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[quote=Anonymous][quote]
Curious to hear that you think a non-Ivy private college is worth the debt load.  Lots of people swinging the other way on that opinion.  
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[quote]Thanks for saying it was a good list. I certainly would have added Penn State but I was anticipating flaming. Before the scandal, there was an article in the WSJ last year saying company recruiters actually preferred Penn State kids to any others. That really shocked me. I don't know what it's like there post-scandal. But, the college kids certainly shouldn't be blamed and shouldn't be collateral damage.

I'm someone who thinks people actually should go to state schools unless they get into a top-20 ranked private school. Otherwise, I don't think private schools are worth it for college. People can spend the money on private for their masters if they want (once they really know what they want to do).[/quote]

It was a personal decision for me looking back.

To preface, 6 figure debt to me would've been 100-130k back then, not the 160-200k+ that it is these days if you are forced to pay full flight to gtown, hopkins and don't get much aid. (gtown and carnegie mellon gave me pretty crappy aid over a decade ago....i'm not sure if that's changed...both schools have pretty shit endowments for their reputation so don't know how that has affected their aid giving a decade later).

I hated the size of PSU (and land-grand public research schools like Texas and UW are HUGE) and a lack of attention (even with their constituent honors colleges of which i was a part of). I went to a public hs that had 1600 kids and thought 30-40k undergrad campuses would not be a big deal but i HATED being at such a large school (especially in a rural area). Looking back, part of it was being in a rural area, part of it was the size(felt like i was drowning with how large psu was).

Also for what I ended up wanting to do and currently work in (IR, country risk finance), recruiting is SO much better at places like Tufts, gtown, cmu etc.

If one is intersted in bulge bracket banking/finance, strat consulting (tech, then CMU naturally) even places like CIA these days (CIA used to come on campus for all directorates at PSU when I was there but the last few years they only send DST (engineering directorate) to PSU but DI and NCS reps go to places like Gtown, Tufts, etc.).....going to a top-20 private (even if it is non-ivy) helps a ton. There are more relationships in terms of recruiting and networking that help a hell of a lot.

I guess to distill my feelings it comes down to size of school (student body), location, recruiting relationships with certain industries in certain fields, type/nature of student body.

I thought that top 25 non-ivy privates were not worth it but after working for 6-7 years and looking through my network, i'm not so sure about that. I think any top 20-25 private that fits your criteria in terms of fit, and would make you happy, would be better than a large public and the difference between say penn CAS/Cornell AS vs. gtown, tufts, hopkins for example is pretty much non-existant.

outside of the top-25 for privates, i agree that public would probably make way more sense.

If you know with virtual certainty though that you are going to med or law school, then I'm not sure it matters also since both those tracks are heavily based on mcat and lsat performance, which is not so dependent on where you go to UG.

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