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Are Harvard and Princeton the only US schools that are worth it for a Canadian to attend?

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Nov 24, 2004
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StatsGuy wrote: even "regular" non prestigious schools like Boston University is 80k USD a year ... tuition is bonkers in the US
Agreed on the bonkers, but in fairness, the $80k is an all-in cost. Tuition itself is more like $60k. And BU is a very good school.
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Nov 12, 2011
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canuckstorm wrote: Maybe those Canadians go there because they got a full ride scholarship. What the hack if someone else is paying for the degree. However, if you were to pay those ridiculous American tuition fees, the math would not make sense if your target is the Canadian job market. Our Canadian employers frankly do not care where you got the degree from as long as it is relevant to the job you are being hired for. No one is going to pay you a premium for that Princeton degree. EY or KPMG in Toronto will hire you at the same salary as your colleagues from Laurentian or University of Manitoba.

The only exception is in the area of academia where a PHD from an ivey league university will give you a leg up when gunning for that tenure track professor position
. Academia has a bit of an esteem problem where they believe in hiring an academic educated at a school more "prestigious" than the hiring institution as this is supposed to bring some prestige and bragging rights that they have Yale trained professors. Maybe it helps attract more research dollars?
Even then the prestige of where you get your PhD from means very little. Your research, contributions to the field, and network mean a lot more. There a bunch of grad students I've met from big name US and European schools whose research is nowhere near as cutting edge those at smaller name schools. Your supervisor also plays an important part in your future success. Grad students (particularly PhD students) are unwise to choose their program based on the school. It's more important to consider who you are studying under. In my field (one of the big social science disciplines), Ivy league schools are probably the worst places to go. This is all to say that, at least for grad school, not all big names schools have quality supervisors you would want supervising your work.
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Typhoonz wrote: Even then the prestige of where you get your PhD from means very little. Your research, contributions to the field, and network mean a lot more. ...
I agree with this in principle, but in the long run (at least in my field, and can confidently say the same for most STEM) there is a correlation between school "prestige" and the research groups where the most cutting-edge work gets done, and the smaller schools are often under-resourced (in terms of instrumentation and facilities) which can make research more challenging.

I do agree with you that the choice of PhD institution should definitely be driven by the choice of supervisor (which itself has to be considered carefully) and not the "program". Actually, in STEM fields, one of the advantages of "prestige" is that there are multiple top-name faculty one can consider if the first-choice supervisor doesn't work out (which I have seen happen on several occasions) vs. a smaller school where there may be just one superstar. But agreed about the "program" -- it is less meaningful in the long run -- often in STEM it is minimal anyway.
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JHW wrote: I agree with this in principle, but in the long run (at least in my field, and can confidently say the same for most STEM) there is a correlation between school "prestige" and the research groups where the most cutting-edge work gets done, and the smaller schools are often under-resourced (in terms of instrumentation and facilities) which can make research more challenging.

I do agree with you that the choice of PhD institution should definitely be driven by the choice of supervisor (which itself has to be considered carefully) and not the "program". Actually, in STEM fields, one of the advantages of "prestige" is that there are multiple top-name faculty one can consider if the first-choice supervisor doesn't work out (which I have seen happen on several occasions) vs. a smaller school where there may be just one superstar. But agreed about the "program" -- it is less meaningful in the long run -- often in STEM it is minimal anyway.
Yah this is where things get interesting. For social sciences, most well funded supervisors are found at smaller name schools haha. We don't require huge labs with cutting edge equipment, which is, as you point out, more likely to be found at a higher prestige school.

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