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Hey! Just to give a bit about my background first: I have an Econ/Math double major from a top-20 US University GRE: 169 (Q), 163 (V) 3.6 GPA; A's in Intermediate Micro, Macro, Econometrics, Calc 3, Real Analysis, Linear Algebra. However, I did receive B's in PhD Micro and Econometrics which I took 10 years ago (when I was 19). After undergrad, I got an MA in Education, and then taught for a while. I know admissions committees won't care about the following (clearly) but I started an Ed Tech company, ran it for 5 years and sold it last year to a fortune 500 company. I have written two published books, and teach a summer entrepreneurship course at Harvard. I have primarily been focusing on the teaching of economics to undergrads - and have been tutoring it for the past 10 years. I've had a lot of time to also study advanced economics, and for the past few years have been even tutoring grad micro to new PhD students (I've clearly improved my understanding a lot since getting a B in it in 2009). However, none of this is on my transcript. I did take and get an A in grad econometrics last year, and I was able to get letters of recs from some of my old professors (including my thesis advisor) - while these are strong, the writers haven't interacted with me in 10 years, so i'm not sure if admissions committees will doubt my mathematical abilities since I've been out of school for so long. In the fall 2018 admissions cycle, I applied to 10 of the top 20, and to Rutgers and MSU. I was rejected from all of the top-20 schools, and only had offers from Rutgers (unfunded) and Michigan State (funded). However, I was also offered (50% tuition off) admissions to Uchicago's MACRM program. My career goal is to be a tenure track professor (obviously, as good a university as possible). My research interests are labor/ed policy/applied micro. So my question is: should I go to Uchicago (which means spending another 1.5 years, spending 40k in tuition, and still potentially not getting into better programs) or take the offer from MSU? In talking with some of the current MACRM students, it seems like if you do well in the first year, Uchicago tends to offer you admissions directly into their (public policy) PhD program, which seems like the placements for Uchicago Public Policy are a tad better than MSU Econ (even within econ programs - but I really don't care whether I end up in a public policy department or an econ department since I would likely do the same applied micro/policy research). Thanks in advance for your advice! :)