Posted on 04/06/2012 6:23:00 AM PDT by sitetest
I don't engage in vanities very often, but I thought this one might be interesting to some folks, and I wouldn't mind a little (courteous) input.
Some of you may remember that we homeschooled our two sons through eighth grade and then sent 'em off to a local Catholic high school. The older guy, who is registered here as swotsonofsitetest, graduates in June and will be off to college in the fall.
We're now coming to the end of the college application and admission process and it's decision time. I'm interested in folks opinions about that decision.
After eight years of homeschooling, he did very well in high school, received very high scores on the SAT and his SAT subject tests, may or may not be valedictorian this year, and has pretty good (although somewhat run-of-the-mill and not-terribly-exciting, it turns out) extracurriculars. Thus, he applied to some top schools and met with some success.
He applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Washington Univ in St. Louis, Univ of Virginia, Notre Dame and the Univ of Maryland, College Park. He plans to double-major in civil engineering (where the school has civil engineering, otherwise mechanical engineering) and classics.
He is quite the classicist, more of a language guy than a math and science guy, but that's only a relative measure. He's very, very good at math and science, just off the charts in language stuff.
After months of application process, filling out FAFSAs, Common Apps, IDOCs, etc., it comes down to: Waitlisted at Washington Univ in St. Louis; rejected outright at Yale and Princeton; accepted to UVA; Notre Dame; Univ of MD; Hopkins and Harvard.
Although UVA is a nice school, it doesn't quite light his fire. We don't expect much by way of financial aid (we live next door in Maryland, and UVA is kinda tight with aid to out-of-state residents). He visited Notre Dame and prefers not to go to a pseudo-Catholic school.
So, it's down to Maryland, Hopkins and Harvard.
Hopkins had been his favorite through the process. Great engineering school, great classics program, great campus feel for him (lots of nerdy kids having a blast studying their hearts out). He met one of the classics professors there and they quickly hit it off.
Maryland had been his "safe school." I hesitate to call it that, because Maryland is not the school it was when I was young (party school that took most folks with a pulse and respiration). Today, the median CR + M SAT of incoming freshmen is over 1300, much higher for their Honors College and school of engineering (to both of which he was accepted). So, I will say it is his safe school in a whisper.
Maryland has a great school of engineering. Their classics program is pretty good, but nowhere near what it is at Hopkins and Harvard.
Harvard, too, was a bit of a dark horse, for reasons with which many posters here would be familiar. But they have a decent engineering school and one of the top classics programs in the country. Plus, it's Harvard. As well, the folks just exude a happy, pleasant, non-bureaucratic competence. And have made him feel welcome and wanted. Which is something Hopkins has not done. However, they only have mechanical engineering, not civil.
Anyway, the money aspect is worth mentioning here. Hopkins is coming in with a decent financial aid package, but it leaves $22K to me to pay per year. Ouch. The loans that my son would need to take out are very modest - a total of $5K over four years. This all includes a modest amount of work study during the school year for my son.
Harvard came up with a substantially-better package - $16K per year to me. Which is nearly affordable, LOL. It includes no loans (unless I want to borrow what I'd owe them) and modest work study.
Maryland is offering a full merit scholarship including full tuition, room and board, books, and a small stipend for educational endeavors such as research, travel, conferences, etc.
So, what do you think? His original first choice with great engineering and classics for $22K per year with modest loans? Harvard (can't beat the brand name with a stick) with good, but not great engineering, phenomenal classics for $16K per year with no loans? Or Maryland, with great engineering, decent classics and, did I mention, absolutely FREE?
If Maryland will give you a free education, take it. The Free education outweighs any other consideration for an engineering program.
There are only about 2% of jobs that require a degree from a specific school. Engineering is not one of those fields. I would also submit that Maryland is superior to Harvard in the engineering department.
YES!!!! And it applies to virtually every field of study.
You have no choice but to send him to Harvard.
If your son is at all an amicable, gregarious character, send him to Harvard. The future will be now, the future “real world” will start the first week of freshman year.
As compared to Maryland where his future starts after 3.5 years of partying on campus and then finally reality sets in his senior year as he starts job hunting.
That 65k will be nothing as soon as Ben Bernanke and the Fed Reserve unleashes inflation sometime 2014ish, Grabbing loans at low interest rates now, in a pre-high inflationary period is a no-brainer.
UMaryland, even the honors college, does not have a long standing Alumni network??, it was a party school as you remember it, all the way up to when I applied there in the late-90s.
If your son can work the floor gladhanding at Harvard it’ll pay for itself in under five years.
Don’t think of Harvard as a 100k debt as much as it’s incremental cost over Hopkins, which puts it as a 28k additional expense.
Your son will walk out of Maryland with substantially less life experience compared to the student life in Boston, substantially lower “Rolodex” access, substantially less understanding of how the machinations of this country’s ruling cadres actually work on a daily basis.
I didn’t attend Brown U for the same reservations of “being behind enemy lines”... and the first five years out of Uni were definitely tougher than it should have been.
You should contact each school’s Career Services department. They can give you statistics on the salaries of recent graduates broken down by academic major.
“I was just looking up an old acquaintance who graduated from GA Tech (the best bang for one’s buck in engineering, IMHO)...”
Georgia Tech is a fantastic school... for engineering.
No classics.
In terms of pay scales, beginning civil engineers are among the lowest-paid of the engineering specialties. But, it's what my son wants to do.
As for Ivy League folks - I've met a few. Some good, some bad. I wouldn't try to lump them all in one category or other.
sitetest
“Rolodex advantage.”
Is your son quiet or social? After a few years, that database is valuable.
Hopkins - Yeah, we know. We went to the financial aid folks yesterday. Nothin’ doin’. I'm gonna try the same at Harvard next week. I betcha the brush-off I receive will be classier. LOL.
I don't know that my son will change majors. He's a pretty flexible guy on most things, but usually, once he makes up his mind, that's it.
But that's a big advantage to Harvard, as it's really great, and has a peerless reputation in a wide variety of fields, even though Maryland is superior, head-to-head, in engineering.
Maryland's Honors College really is an outstanding opportunity. It's much more than just a designation and getting to live in a special dorm.
Thank you for the complimentary words. I will post the final decision to this thread and try to ping those who seem interested.
Thanks again,
sitetest
That's the though anyways.
If considering the causality of 33% of the budget and hence 33% of the taxpayer's contributions to the State of Maryland is overly reductionist, then you are correct that I am overly reductionist.
Sincerely
We homeschool; I have graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford; I am wary of “elite schools” generally.
NEVERTHELESS, if Harvard is offering money in a reasonable amount and your son has a strong worldview, the choice is Harvard. No question.
Here are some reasons not to worry about the relative merits of engineering programs: 1. Between 18 and 20 students often change their minds about majors. 2. the rankings of engineering and other programs mainly have to do with the strengths of the graduate programs. At the undergraduate level, students are getting a lot of math, science, and engineering basics. Given students of equal ability, the top 50 engineering programs are providing roughly equivalent engineering content to undergraduates. Worry about rankings of engineering schools for graduate school. 3. Harvard has very strong math and pure science programs. This matters for engineering because courses from these departments are a significant part of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. 4. There is increasing collaoration in programs and courses between Harvard and MIT in science and engineering. 5. More important than the ranking of a program is the intellectual “speed of the track”. Harvard students are on average much more capable intellectually than those attending Maryland (you can’t be serious about that one) or Hopkins.
Harvard also has a fine program in Classics.
Finally, rightly or wrongly, the name “Harvard” opens doors all over the world and across the US. The brand matters. Maryland adds no value in that respect, and Hopkins offers vastly less than Harvard.
Frankly, as much as I dislike elite schools, I fail to see how this can even remotely be seen as a close call.
Harvard and MIT have an exchange program. Any Harvard student can take any class s/he wants at MIT. Sitetests’s son can go to MIT for his engineering classes (assuming he stays in engineering).
And another thing....for those that have eyes to see and ears to hear, the next 20 years are going to see massive financial and social disruption. Any financial savings from going to Maryland will pale in value in comparison to the benefits your son will receive from the social and intellectual capital he will gain at Harvard. That social and intellectual capital will allow him to do well even when others are struggling.
I can’t believe I am helping the Harvard Admissions Office....
Colleges try to sell on ‘intangibles’ like a ‘roledex factor’.
Us ‘little people’ think that Harvard grads somehow ‘stick together’; somehow if I’m a Harvard alum and I really need something, I can just pick up the phone and one of my Harvard chums will open doors for me simply because we went to the same school.
Jamie Dimon is the only Harvard alum amongst the top 10 Fortune 500 CEO’s. Mike Duke, of Walmart, is a GA Tech alum. Rex W. Tillerson is CEO of Exxon-Mobil; he has a BS in Civil Engineering from U of Texas-Austin. What rolodex do the other 9 CEO’s use ? How did they get “let in” to the CEO “club” ? Did not their non-Harvard degree sentence them to a life of being “on the outside looking in” ?
From usnews.com...
“Of the 500 CEOs in question, 174 have M.B.A.s and 59 have law degrees. Nearly 200 of the CEOs have no graduate-level degree. Nineteen of the 500 CEOs attained no college degree, and many were college dropouts turned visionaries in the technology sector, like Oracle Corp.’s top executive and now billionaire Lawrence J. Ellison. A few retail executives also worked their way to the corner office by way of humble beginnings on the sales floor, like James A. Skinner of McDonald’s, who started as a restaurant manager, and Brian J. Dunn of Best Buy Co., who was once a store associate. “
link is here: http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2011/01/03/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-college
Harvard markets to the wealthy; they accept the super-intelligent of the non-wealthy where those students have it in their mind to ‘join the club of the rich and powerful’, or have it in their mind that Harvard is the pinnacle of intellectual training. Ergo, most Harvard grads are bought into the idea of elitism. This, coupled with the prestige of the degree, produces a set of alumni with a propensity for success in terms of money or influence, which continues the brand mindset in the minds of all us poor outsiders.
Of course, the numbers don’t bare out the proposition that Harvard graduates in particular ‘run the world’ any more than other colleges, as evidenced by the sheer number of leaders in the world and the number who actually graduated from Harvard.
The list of Harvard alums recently or currently in Congress sports Pat Toomey, but then goes on to a thoroughly unimpressive group, right down to William J. Jefferson, Alan Grayson, Barney Frank and Charles Schumer. Seems like Harvard’s true leadership is in spawning corrupt politicians bereft of morality.
The scariest proposition about Harvard is truly it’s tendency, certainly born of it’s tendency towards arrogance and elitism, to train future leaders who are intellectually immersed in totalitarian quack viewpoints and agendas. Very often young intellectuals throughout the centuries misconstrue the writings of earlier intellectuals and they themselves provide an intellectual basis for all sorts of evils. I can’t help but think of Malthusianism and all of it’s derivitaves; theories that are obviously oversimplified and flawed have been contorted into the viewpoints of many of today’s influential and powerful people whereby they seem determined to wipe out humanity for it’s own good through governmental control, forced population control and a basic alignment with communalism. Michael Bloomberg springs to mind; a graduate of both Johns Hopkins and Harvard. While he privately enjoys what the NY Times refers to as “positively baronial” tastes in his homes, he publicly asserts that the American public should submit to relinquishing all of their personal firearms and be forced to abstain from salt.
IMHO, if I study the classics under a tutor who is actually seeking to change my worldview while “teaching” me, I’d really not rather have their running mouth interrupting my reading. Though the elitist schools would have us think that they have a monopoly on learning, I’ve finally come to realize that they do not - for one who seeks to learn, there are countless books and teachers they can avail themselves of. And their other old ploy, their promise of joining an elite club guaranteeing income and influence, is likewise an empty promise made to future “useful graduates”.
“he publicly asserts that the American public should submit to relinquishing all of their personal firearms and be forced to abstain from salt.”
And the peter?
Remember that Harvard feminized their science courses after Larry Summers made those remarks about women not being as good at math and science as men.
Other than that, I would recommend that your son make another visit o the schools and speak to the Dept heads.
Make sure that he would be happy being an engineer, although some companies are one highering engineers for operational positions, particularly in the oil industry.
As to smiting the heathens, hey, he is going off to college and there will be plenty to smite no matter where he goes but when you smite Ivy League "master of the universe" heathens, you know you can smite any. Some that he would encounter at Harvard may well become the Harvard equivalent of John (did you know he served in Vietnam?) Kerry (regrettably a Yalie and every bit as despicable there as in later life). Of your choices, your son would likely not regret choosing Harvard. If your income were modest, Yale would be practically free but IIRC all the Ivies have "need-blind" admissions and university scholarships to match. If he is a warrior, he is needed there to be involved with those already here. Also, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and likely the rest of the Ivies to a lesser extent are in the centuries long process of graduating what Tom Wolfe called: "masters of the universe." The advantages of Ivy League rolodexes are not easily matched.
I would describe Notre Shame as anti-Catholic rather than pseudo-Catholic. Google The Land 'o Lakes Conference of 1967. It has not improved since. Rather the contrary.
I can think of only two disadvantages of Harvard. First, the weather in Cambridge is not pleasant in the worst of winter. Then again, if weather were the determinant, Florida and California have many schools describable as "Beach Blanket University." I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that weather will not be a major consideration in your son's choice.
Second, if your son were a seriously talented variety football player type, my household would prefer that he not attend Harvard and possibly win the annual contest with Yale known as The Game. But, that's just us. Yale's mascot is an English Bulldog named Handsome Dan (the 47th or whatever number). You would not willingly allow your son to break the puppy's heart, would you?
In the totality of circumstances and in your son's cornucopia of outstanding choices available, you may reasonably be forgiven for sending him to Hahvard and to believe that Harvahd should be allowed player personnel who make the Cantabs quite competitive which they all too often tend to be in games against Old Eli.
Wow! The state of Maryland spends 33% of its budget on higher (post-secondary) education??
No??
Then see my previous post.
sitetest
“My point is that most young men will benefit from doing other things before going to college.”
If my son works with half the effort and half the focus for the next four or five years with which he's worked the last 12, I don't believe that will be true for him.
sitetest
Yes, he is quite social.
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