Caveat: I am not a mathematician or in the math field at all. I took one term of stat. :mrgreen: But I would say it depends on what you want to do with your Masters. What would the name recognition do for you? How far would it take you?
If you're planning to go on to a PhD and do the whole traditional academic track, I would say go ahead and shell out for Chicago, with two exceptions:
- you want to study something esoteric that someone does at Delaware and no one does at Chicago
- you think the peace of mind of having full funding would enable you to become the most brilliant stat grad student in the Mid-Atlantic (so that when you go to conferences people say "Ooh, that's arod17, what a promising young scholar" and it kicks open doors the same way the Chicago name would)
I would also be OK with Chicago if I were sure I'd get a well-paying job straight out of grad school. Otherwise, I would lean heavily toward Delaware. There's my two cents.