Vanderbilt vs state fullrider

Colleges and Universities A-Z Vanderbilt University
1

Son got need based near 44k at vanderbilt for CS(cost 70k), full ride at state school, 18k CMU tepper.

Question is, my wage by commission only, and 2015 income low, if 2016 income higher by about 50-55k, expected Vandi aid reduced a lot(by 20k?). 2017 income so far not good, if 2017 income ends about same or lower than 2015, will Son’s 3rd year get about same 44k or more need based?

Also, he is NMF, will he get additional 2k at Vandi?

He likes tepper better, should we call or email to ask for any match?

Thank you very much

2

I would call Vandy’s financial aid and ask them how they will handle your fluctuating income.

If son did not receive any other merit aid from Vandy, he will receive 5000 for NMF. But it will not affect your bottom line. It will remove work-study from his financial aid letter and the rest will reduce his need-based aid.

3

what state U is the admission from?

4

Call Vandy FA office. You will find that there is a FA officer assigned to your son and they are friendly. If you are from Tennessee make sure you ask about the HOPE and related TN lottery scholarships.

5

If he’s a NMF and did not receive a merit scholarship, he will receive $5,000 per year for four years for NM - not necessarily on top of need based aid tho - perhaps instead of.

6

Does he want to study business?

7

Same boat here, just wonder if it is worthy paying 50k per year to study economic there.

8

If he’s doing premed, the answer is a definite no. Vanderbilt is not worth it.

9

@AnnieBot question about your statement. Are you saying Vandy is not worth it because med school is so expensive and its better to go the cheapest route in any case because of med school costs. Or do you think a Vandy education for med school is not worth it. (just trying to understand where you are coming from - my ds is pre med and is considering Vandy and our state school but our state school is almost double the cost of Vandy)

10

@crazym0m Mostly the former( the debt isn’t worth the cost of the education). Also for the reason that many of the premed classes here are unnecessarily hard to weed people out. Many people who wold have been top students at their state school here are unfortunately weeded out with sub 2.5 GPAs ( the average grade given in a premed class is a C) and are no longer premed, when they could have easily gone through their state school and go to med school.

11

@crazym0m

You’ll hear this repeated a lot around the campuses of top schools, and it’s generally just a “grass is always greener” type thing. If there’s anything that premeds love to do, it’s complain. They do have a fair bit to complain about, but you should take it with a grain of salt. I’ll repost a response I had in another thread:

There is some argument to be made for going to state school so you can save money and keep a high GPA as a premed.

However, it really depends on your goals. If you’re just trying to be some sort of doctor, pay as little as possible, do it as fast as possible, and have the easiest classes as possible, then state school is your best option. If you are interested in MD/PhD or academic medicine/a career in research, the tier of your med school matters - and the high tier med schools tend to recruit from the high tier undergrads. This is due to general prestige factor, combined with the fact that top undergrads give you access to top medical centers, which gives you access to top tier labs and research training opportunities. There is evidence for both types of bias. In this AAMC report, adcoms at med schools ranked selection factors into categories of high, medium, and low importance. If you look at page 12, public medical schools list undergraduate selectivity under low importance. However, private medical schools list it under high importance. Privates also list research as of high importance.

https://aamc-orange.global.ssl.fastly.net/production/media/filer_public/7c/fb/7cfb5f43-f9cd-4a5a-bdad-36e735b5844a/mcatstudentselectionguide.pdf#page=12

I’m also always of the opinion that life isn’t a utilitarian exercise where the goal is to die with maximum money. You can’t take any of it with you. If you have no preference, sure, why not save some coin. But if you really like the atmosphere at a competitive school, and you think will make your life more enjoyable (don’t just do it for the number on US news ranking), why not spend a little extra.

If your state school doesn’t have any financial advantages, I think the choice is easy.

Also on the weeding issue: I think that everyone who gets weeded out here deserved to be weeded. I can’t find the source but I remember seeing a statistic saying that every year, between 50-60% of the freshman class states medicine as their career goal. Most of these kids never actually wanted it, they just didn’t know what they did actually want to do, and being a doctor is a well known/respected career path. Then they see that they have to do a lot of work, they’re not really willing to that work, and they get Cs and drop. Cs and lower here are mostly because the person didn’t put maximum effort into studying, rather than not being intellectually gifted. N=1, but I didn’t shy away from taking hard classes, and I do feel like my classes here did a good job of preparing me for the MCAT (scored in the 99th percentile). Who knows, maybe I would have done the same at a state school though.

12

@AnnieBot @fdgjfg Thanks for the input. Our state school is a top one and Vandy is, well, Vandy, so prestige is not the concern between the two choices. Those med school importance criteria are very interesting though and I will definitely share them with ds. If average students get a C at Vandy, that seems fair to me. My ds does not believe himself to be average in any way academically and I have to agree. I actually think fit is good for both schools and my son as well. Still trying to determine which provides more opportunity for research. @fdgfg your mcat sounds spot on. Did you find plenty of opportunity to meet those other “high importance” criteria at Vandy?

13

@crazym0m

The curves in pre-med classes actually aren’t that bad. The worst curves are in bioI/genchemI&II/orgoI&II, and that curve is where the average is brought to the B-/C+ line. So half the class will get a B- or better, and half will get a C+ or lower. A lot of the people taking the low grades in these classes are engineers who don’t care that much about their GPA. Upper levels are easier. So if you work reasonably hard, you can get B’s in the pre reqs and still end up with a 3.8+ cumulative and science GPA. If your son is a CV he’s probably pretty smart, and although the competition is fiercer in college, he might still be at the top of his classes.

I would say yes, there were definitely opportunities to fill those other criteria. It’s pretty easy to get involved with clubs, nonclinical volunteerring, etc., but that’s true at pretty much every major university. The real advantage that Vanderbilt has is the huge medical center across the street from campus. This gives you access to a wide variety of clinical volunteering opportunities (you can do general volunteering with the hospital, work at the student run free clinic, translate for ESL patients, work with a specific type of population), shadowing, and research.

Most major universities have research but having a top research hospital so close by gives you a lot of opportunities. For example, you can get your classic microbio petri dish bench research pretty much anywhere, but if you want to do something like neurosurgery research looking at deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease, you need the hospital for that. There are tons of labs doing a lot of great work, and most of the science majors allow you to write an honors thesis senior year, which I really enjoyed. The faculty also seemed very invested in training undergrad scientists, or at least the ones I worked with.

14

@crazym0m and others: We are visiting Vanderbilt for the first time right now (as I type this!) to decide between the CV scholarship and a full-ride OOS school that really impressed both my child and myself and would offer a ton of specialized research and other opportunities.
For us, even after meeting with some people today and walking six miles, it seems the research in my child’s field might actually be more difficult to find here at Vandy, but that depends a lot on major. As @fdgjfg says, it is clear that if your child wants neuroscience or direct medical research, this is the place to be. For my child, the major here at Vandy is not quite the desired one, so the research seems trickier to find, but it is so difficult to know before actually going to a college. I wish the visit were going better because I want my child to love Vanderbilt, and I want to be able to say it is a great fit, but so far, it doesn’t feel that way. And we spent the whole day on campus. But again, if my child were in direct medical/neuroscience research, I would have a different impression right now. Maybe tomorrow will go better!

15

@sursumcorda hmm good info. My ds is neuroscience/math. Would love to know how it all works out for you

16

@sursumcorda you’re correct about that, not all the programs have equal research opportunities. It’s also difficult, because many kids change their minds about what they want to do, so it can be hard to know what programs to even pay attention too. As cheesy as it sounds, I would just go with your gut feeling on your general impression of the overall atmosphere/experience of the school.

17

@sursumcorda If I may add, I would say go with your gut feeling too. However, I will say that when I visited Vanderbilt, I liked it well enough, but didn’t have that token cinematic experience of falling in love with any college I visited, and I’m here now and I absolutely love it. Perhaps that’s a cultural difference in terms of the American College Experience stereotype, but past a certain point, I think people can really thrive anywhere. Vanderbilt doesn’t necessarily have 100% of the things I want, but you can create avenues for that if you work hard enough. I have a highly desired research job that only grad students used to get, but I got it before I even arrived on campus as a freshman. That’s a matter of initiative and drive rather than the college presenting things to you on a platter.

That said, it sounds like the OOS may be a better fit due to opportunities as well as vibe from what you’ve written, but I just wanted to say for the record that I don’t really believe so much in the love at first sight college experience, at least for myself.

18

Thank you all for reply.
While, I count some loan as aid, the grant is 41k, not a big difference though.major is CS.

Ends up, he also got into CS of engineering in Cornell , with 21k aid. Fullride is at rutgers, he wants to work in east cost so he doesn’t want to go Vandy anymore.But cornell is too expensive, 2nd year probably no aid at all, 3rd/4th year maybe no need based aid or very little. .Cornell is cold and windy, I don’t like it, plus it is said the cs is hard, many of them are algorithm and deduction, not much coding.

He also has 1/2 at USC, accounting, plus near 4k aid. But LA is too far away. GA CS OOS no aid.
He prefer CMU tepper but only gets 18k, will be full price for 2nd year. Rutgers is good enough, I plan to have him go there.

19

I don’t think doing CS at vanderbilt would preclude him from getting a job on the east coast, but if you are worried about financial aid shifting due to large swings in income, then a merit full ride at rutgers is probably a good choice. You could contact the vandy financial aid office and they might be willing to work with you/explain what to expect down the road moneywise if you went there.

20

I agree with the above. Vanderbilt sends PLENTY of people all around the country. To think of it as restrictive to his chances of employment or graduate study at the top institutions of the Northeast is ludicrous. But, were I in your shoes, I’d take Rutgers - STEM majors don’t need brand name diplomas like an econ or humanities major might in order to get into top grad schools. STEM students need marketable skills and ideally less debt, and so full ride at a state school of Rutgers caliber is a wonderful option. Also, assuming he had the ability to get into Vanderbilt and CMU, he no doubt got into the Rutgers honors college, yes? In which case he’ll have a wonderful four years.