Vanderbilt vs. Duke vs. Penn

<p>Thank you folks. Your personal experiences help a lot. @oliver007 Appreciate your input given that you have been to both Vandy and Duke. The cost of attendance difference between Vandy and Duke is about $44K/year and the increase will grow yearly given that she has a Vandy Chancellor’s scholarship and Duke’s avg tuition increases of 4%. @4beardolls - what other school is DS considering.</p>

<p>I am unable to debate Duke vs Vandy on prestige/reputation/intellectualism/location etc but if you are trying to be a doctor does it even make sense to sink money for an undergrad school ( similar to Vandy ) when it can be used for medical school. Do people in medical profession discuss reputations of the undergrad schools they went to ?</p>

<p>It is my opinion that med schools would have a greater respect for a student who accepted 44 plus grand a year tuition at a place where premed is taught magnificently (as it is at Vanderbilt)-- in order to be able to underwrite to any med school he/she desired with strong ability to pay off the debt that accumulates each semester in med school. For instance, when she applies to Duke Medical School among others, she can state she had a hard time turning down that admission but embraced her scholarship at Vanderbilt with gratitude, but would like to have her second time around life at Duke.<br>
When you are already recipient of a rare merit scholarship, you have a bit of a leg up on applications for other opportunities through-out your four years and beyond. Confidence in oneself, the ability to see the long view of a medical education and the ability to weigh the welfare of one’s family… if their resources are finite…is one way to measure character. I think that med schools seek MCAT scores plus people of strong character and grit.<br>
One thing I enjoyed watching online was the White Coat ceremonies at Duke Med, Wash U Med, and at Vandy Med where our sons have friends now. Parents are invited, and since a picture/video says a thousand words, these are the sorts of images that might help you visualize re keeping “your eyes on the prize”. Look at where honor graduates of Vanderbilt end up at med schools. And watch this white coat ceremony…skip forward to see each student in a new class at Vanderbilt Med School introduced. Then you and your daughter will have a better idea at how diverse the students are who make it into top medical schools–some from undergrad schools that are not top ranked, but students who have very impressive letters of reference, undergrad research experience, top grades, and top MCATs and evidence of character and vocation.<br>
By the way, the obvious warmth and supportive atmosphere at this ceremony at Vanderbilt Med School is very similar to the undergraduate school.<br>
<a href=“http://mediasite.vanderbilt.edu/Mediasite/Play/473d924c492346b7af672e543ff34d801d”>http://mediasite.vanderbilt.edu/Mediasite/Play/473d924c492346b7af672e543ff34d801d&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>@faline2 “Confidence in oneself, the ability to see the long view of a medical education and the ability to weigh the welfare of one’s family… if their resources are finite…is one way to measure character.”</p>

<p>So well said!</p>

<p>asiandad: I am a doctor. Doctors don’t give a damn where other doctors went to college. It barely matters where one went to Med School after a while. What matters forever is where you do your RESIDENCY/FELLOWSHIP, since that is where your actual practical skills are acquired, and that is where you form permanent alliances with others in the same specialty. If you or your daughter spend more than a nanosecond in making the choice between VU/Chancellor Scholarship and Duke, I am afraid you will deserve the regret that descends upon you when Med school expenses make themselves felt. Do you know that a large number of VU students just plain turn Duke down every year, and here you are vacillating over a ridiculously obvious choice!!! If resources are not unlimited for you, it would, in my opinion, be unconscionable for a child to not gratefully, humbly, and gleefully JUMP on the Vanderbilt offer!!! This really is a ridiculous no-brainer which for some reason is being allowed to rise to the level of a “dilemma” here.</p>

<p>Oliver, you are absolutely right there. I am a PhD and work in academia. I can tell you that the place of undergraduate education really does not mean anything in this part of the world. I am sure only the last place of your education/training matters in the post-undergraduate level. I know there are kids who weigh between a Vandy merit scholarship and HYP. But Vandy Chancellor Scholar and Duke? Give me a break, please. I am sorry but I just do not get asiandad family’s issue.</p>

<p>I am not a doctor. I am not a Phd. I am not even a loving Asian dad. I am only a 54 year old businessman, and here is what I know: $44 grand a year delta for four years is a pile of money especially if you are paying with after tax money. </p>

<p>Have you explained to your child what you have to earn in order to save $44 grand? It is time to introduce your child to an adult world where bites are taken out of your paycheck for taxes, and food, and insurance, and the mortgage and that repair bill for your daughter’s violin bow (come on, admit it, your daughter plays at least one musical instrument). These bites out of the paycheck are only concepts our children hear about on the news. They have no idea that these things are real.</p>

<p>My daughter (a newly minted William & Mary Econ grad) has twice my IQ and a GREAT job and she still thinks driving involves little more than paying for gas. I have done a bad job in this respect because I have some kind of delusional need to keep her as an ignorant child. Dad’s protection was good for her when she was 12. It is bad for her now. I have some catching up to do.</p>

<p>I encourage loving Asian Dad to ask “what if”? There is a saying in my business world: when in doubt, remain flexible. You what to know what flexible is? How about having that $176 grand in your pocket four years from now? Things will change. It is at least 1% possible that she will want to go to grad school for painting in Italy in lieu of medical school. Anything could happen and when it does, I can promise that having that $176,000 will be a good thing.</p>

<p>Duke undergrads seem to perform much better in medical school admissions than Vandy alums. Something to keep in mind…</p>

<p><a href=“http://medadmissions.wustl.edu/HowtoApply/selectionprocess/Pages/WhoChoosesWU.aspx”>http://medadmissions.wustl.edu/HowtoApply/selectionprocess/Pages/WhoChoosesWU.aspx&lt;/a&gt;
Wash U Med
65 Duke grads enrolled since 1998
26 Vanderbilt grads enrolled since 1998</p>

<p><a href=“http://casemed.case.edu/admissions/profile.cfm”>http://casemed.case.edu/admissions/profile.cfm&lt;/a&gt;
Case Western Med 2013 Entering Class
Duke: 7
Vanderbilt: 2</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/som/students/academics/catalog/SOMCat1112.pdf”>http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/som/students/academics/catalog/SOMCat1112.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Hopkins Med Entering 2011
Duke: 17
Vanderbilt: 7</p>

<p>Remember, if you daughter pursues a MD/PhD, then the full cost of her medical education will be covered by the U.S. Federal Government.</p>

<p>^^^ You gotta be kidding! Did you learn this type of “statistical analysis” at Duke?</p>

<p>Both Vanderbilt and Duke are elite universities. There are 3,700 colleges/universities in the US. Only 15 are in the top 20 USNRW and AWR and Vandy and Duke are 2 of those elite 15. If your plan is to become a physician it doesn’t matter where you take organic chemistry. There is zero “premium” for pre-meds in selecting one of these over the other. Medicare and Obamacare will reimburse you the same amount no matter what your student loans look like.
Since Vandy is offering you a scholarship go to Vandy. If Duke offered you a full ride and Vandy would cost you an extra $176K I would recommend you go to Duke.<br>
As for grad/med school I believe about 40% of Vandy students go and 71% are accepted into their first choice. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Why is the education “worth the premium”? Teachers are more knowledgeable? Teachers are more entertaining? Textbooks are better? Library has more books? Something in the water causes students to learn more?</p>

<p>Inquiring minds want to know!</p>

<p>MandarinChang, are you a current Duke student? Tell us, are you paying full Duke tuition and fees freight of $61,404, and did you turn down a full merit tuition worth (176,000 dollars) at a top 20 university? If you are receiving financial need aid at very generous Duke University, your situation has no bearing on the choice of the original poster, who falls into the category of families at private institutions who will get zero need aid and can only compete for rare merit offers. By the way, my Duke graduate has tremendous respect/love for Vanderbilt, his brother’s alma mater. He would think your assessment of the overall inferiority of a Vanderbilt education to be “hilarious.” </p>

<p>looks like mandarinchang needs a cephalo-colonic disengagement. Bizarre and uneducated opinions.</p>

<p>ennisthemenace has successfully disqualified from any serious consideration of his opinions! Pretty shabby quality of “evidence” to support his unsupportable views. Actually quite laughable.</p>

<p>I hope MadarinChang is not a real Dukie and not even a real Madarin. Duke is a noble school and the Chinese are noble people. If rogues like MandarinChang is any part of Duke, that school is really doomed.</p>

<p>I have been a loving dad but not a good dad in explaining the value of $$ to my kids even though I do know the value of money. @thecoldeye @oliver007 @faline2 you guys hit it out of the park. I learnt a good lesson in parenting. Need to work on this for my second kid. btw, I didn’t even have to explain all this to DD, I just showed her this thread and Duke thread. @thecoldeye @oliver007 request you guys to post more on CC ( like @faline2) and impart your wisdom. Thank you so much</p>

<p>Our kids–your kid, lovingasiandad- are very honorable young people because of their outstanding work ethics and they have most definitely taken on some of the best of the values of their parents, teachers and other mentors they have been around in their most tender years. But they are works in progress. Their frontal lobes aren’t finished. Everyone, even middle aged people with aging, complete, brains–indulges in fantastical thinking. Which is why I refer to Duke as “we gave our son a Pony.” (something all little girls in the sixties asked their parents for) I asked for a white pony with brown spots every year of my girlhood despite the fact that we lived in military housing and moved every 18 months. Despite the disappointment of no Pony, I did grow up stronger from moving from one part of the US to another region regularly.</p>

<p>This has become a joke among my friends…as frankly the Fantastical Thinking lapses re how to fund our children’s higher education-- begins with parental fantastical thinking, not the 18 year old. </p>

<p>I speak as a parent who would like to do more for our sons, and for our honorable first born child, pre-recession, we just closed our eyes and let him choose among the jewels where he received admittance. We also ended up with a second mortgage after Duke, declining home valuation after the recession, a decline in the financial markets that affected job opportunities for all Econ graduates (not just our Dukie) and to live to tell Duke son we are unable to help him with graduate school. (We could have --if he had taken his Echols at UVA or his honors admission to William and Mary.) But…we bought him a Pony. </p>

<p>Graduate school for a future MBA is not as critical for someone in the medical fields because they really want you to work for 4-6 years with your undergrad degree first. Duke son has an interesting job in a major city and will start taking MBA classes in an evening program while working full time. He has already replaced the used car we helped him get on his own. He walks like a young man who can pay his own way…and he has-- for five years already. He really can’t afford to give up his job because it has great potential and is a great match for him so…night school it is! There were times when his fellow Dukies were going to grad school on their parents’ dime that he felt a little forlorn but I think he garners respect in his workplace because he has achieved financial independence.<br>
We still have our Chancellor Scholar at Vandy’s graduate loans to stare down and strategize over. </p>

<p>Your daughter is honorable, just as our sons are honorable. But just like in earlier phases of parenting…it is a form of child neglect not to teach them the realities of this world. Our Vandy grad is one of the most earnest, honest, hard-working 23 year olds you will ever meet and he has a very modest paying job in a desirable place. He is paying all his bills except his car payment! We have asked him to look at his income and to evaluate what he would have to do to take over the last year of payments on his car. He looked…Astonished! It’s not that he is a selfish entitled person—he often had little paid jobs around town…but he has had his head stuck in books for 23 years. His income won’t allow for him to pay for his vehicle. I am glad he is starting to realize what financial autonomy requires. If he waited tables on weekends, he might be able to close the gap re the car payments…see where I am heading? By the time he gets to graduate school, he will be so anxious to be autonomous that we think he will be doing all the math on his own.<br>
autonomy feels good! I remember being 23 and receiving nothing from my parents. each one of these hard working kids has a path that may take longer or may take deep strategizing, but the goal is autonomy. So sad! My friends and I live for Skypes a couple of times a month now. ha.
anyway, enough rambling for this morning. </p>

<p>AsianDad,
From the people at US Census, here is a little data point to put the Vandy/Duke delta of $44,000 per year in perspective: the average retirement savings for an American age 50 is . . . .$44,000. See article: <a href=“Retirement Statistics - Statistic Brain”>http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I have no opinion as to which school is better. Both are great schools, and both could be a perfect fit or a complete disaster for your child. You cannot tell in advance. If you can develop a statistically validated algorithm to predict school “fit” in marginal cases, please invite me to become an early investor in your firm.</p>

<p>Your daughter is sincere when she says she wants to be a physician. I believe her. I also believe that she does not know what she is talking about. In just my circle of friends, I know physicians who do not want to be physicians. These people went through med school and training with (compared to your daughter) an informed belief that medicine was for them. They were wrong. Is it possible that your 18 year old could be wrong? Yes. Given this uncertainty, I say it is best to maintain the options that having $176,000 brings.</p>

<p>I think about my dermatologist. She has THREE unrelated Board Certs! Because she took advantage of undergrad and med school scholarships, her father had a pile of money to support her as she worked through one specialty after another. That was nice. Options are good–keep them if you can.</p>

<p>I respect your daughter’s hard work and character (and I hope she respects yours). I have EVIDENCE that your daughter is very good at “getting the grade” in school and on standardized tests. I have evidence of nothing else. We and she really have no idea what she will want to do with her life. We only know what this 18 year old says. Consider the possibility (probability) that she does not know what she is talking about. With all of this doubt, keep the money.</p>

<p>I read the replies to @lovingasiandad’s topic on the Duke forum-- all of the posters spoke very highly of Vanderbilt and were extremely levelheaded! It’s strange that the posters wanting to paint Vandy as scum compared to Duke came to Vandy’s forum to do it…</p>

<p>@commodore15 It is a big misconception that employers target only wharton kids and the rest get overlooked. this seems to be what some people outisde penn think but any penn student will tell you it is not the case. Obviously there are fewer students ending up in “business jobs” from Penn CAS and SEAS but this is because many of these students are interested in grad school abd not going into business. Penn CAS and SEAS students have an great rate of success in getting business jobs. the great thing about penn is that it is the nimber one target school for firms because of its preprofessional culture(which is largely due to wharton) but recruiting opportunitites sre open to everyone and non-wharton students are in no disadvantage at all. </p>

<p>Also Penns yield for the class of 2018 was 66%, so nowhere near the 41.5% of Vandy or 47.8% of Duke. For the class of 2017 penns yield was 64.3% while Vandy’s was 40.7% and Duke’s was 45.5. So while Duke and Vandy might be “in the same range” as you say, Penn is definitely not.</p>