Is the Ivy League really worth it?
Average cost of an Ivy League undergraduate education = $50,000 per year (including tuition, books, room and board)
Four years at an Ivy university = $200,000
For the same price you could buy….
= 800,000 gumballs. If you eat three gumballs a day, that is one for each meal, you would have 730 years of bubbilicious fun. Now assuming you only live to about 80 — you are after all surviving on gumballs, how long do you think you’re going to live? — then you have a surplus of 650 years of gumballs. If you write your own diet book about your amazing gumball diet and accrue at least 8 followers then you can sell your gumball surplus for a 50% mark up. This way you’ll live to 80, eating gumballs, and have made $266,906 for a profit of $66,906. Combine that with interest and some clever investing, and you could probably live off of it in a Turkish suburb.
= 400 Heifer cows which can deliver four gallons of milk every day and change the life of a hungry family. The milk can provide nourishment for children and income from selling surplus milk, which can in turn pay for tuition, medicine, clothing, and better housing. Heifer cows can help crops grow. And a healthy cow can have a calf every year and so one cow can eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self-reliance. (www.heifer.org)
=7,407 Bratz dolls. (www.toysrus.com)
=20 years of rent for a studio apartment in Paris next to Opera. Certainly a more romantic option than the others, I envision this trade off being made by aspiring artists or writers. Maybe subtract a couple years so you can pay for food and what not, but since you aren’t in school you can get a job as a Parisian waitress. (www.craigslits.com)
= Oral re-hydration salts that can save 606,060 children from dying of diarrhea. (www.theguardian.co.uk)
=245 year subscription to the steak of the month club (www.amazingclubs.com)
=800,000 meals for Bolivian children. Hopefully they’re not feeding them gumballs. (www.whs.org)
=A new car and condo in Cambridge, MA. Why wait until after college to settle down? (www.honda.com, www.realtor.com)
=The medicine to make 1,025,641 children safe from malaria. (www.theguardian.co.uk)
=73 full scholarships to in-state students at state universities. This one is a toughie because unlike in the other hypothetical situations where two disparate purchases are compared, such as one million children protected against malaria versus one ivy league education, in this example the trade-off between two types of education begs the question is the ivy league bachelors degree really 73x better than the state one? (www.collegeboard.com)
So if you could do it all over again, would you? What would you spend your 200,000 dollars on? One million children or one Ivy League education?
