Baby boomers - Northwestern U is now 70k / year...what do you have to say for yourselves?

Northwestern does have an $10+ billion endowment. If my math is correct, that is around 500K "backing" every student there. I would think that a large number of students get generous financial aid packages if the can get admitted.

It looks like 55% get financial aid. According to US News and World report the average financial aid award is 40K. Still, 30k a year is not chump change.

I have a kid at an expensive private school in California. It is cheaper to send them there and live on campus, then to do the same at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Many of the spendy private schools are in fact a better value. My wife and myself are professionals and make decent money and are still able to get most of the tuition paid for - no loans.

last page read test post

Why would anyone want to go to northwestern? They don't even have a track team.

Your family made too much money then.

Senior-Lazarus_Long wrote:

Undergraduate courses are all the same. Get good grades and maybe you can get a scholarship for post graduate studies.There's always ROTC.

The first half of this isn't true. Just compare the math courses offered at an in general respected school like harvard, a respected in some specific field school, say CMU for discrete math, and some large state schools like Ohio State or Michigan.

Looking over the courses offered in the spring 2017 semester:

For undergrad abstract algebra: Harvard has 9, CMU 5, OSU 1, and MSU 4

Undergrad Analysis: H has 5, CMU 5, OSU 2, and MSU 4

and undergrad discrete: H has 1, CMU 5, OSU 0, and MSU 3.

Just from quantity and ignoring quality of courses it looks like Harvard is way better for anyone that wants to study algebra, CMU for anyone who wants to study discrete math, and you really shouldn't go to OSU if you want to study math.

You're going to get way more into 'real' math coursework at some universities than others. There's a big difference between a college that doesn't even let freshmen take 'intro to proof writing' and harvard, which throws math majors into intro algebra and analysis first semester.

@above: There are three colleges in the US (MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd) that put most (all?) freshmen into proof based math classes first semester.

A very specific few other colleges (Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, and UChicago come to mind) have honors sequences that let a couple dozen freshmen start with proof based Multivar/LinAlg/DiffEq.

Aside from those few accelerated sequences, undergrad lower div courses are very similar across universities. Very few freshmen at Harvard (or any other school--there are some 15 colleges in the country with freshmen classes of comparable high school academic stats to Harvard's) are taking real analysis and abstract algebra. Most kids spend freshmen year finishing up a calculus sequence and then take LinAlg and DiffEq as sophomores.

Once you get into those upper division courses, there can be a significant difference. Until you get there, it's a lot of the same at most institutions--including plenty of ivies, Berkeley, etc. Kids following pure math tracks might be better served by Harvard, but engineering, cs, and applied math will have a pretty similar curriculum--even upper div courses--at state schools.

Caveat: I attended NU and took the math 285 sequence (proof based linear/multi/diffeq). The instruction was easily the best I ever received and the class--there was only one section--had under 25 kids. Was it worth the price? I'm not sure--sending me there cost my parents a lot, and I don't think I would've had significantly fewer opportunities going to UCLA, UC Davis, Cal Poly SLO, or any other state school I'd been admitted to.

I'm talking specifically about math majors and am only trying to express that there are relatively big differences in courses at different schools. I also don't think more expensive/prestigious necessarily corresponds to better/more opportunities in this case (just from courses offered, compare MSU and OSU, two similar schools. Obviously I'd need to do way more research to say for sure, but MSU appears to have way more math opportunities than OSU). This just happened to be my major and from what I know of physics the situation is similar, so I was extrapolating to the experience of students in other majors. I might be wrong though, I only have specific experience.

And most schools I know of start their freshmen math majors off with at the very least with some 'intro to proofs' class. From my own experience, I was one of 80 freshmen in our intro to proofs class and one of 40 in our 'honors matrix algebra' which had some applications but was still a freshman only course that was meant to get us writing proofs as soon as possible. And this wasn't at any of the schools you mentioned. Most of the math majors were finished our core analysis and algebra sequence sophomore year, so more specific electives were a really big focus. A disproportional amount of us ended up focusing on algebra just because that branch had both the most courses and best professors. We had a couple older professors teach all of our topology classes, so everyone hated it and I don't know a single person that went on to study topology in grad school from our program.

On the other hand my brother was a double physics math major at a different school that is fairly big and has a decent reputation in engineering at least. They didn't even let their freshmen math majors take their intro to proofs class, so the earliest they could take analysis was junior year. They had a few basic theoretical courses, but almost all of their electives were incredibly applied. This was really nice for my brother since he was way more into physics than math but would have been awful for me.

Of course, it's possible the the difference between my brother's and my experience is really situational and most schools are more homogeneous for the first few years, but at the very least looking up course offerings seems to back me up.

For what it's worth IMG Academy's boarding school is also around $70k a year.