He turned down every Ivy League school. Stanford too. Who is he and where is he going?

He turned down Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities, and, for that matter, every other school in the Ivy League school. He said “no” to Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt too, as well as Washington University in St. Louis and New York University. So who he is and where is he going?

He is Ronald Nelson, a high school senior from Memphis, Tennessee, who decided to accept an offer to attend the University of Alabama’s honors program with a full scholarship. Why? According to Business Insider, he wanted to go to a school while saving money for medical school, and the University of Alabama gave him the best offer.

Nelson’s academic credentials were top-notch: a 4.58 combined grade point average with 15 Advanced Placement courses, a 34 out of 36 on the ACT and 2260 out of 2400 on his SAT.

The Business Insider article says:

Nelson and his family were faced with a choice — stretch their budget and potentially take on debt for a brand-name school, or save their money for a graduate degree down the line. His father, Ronald Sr., is an engineer who works as a manager at the Federal Aviation Administration and his mother, Sandra, works in management at FedEx headquarters.

“I think it would have been possible, given some sacrifice,” Ronald Sr. told Business Insider about sending his son to an Ivy League school.

But the high school senior decided he did not want to take on debt — which he would have accumulated because no other school offered him a free ride. And, he said, he doesn’t think going to Alabama will prevent him from getting in to a top medical school.

He was quoted as saying:

“I’ve had a lot of people questioning me — ‘Why are you doing this?’ — but after I explain my circumstances, they definitely understand where I’m coming from.”