Are private college worth the money?
The answer is a big NO, according to the future earning power of the graduates (what else matters more than the ROI of your education investment?). Note that UT Austin ranked #3 and A&M ranked #2 in the ranking of "The Best Colleges for Making Money".
This is a very interesting ranking, which reconciles what I have been thinking and learned in these years on college selection.
It’s good to see two Texan schools made at the top of the list. This once more reflects on the similar matter what we have tried to justify ourselves for staying in Dallas with the relatively more effective savings, as a living place section thought process.
Another point that I would like to share with you is that selecting a career-focused major is far more important than taking the glory of a school name. Don’t get me wrong, I should qualify further that no one would reject any prestigious glory if it is financially justified. By saying that, I won’t want to pay just for any glory. Thus the key point here is: “glory on other’s name” vs. “gain belongs to your own”.
Taking my daughter’s case just as an example, I think she is maximizing her ability to gain much more from what her school in average could offer to students. I would like to share with you a status update I just learned recently about her job exploring strategy. She has gained so far among only a dozen of students in her school who had got a full hit-rate set of interviews from all investment banking firms they applied to so far. Given the current economic situation, gaining interviews with I-banks such as UBS, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, Citi Groups, Scotia Waterous, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Greenhill, etc. apparently is not a easy task for students this year. Due to the financial crisis impacting much more in the Northeastern area, many Ivy school students had to turn to the South in order to get higher chance for an interview. Needless to say, we are very proud of her.
Just taking this direction as a talking point (not extremely), I start considering more and more that a school is just a playground, it is crucial and really depends on how individual students perform after having entered. So being admitted by a better school is just a formality. In that case, the teacher-to-student ratio, for instance, is just a formality, which will very unlikely affect most of self-motivated students. On the other hand, a student who can stand out of a vast student sea in a school with very low T-to-S ratio would convincingly prove that she or he could perform very well in their career in the future. What matters is the real life in a real world. And obviously, for the same argument, she or he could definitely perform very well if she or he would have been admitted in an ivy school.
