Heathcliff1850

Let's play a game! So yeah, I think I'll go to Madison. Thanks to everyone for the input.

I've applied to MS statistics programs, and I have acceptances at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UWM) and Duke. UWM will let me go for free, whereas at Duke I must pay full price ($60k/year for two years). Which choice makes more sense? I'm leaning UWM, but I'm wondering what other people think. I'd like to go on to a PhD. From scanning lists of alumni, I note that both UWM and Duke historically send a lot of MS students to PhD programs, which is a point for both programs; UWM PhD in particular seems to take a lot of people from its own MS, more so than Duke, but I also worry that, if I want to leave my MS school, Duke will give better opportunities. UWM's MS doesn't have a thesis option and Duke's does, so point Duke, though both seem to have pretty flexible curricula, so maybe I could do a thesis at UWM anyway. Tuition at Duke is $60k per year and the program is two years, and $120k of debt is rather a lot, especially given that I already have debt from a previous degree; big point for a fully funded degree at UWM. UWM has promised a TAship with a $16k stipend, but Duke says that TAships are generally available to MS students who want them, so maybe that's a wash. I love Bayes' Rule, and if I could jump into a tub full of Bayes and roll around in it for the rest of my life, I would be happy; while Duke is obviously superior in that respect, UWM has people doing cool Bayesian stuff in biomed, and anyway, at the MS level, maybe the most important thing to prepare me to roll in Bayes at the PhD level is to be really, really good at probability theory, which I could learn at UWM. Finally, Duke outranks UWM by 0.1 points in the US news rankings (12th vs 16th), which seems like not enough to worry about. In sum, it seems to me that Duke is a little better for what I want, but not $120k better, and that I should go UWM. Gradcafe, what do you think? (Sorry for the slightly manic post.)