Smart choice: saving for his medical degree.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A Tennessee teenager who got accepted to all eight Ivy League schools has decided to reject the offers of the entire conference, and while he’ll be rooting for crimson in the upcoming academic year, it won’t be that of Harvard, or even the carnelian of Cornell.
Instead, Ronald Nelson will be cheering on the Crimson Tide as a member of the University of Alabama’s incoming freshman class.
Nelson also rejected offers from Stanford, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Vanderbilt, and Washington University in St. Louis, reported Business Insider.
Nelson said a generous full-ride scholarship convinced him to enroll at the public school, according to the New York Daily News, and he’ll put the money he’s saving on his undergrad degree towards medical school.
Nelson, who graduates from Houston High School in Germantown, Tenn., on Tuesday with a 4.58 GPA — said he received financial aid packages from many schools. However, “The [private schools] told me that I would probably end up paying quite a bit more over the next three years,” he said.
Apart from his stellar GPA, Nelson has taken 15 AP courses while notching a 2260 out of 2400 on his SAT and 34 out of 36 on his ACT. Furthermore, he’s the senior-class president of his high school, a National Merit Scholar and National Achievement Scholar, and a state-recognized alto saxophone player, but those outstanding credentials were still not enough to receive any performance-based scholarships from any of the Ivy League schools.
In the current economic climate, the average member of the class of 2015 is graduating from college with over $35,000 in debt, which is a number that continues to rise with each graduating class, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“With people being in debt for years and years, it wasn’t a burden that Ronald wanted to take on and it wasn’t a burden that we wanted to deal with for a number of years after undergraduate,” the high school senior’s father, Ronald Sr., said of his son’s astute college decision. “We can put that money away and spend it on his medical school, or any other graduate school.”