Reply to IB Program : college choice?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]True, but I also believe that the top VA schools (and UMD for that matter) have enough name recognition in most of the rest of the country that it is not a disservice to the child's future career to attend one over a costlier private. To me, the bigger disservice is setting your child up for years and years of unnecessary debt. I fail to understand why people are so fixated on undergrad schools. In many fields, a graduate degree is much more important and a better use of loan money if you must.[/quote]

I have lived in other parts of the country, including the Chicago area, Texas, and the west coast, and this is not true.  In other areas of the country, for the better or the worse, UMD or UVA would not come close to seeming as prestigious as MIT.  Also, there is something to be said for having a challenging peer environment--even at the best state schools the average student is not at the same caliber as MIT.  The best students are just as good, but there is some major teaching down to the average that happens at flagship state universities.  If you look at the syllabuses for freshman chemistry at MIT, they go into some topics that usually are not covered until a sophomore/junior level inorganic chemistry class.

Plus if you are in a technical area like engineering, the hard sciences, and math, you shouldn't be paying for a graduate degree unless it is medicine, law, or business.  Most masters and PhD programs that are competitive have tuition covered plus stipends.[/quote]

First of all, I said that loan money is better used toward graduate degrees "if you must." As you said, few students get significant law, medicine, etc scholarships. Also, I never said that state schools are perceived to be on the same playing field as MIT - I am obviously not that delusional. I just don't believe that taking out loans or having my child take out loans for undergrad is a productive use of any of our money, so I would much rather send my kid to UVA for a social science degree or VT for a STEM degree. To me, it's not worth it when there's no guaranteed return on that investment. But we can agree to disagree on that. [/quote]

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