I am convinced “holistic” has been adopted by everyone everywhere to cover for biases.
You can get a Masters Degree in a STEM discipline without paying tuition? PhD has been that way for some time now, but is this also true for a Masters degree?
Is it your opinion that an advanced degree in applied math, statistics, computational math, biochemistry and engineering isn’t worth it?
At MIT, the median starting salary in 2017 for engineers with a bachelor’s degree was $85K. Students with Master’s in Engineering earned a median salary of $115K. That’s a big difference. Same again in math and the natural sciences. The guys I went to school with who earned a STEM degree and then an MBA are all highly successful. They’ve had access to numerous opportunities throughout their careers. The brand of your grad school is umpteen times more important than that of your undergrad.
At highly selective schools merit aid isn’t so much about rewarding talent and hard work as it is a tool to help shape a class. In that sense, there is a “holistic” nature to it. First generation students, URM, children of immigrants from the “right” countries, or those from underrepresented states or rural areas have an advantage because they provide some cultural texture to the campus population, but that doesn’t mean there is no merit in the equation. It requires merit to just get admitted or even be seriously considered for admission. That’s why so many elite private schools have done away with large merit scholarships. Many of those that still exist do so only thanks to legally binding agreements dating to when the endowment was created.
Unfortunately, with the prevalence of test prep courses and the practice super scoring there are hundreds if not thousands of kids with perfect test scores and grades. That gets you a lottery ticket. I think 10 or 11 kids in my son’s class got a 36 composite (not superscored), including a few who got straight 36’s. About two dozen are NMF and most of them have 4.0 UW GPAs and 4.7 or better weighted with at least 9 AP classes. Many are highly accomplished musicians, varsity athletes, science fair winners, speech and debate champions, or heavily involved in community activities, etc. That’s a lot of talent from a single public high school you’ve never heard of. They would be good fits at pretty much any school in the country. How many of them do you think would or should get into Vandy? Are they not all deserving? I can assure you Vandy won’t take them all. Parsing these things out isn’t easy for admissions and scholarship committees so the difference between “winning and losing” can often look trivial despite their best efforts.
TL;DR version - Chin up. You’re in excellent company.
My industry highly values a STEM education. A master’s degree in the natural sciences is table stakes. A PhD is necessary if you want to climb the ladder or conduct research. The best educated and most competent are aggressively pursued and compensated generously. Just like every other industry. Where (and with whom) you did your graduate work is very important. Undergrad, not so much.
If you have a fixed amount of money to spend on your college education, the focus should be on graduate school. The undergrad degree just doesn’t have the value it did years ago. The wise student will plan on attending grad school because it will create value for them throughout their life. Spend your money on the grad brand, not the undergrad.
I think your previous two posts (#221 and #224) may explain this. Your son didn’t receive merit scholarships at Pitt or Purdue because of a form of yield protection - i.e. they assume (with some degree of certainty) a student like him isn’t going to attend regardless of aid and that is a scholarship they don’t want to waste.
Yes, there are some funded masters programs, particularly at MIT, and many other PhD programs award masters mid-way.
It really is a drastically different landscape between undergrad and grad, so if a school is not funding your STEM graduate degree, it is best to either find a different graduate school (as you will not receive top opportunities at a graduate school that doesn’t recruit you with funding) or reassess the rationale for seeking additional degree.
I am not as familiar with the fields you listed, but in CS (the field that DS is interested in), a BS from MIT is limiting neither opportunities nor compensation relative to a MS. And if one is interested in an industry career, the opportunity cost of even fully funded Masters can be very high for a highly sought-after software developer.
Son is currently interested in pursuing a career in academia, but in deciding to fund his MIT undergrad rather than taking a full tuition scholarship elsewhere we are assuming no graduate education costs regardless of what his post-graduation plans are.
If it was yield protection, the logic dictates he would either get rejected, or, once admitted, get aggressively recruited to increase the chances he matriculates.
A scholarship not taken costs the institution precisely zero.
Do people in your industry often pursue an unfunded PhD?
I mean, this debate is as old as the hills, and there is no one right or wrong answer.
There will always be examples of students doing amazing things after all sorts of undergraduate institutions. And I will be first to say that the student is the main ingredient in their own success. I have stories of my own that I made sure our kids internalize growing up.
Yet… here we all are, on the Vandy board. So…
First, I should clarify that when I said a form of yield protection what I meant was not so much an effort to protect admission yield but the application of that same logic applied to financial aid. Second, admission and scholarship decisions are usually independent events so the discrimination criteria aren’t necessarily going to line up between those committees. It costs a large state school nothing to admit a few dozen high achieving students, but a scholarship not taken most certainly has an opportunity cost if it cannot be reassigned to another applicant in the class (an assumption on my part).
Colleges should be transparent about their criteria and every public and private school counselor and students should know what those criteria is. They are welcome to say that URM or immigrants from certain places students has X% lower criteria for admittance and merit scholarship. They can define what that merit means so that certain students would not bother applying it if they don’t meet those criteria. GPA’s are very local to school. Put all brilliant student in the same school and ask them to take most rigorous courses, some of their GPA will go down. They would perhaps all would be getting 4.0 UW in certain different schools where it is less competitive. That’s why national testing like AP’s, SAT/ACT subject test helps to normalize. It is not as if standard testing do not require preparation effort. Bottom line is colleges should be transparent and list out objective criteria. This is all everyone is asking for otherwise what is going on under the hood nobody really knows. No wonder, the colleges admission scandal surfaced last year.
Even though we can not complain about DS’s admission results, I am a firm believer in the approach you describe, and we have discussed it frequently in our family.
The opaque holistic admissions process dominant today in the US came from a very shameful page in the country’s history.
“To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is at the same time straightforward and effective, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admissions authorities.” (Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933)
Yes, for medical schools GPA+MCAT triumphs school prestige. My S gave up Penn and JHU BME for Vandy CV and doing great. However get GPA is not easy at Vandy, tougher than Harvard/Stanford but easier than MIT/JHU.
@TheVulcan - If you’re paying for your PhD, you’re doing it wrong. We have paid for employees to pursue their masters, but that is very rare and would only happen after at least two years of service. We normally hire students already with an advanced degree and who have worked with profs/programs we are familiar with. Most kids pay for their masters degree unless they possess stellar research methodology skills where someone with access to lots of funding wants that student working with him/her.
Not too long ago, the financial industry, especially the I-Banks, would pay to send their top recruits to a MBA program provided they agreed to return to the company for a specified amount of time. I don’t think that is nearly as common today for a host of reasons. But the fact remains, unless you have unlimited funds to attend school, you are much better off using those resources to attend a top grad school than an elite undergrad. You will earn more with that advanced degree and you will have many more opportunities.
My point exactly.
And your chance of possessing those stellar skills and getting funded masters might be better after MIT, particularly because MIT’s funded MEng program is limited to their own EECS graduates.
The calculus may be different if one intends to go PhD route.
It simply is not as cut and dry as “undergrad does not matter”.
You pays you money and you takes your choice.
Okay- BUT when do we think they’ll release RD decisions!!?? Now that we’re going to be social distancing and schooling at home it’s really hard to wait!!
The talk of the Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholarship has died off… did everyone who applied hear one way or the other? My son never got an email either way, so I’m curious if anyone else is in the same boat. Checked spam folders too. I’m guessing it’s a “no.”
We got our “no” email. It couldn’t hurt to reach out to them and let them know that you never got an email from them, and see what the status is.
heard a rumor that RD decisions might come out today… can’t be true, right??
That would be amazing, but considerably earlier than previous years…2 weeks earlier, I think. That said, if they are ready to release, they may want to do it earlier, since a lot of schools are shutting down.
We got the “no” email for CV scholarship.