PolicyApplier

This speculation feels correct to me. At least at the Admitted Students Day at UChicago, the people that were considering schools like Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia never mentioned the rankings. Provided they stayed within the top 10 (which doesn't even apply to Columbia), the presumption seemed to be that the name of the university alone was enough. People were willing to take on the nearly 200k (with the obvious exception being Princeton) based on name alone.

Very strong "why don't you just stop being poor?" vibes.

Though it all feels a little anti-climactic since I got notification of my status in December from UChicago for the MSCAPP program, that's where I am going to go. There are some things I need to settle with where I currently where work before I make the decision on whether or not I defer my enrollment to next year, but UChicago seemed to have all of the things that I was looking for and access to all of the areas I was looking to study/participate in. Through some external connections I should also have access to much more of the political machine in Chicago than where I currently, which makes the transition feel less stressful.

I didn't apply to those schools, so I unfortunately cannot.

For MPP's, both Chicago and Michigan have pages for you to submit requests to (you post your other offers, etc.).

Provided you can do all the things needed to get into Harvard Law, I don't see how the Harvard connections would hurt you. As to how effective it would be, the advisors would likely be the best ones to ask. You could also look at the post-graduation stats and see if any of the students from those programs went on to the law schools/universities you were interested in after graduation.

Since you want to go to law school eventually, I'd go to the spot with the law school you most want to go to. If I understand admissions decisions correctly, they generally value degrees from their own institutions pretty highly. The one that also that makes you go into the least amount of debt would be good (presuming all MPA's are roughly ranked equally).

Just based on timelines, I’d guess that you get to send them back your initial offers and they’ll send you what will be the final one based on the other offers you’ve received. That’s all intuition though and I can’t say for sure. I am interested to see what type of verbiage is used when submitting a request for more funding. As far as obligations to accept their offer, I’m not sure they could do that. You could also technically back out until you go to classes and have just lost your initial deposit. I don’t think there’s a way for them to bind you to the offer one way or another.

March 30th seems so incredibly late the other standards. Seems like poor form by CMU.

They scholarship letters also came almost immediately after for the MPP. Exciting times!

I'm still waiting to hear from CMU, USC, and Berkeley. Based on what I've read, they should all be coming back within the next 7 days.

They're out now! Good luck everyone!

I applied in December, but still haven't heard back from the DA track. Any word on when these will go out?

If they offered you 30k, it should be 30k per year. As far as re-asks, they sent an email stating this a couple of days ago: "The Scholarship Reconsideration Application will be open from Monday, March 14 to Thursday, March 24. All requests will be reviewed by the committee, and notification of updated scholarship offers will be sent by April 10."

Yeah, their response was super vague. It seems like you could get some DS work in there, but it'll have to be something you force into the curriculum as opposed to something that blends well into it.