In Praise of the Safety School

My name is Peter, and I work at Magoosh doing Business Development and Sales. I used to teach high school math (your favorite!), and I joined the Magoosh team after going to business school. For those of you who can count, that means that I’m old. But, look I can use gifs! So I’m pretty hip. Anyway, when I was in high school, I was probably like a lot of you reading this blog: high achieving, ambitious, and so, so ready to get out of town. I was bright, had good SAT scores, a solid GPA, and big goals. My dream school was UC Berkeley, but I also applied to top colleges all over the East Coast. As an Arizona native, I was desperate to go out of state. Some place with history, status, and summers that weren’t four trillion degrees. Most important, I wanted a big brand-name university, a school that, just by putting it on my resume, would tell the world I was smart. Despite getting into my top choices, because of the financial situation in my family I soon realized that the only viable option was to stay in-state at the University of Arizona. It was a tough decision, but ultimately the best. So for all of you who think that staying in-state will ruin your future forever, I present to you the top four reasons to seriously consider your safety school: 1. The cost Here’s a fact: going to the highest ranked college you can get into is going to cost you a lot of money. If it’s a reach for you to even get admitted, they’re not going to offer you financial aid. Safety schools, on the other hand, have a strong incentive to cough up the cash. Top schools can cost more than $50,000 per year just for tuition. In my case, because of merit scholarships and need-based grants, Arizona was free. State schools are mandated by law in most states to remain affordable for in-state residents, so chances are you’ll get a better deal locally than you will going to a private school across the country. 2. The people Since Arizona was my safety school, I imagined that I would be, like, the smartest person who ever went there. Not even close. From day one, I was surrounded by people waaaay smarter than I was (including my lovely wife, whom I met moving into the dorms freshman year). The students and professors at UofA were just as intelligent and ambitious as the people I knew at much fancier schools. They were also a lot more diverse both racially and socioeconomically*. It’s a myth that state schools attract the unambitious; rather they tend to attract people who are either unable or unwilling to pay private university tuition. 3. The education My senior year, I studied abroad in Budapest, Hungary. In my program, I went to school with students from top colleges like Harvard, Yale, Pomona, and others. My classmates were all incredibly smart. But you know what? They hadn’t learned any more in college than I had. When I enrolled at business school at Cal it was the same again I was surrounded by smart people who went to top colleges, but my undergraduate education had prepared me just as well theirs prepared them. The US has an amazing network of colleges and universities by far the best in the world. Take advantage of it! 4. Your future After graduating from Arizona, I taught with Teach for America. Then I went to business school and just last month completed my MBA at Berkeley. TFA and Berkeley are both extremely selective programs, and my degree from a state school did not prevent from pursuing either. The number of people enrolled in graduate school jumped 32 percent in the last decade. Depending on your career goals, the college you choose for undergrad may not be the last college you’ll ever go to. If you do really want a brand-name university on your resume, grad school might be the better time to get it. All this is not to say that going to a top-ranked school is a bad choice. You can get a great education at an Ivy League school. You can meet smart people and you can prepare yourself for the career of your dreams. But you can also do all that at a state school at a fraction of the cost. If you are an excellent student with big ambitions, you’ll do great things. So if you don’t get into or can’t afford your top choice, it might actually be the best thing for you. * National Center for Education Statistics Photo Credit: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8