To quote Ivy League schools as having generous FA is a complete joke. They offer ZERO merit aid. The vast majority of their huge endowments goes unspent year after year. The number just keep getting bigger due to compounding interest and rich alumni.
The real answer to the original question, is nothing. There are comparable and better schools all over the country that have great programs. The biggest true advantage to those schools is to get to know the rich and powerful…oh, and to have some brag opportunities.
@alum88, the NU merit scholarships are almost always a token amount. For instance, $2K for NMS and a few thousand for other scholarships. In that sense, they’re not too different from Columbia’s named scholarships, where the main benefit is that you get to put a scholarship down on your resume.
@Torveaux Ivy schools and the very top LACs give massive amounts of financial aid and are among the most generous. It is just that as a policy matter the FA dollars are spent based on need, and not merit. Virtually every student at and Ivy or top LAC is academically deserving of a merit award and could get one from many, many other colleges if they chose to do so.
Complain about the way Ivies spend their endowments all you want. Harvard’s need-based was at least $5000 more generous than every top LAC my daughter was accepted to or interested in. I would have been particularly thrilled if she’d been able to attend Amherst or Vassar. Wasn’t happening. Other HYP parents will tell you the same story.
@Torveaux (re post #60): “The vast majority of their huge endowments goes unspent year after year.”
With respect, I suspect you may not understand what an endowment really is or how one actually operates.
Endowments are binding agreements between the donor and the institution. They are SUPPOSED to last FOREVER and they MUST be used ONLY for a clearly defined charitable purpose (specifically delineated in each written, binding endowment agreement). For these reasons, they are entirely unlike annual charitable donations to a university, which frequently can be used for a wide variety of reasons and entirely expended in a single year.
Therefore – and this is VERY commonly misunderstood – only about 5 percent of a university’s endowed capital can – or should – spent in any given year (and, even then, ONLY for the purposes delineated in the endowments’ bilaterally agreed to documentation). To do otherwise would violate the endowment’s legal strictures, because: (1) it could not then operate in perpetuity and/or (2) its accrued, capitalized funds were utilized for purposes not specifically agreed to.
To illustrate, you decide to endow a tuition-only scholarship at Harvard College (I will employ several simplifications, just to make this explanation easier, but the concept is wholly valid). Current annual tuition is (perhaps) $65K, which means Harvard may require an approximate $13.0M endowment chaptalization (20 x .65K = $13.0M). Let’s further presume Harvard’s aggregate annual return on invested endowment capital is 8 percent. Once you endowment reaches a value where $65K (plus accrued inflation) can be withdrawn yearly, some lucky student will receive a full tuition ride and any additional earnings will be retained in the endowment’s corpus to cover inflation and capital losses.
It is VERY important to understand that endowments are supposed to operate for many CENTURIES, which completely differs from annual charitable gifts to colleges and universities.
Consequentially, it is absolutely wrong to suggest that a university might expend ALL (or much) of its endowed funds – even for a most worthwhile reason – in a one or a few years. To do so would both violate its binding contract and also prevent the charitable purpose from continuing indefinitely.
@alum88 (re #57): Like the other top National Research Universities, Duke (need blind and 100 percent of demonstrated need met) provides EXTENSIVE, very generous, need-based grants; however, unlike many of its peers, it also provides a relatively few – but exceptionally generous (everything on campus, plus funded summer work, overseas semesters, some “spending money,” etc.) – merit scholarships. For the details, google A B Duke, B N Duke, Robertson, or any of the other Duke merit scholarships.
I was waiting for the punch line, but it did not come.
The price of admission is too high–I come to the Carnival and find “Prophets and Mystics” rather than Jokers and Fools. What’s this flesh but crudded milk, puff paste, a box for earthworms. Suffering, dying, hypocrisy and the silver tongues, I see elsewhere, and I needn’t pay a price for it. Rogues and knaves and getting and spending and ingestion and purgation and worth and vanity and folly and folly and false marketing and
“Complain about the way Ivies spend their endowments all you want. Harvard’s need-based was at least $5000 more generous than every top LAC my daughter was accepted to or interested in. I would have been particularly thrilled if she’d been able to attend Amherst or Vassar. Wasn’t happening. Other HYP parents will tell you the same story.”
And others will tell a completely different story. Anecdotes about one individual are kind of useless, because everyone’s situations are different. Statistically Amherst and Vassar are among the most generous colleges (as are HYP). According to Kiplingers, the average student at Amherst graduates with roughly the same amount of debt as Yale and Harvard (Princeton, to its credit, is lower than any of them by quite a bit). Vassar and Amherst both support a significantly higher percentage of low income students than do Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Have you read that play, JustOneDad? I must confess, I cannot snark at that. But I can snark at it, because everything I post is snark, and snark is life, and life is snark, and every journal needs a “criticism section,” and reason and logic are bad jokes and have failed me much too often, and I am not a critic but a louse and a scoundrel, and my Ego builds up inexorably to its own destruction (for it contains its opposite within itself, like Hegel’s theses or Hamlet’s innuendos or the state of Polybius or Pechorin’s actions or the Karamazov bloods).
But I cannot snark at that, because literature makes snark irrelevant. Hardly anyone reads beyond Shakespeare in early modern theater.
There used to be a frequent poster on CC who presented something like this position.
He tried to back it up with logical arguments. Those arguments went something like this:
The features that US News measures have little or no provable bearing on academic outcomes
The outcome differences that we do observe (such as higher average alumni salaries or higher graduate & professional school admission rates) are mostly attributable to the ability of certain schools to cherry-pick the strongest applicants
Top scholars at prestigious research universities devote little attention to undergraduates; in many cases you'll be taught by inexperienced TAs.
Students at prestigious universities learn to game the system in preparation for lives of privilege, in which they are not subject to the same rules that apply to students at average colleges (cf. William Deresewicz , *The Disadvantages of an Elite Education*)
Everything you learn in college, and any success that follows, is due largely to your own efforts
@PurpleTitan Those other schools are probably pretty generous for domestic students, but I guess my situation was also a bit different since I’m Canadian (except for Stanford and MIT, which I also applied to).
@PurpleTitan I realize that…I suppose my statement was more with regards to HYP. Although for my financial situation, only Stanford’s NPC came out ahead of the rest of the Ivies minus Cornell, which were closely followed by MIT (I did not consider any LACs).
@TopTier - See, that is why so many people don’t like graduates from pretentious schools. The assumption that I don’t understand how endowments actually work is priceless. I am sorry that my presumption is that the average person on cc actually DOES understand the concept, so I did not feel it necessary to spell out that I meant the proceeds, not the endowment itself. The fact remains that whilst many of these school have huge endowments, they are still rolling them up. They spend a fraction of what they could and still maintain the endowments perpetually. Even within that select group of schools, there are wide differences among them with regard to how they spend the money. If I recall correctly, Princeton is the most generous of them.
While I despise Duke in general, I must laud them for their program having at least some merit option.
@tk21769 - not sure if you were trying to make a point. US News rankings include spending as part of the calculation. I cannot disagree that the US News rankings are about the worst possible way to measure a college. That is not to say that there are not some useful bits of data there, but the measurements can and are ‘gamed’ by colleges attempting to lift their ratings
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with going to an Ivy, but there is nothing especially great about them unless you are especially attracted to the history and tradition. For the money, there are at least 50 schools in the US alone that are as good or better at educating students. The honors colleges at most of the state flagships are on par with these elite schools. The numbers are skewed most often because the state flagships also educate a wider range of students.
I will start my list for fun…top schools that are not Ivy league that are as good or better for academics. (in no particular order) Put the same quality of student into any of these programs and they will do as well by any measure you care to use (except perhaps access to the rich and powerful)
Chicago
MIT
Cal Tech
Cal
Duke
Carnegie Mellon
Georgia Tech
Minnesota
Penn State
Illinois
Texas
Johns Hopkins
Case Western Reserve
Harvey Mudd
Wisconsin
Purdue
Stanford
Michigan
Northwestern
UCLA
Rice
Notre Dame
Wash U St. Louis
Virginia
Vanderbilt
Florida
Texas A&M
Ohio State
Washington
Bowdoin
Haverford
Boston College
Georgetown
William and Mary
Emory
North Carolina
Tufts
Carleton
Brandeis
Santa Clara
Trinity
“For instance, would anyone say that the 8 schools of Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, JHU, and Rice (you can substitute Cal for JHU or Rice if you want to) are definitively worse than the 8 schools of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell? I don’t think you can find a measure that would show that.”
Taken as a group ( though with individual exceptions). I’m pretty sure they are definitively worse by the measure of driving distance from the New York City metropolitan area. . That was the most relevant measure in my own college hunt. Ditto Philadelphia and Boston metro areas. Virtually every college I’m aware of has significant over-representation by students who are within driving range.
I’m guessing that, taken as a group, they would be found to be definitively worse by some reasonable measure of ice hockey prowess too. Despite the fact that the two city slickers packed it in years ago. I would trust the Wharton/developer types at Penn would rent ringers prior to such measurement, but, based on football performance, Columbia just may want to call in sick that day.
