one place and easily manipulated.
IIRC, one feature I especially liked was the ability to compare starting salaries by major. I know not everyone considers salary information important in deciding if the college experience/education was worthwhile, but it was one of several factors that carried significant weight in our calculations. And it was made clear that for the colleges on S20’s list, the salary didn’t fluctuate much whether the school was USNRW #28, #77, #120 or #190, or whether it was a “National Uni” or a LAC. There were some schools that were noticeably lower than the norm and I made note of those - and there were very few schools that were noticeably higher than the norm, and we likewise noted those as well.
But overall, it was useful to us to be able to compare many features of the schools/campuses/class size/etc. When my son was very into caring about one school’s rank versus another school’s lower rank, it helped him understand there was little actual difference between a school ranked in the 20s and another ranked in the 160s. Except for the overall USNWR rank and maybe a few points on the SAT/ACT, the differences in virtually ever other comparison point was negligible or sometimes in favor of the lower ranked institution.
Most of what you describe my older kids experienced at their highly ranked low enrollment LAC’s too. Freshman enrollment at Bowdoin was a mess. Final step was telling students not lucky enough to get classes to go from professor to professor to beg to get an exception to be enrolled in their classes and that step wasn’t reached until the first day of class. Of course the profs all started assigning work from the readings day one despite the Freshman not being able to know which books to order online (no on campus academic bookstore) until classes started, then scrambling to the library to compete for the few copies there.
So to clarify your first post about the UC’s, all you are apparently saying is that if your student has the chance to go to the top ranked, best endowed school per student, then the UC’s are not a good deal for OOS students, not that they are a bad option for the vast majority of students without that unique opportunity?
UCs are difficult to go to in CS. I mean this seriously. We’ve had extensive conversations with friends who were trying hard to sell us on the idea – they actually went to UCB. It is very hard to justify. Nominally UCB was on my son’s list at #8 or something, but he wouldn’t have gone there if it came to that. He would have picked many many other private schools over that. Indeed he was in love with the UT Austin Turing program over UCB. The Turing program effectively functioned like a private school within a public school. I am not entirely sure he would have picked UCB over Rutgers Honors – maybe he would have. UCB is just an ocean. It is a completely impersonal experience. He said to me at the time – “I guess I am supposed to pick UCB over Brown right? Maybe I will. I don’t know.”
I think the UCs are not good value for the majority of OOS students, not just those who have Princeton or equivalent acceptances. They’re definitely great schools, and good value for in-state but I wouldn’t be able to justify the cost vs experience for OOS students. Most will have better local or regional options, especially for CS.
There are excellent honors programs at other public schools that can provide a small school experience. The UT Austin Turin program @neela1 mentioned and the living learning honors program at UMD are two very good examples but there are others.
I heard UIUC Honors for CS is very good. My son’s friend went there.
To be fair I have a friend’s kid that is doing Chemistry at UCB, and is somewhat happy. Those majors are less pressured for resources. By the time you get to senior year, in specialized sub fields, class sizes apparently drop to 50 or so.
Well my kids go to a school in the 30s versus 15-23 range because of $. I do not expect my kids to have a different educational or career outcome because of these choices but they will come out of college with 0 debt.
It feels to me like we have fallen down a rabbit hole of “prestige” and are encouraging our kids to mortgage their (and our) futures to it.
I think this is the most important think. Ranking schools depended completely on the student. Yet ranking systems assume ALL student’s interests are aligned. They aren’t.
Our son had the record to be competitive at any school. Caltech and MIT might as well have been ranked 300th for him. He had zero interest in that type of experience. Ditto Cal. Why pay an exorbitant amount for giant lectures and lots of exposure to TAs.
He ended up looking mainly at schools not even ranked in the USNWR main ranking. The schools that offered more of what he was looking for were the ones that don’t offer PhDs. They put all their resources towards undergrads.
I guess they all have these problems. I assumed that some of the struggles I saw at UCLA
were due to an enormous university operating on a public school budget. Thanks for letting me know!
Actually, the top schools are renowned for being great value, grads have amongst lowest debt, have excellent financial aid, etc…, so financially it always comes down to individual circumstances. They also have very high 4 year graduation rates relative to the average, which is very important. Graduating in 5 years adds expense, but more importantly is a year without income and a year behind ones peers in the pecking order.
Sometimes an OOS public school ends up being less expensive than the in-state public school. Very often an OOS private school is less expensive than an OOS public school.
There are really 3 (not counting CC) price tiers in the higher education system. Instate public, OOS public, and private. For people in states with good colleges, it is really hard to justify OOS public.
And the real unfortunate thing is that most privates cost mostly the same price – within 10k/yr, while there are large differences in quality.
The choice between instate public and a private will happen at some sharp cutoff on ranking/prestige.
Prestige is a thing that is real because it gives access to opportunities that are less available from lesser prestige places. If you are outside the prestige loop you don’t know what you don’t know in terms of opportunities that you are missing. Is it worth the difference between the tuition for instate public vs private? This is hard to say, and varies by person. In lucrative majors, it is easy to justify the private above a certain threshold.
The various UC’s have special programs comparable to honors too (and sometimes labeled honors) with small capped enrollment. UCSB for example has the College of Creative Studies. At UCLA I was in a program that had typical class sizes under 20 once you got past the general ed survey sources (which are big at many schools). And on top of that I was in the Honors program which also had small, personal seminars and research opportunities as an undergrad.
I don’t think it’s easy to generalize the UC’s as a good or bad option. They are cost competitive (except versus someone’s in-state public option but that’s true of every school), their class sizes are duplicated at other schools, public and private, and they have such a varied number of programs and majors with different circumstances that it really depends what you’re interested in and which UC you choose. So basically like every other school — good for some things, not for others.
CS is a special case which is a mess at many schools, public and private, big and small, because demand vastly out paces teaching resources right now. But not everyone is, or seeks to be, a CS major.
I agree about the prestige trap. And where you go to college has little to do with professional outcomes. Of course it can open certain doors. But a serious hustle can open the heaviest of doors.
And I think learning to hustle is something that a huge university teaches its students by default. No one holds your hand and guides you along the gilded path of enlightenment in a class of 1000 kids. You’re gonna get there on your own, and it’s gonna be hard sometimes. But I’d like to think the experience prepares you for life.