Reply to If you turned down a top liberal arts school for a cheaper state school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let me say that I think UMD is a fantastic school and anyone who gets in - which is a much tougher admit than it used to be - can get a great education. And in general, smart, ambitious, determined kids can go anywhere from any school.

Still for us, my immigrant husband who won't spend a dime on anything other than education felt VERY strongly about ensuring that our kids could go to the best possible school that they could get into. His argument was that their horizons will be exponentially wider if they are at a competitive school with peers from all over the country and all over the world.

That is true in my own experience - I lucked into an Ivy back when an ordinary smart kid could do that. It exposed me to ideas and people whom I would have never met at my state flagship, even though it is/was a fine school.[/quote]

At UMD you will meet "peers from all over the country and all over the world". There is a large cohort of kids at UMD (or any big flagship) who had the intelligence and academic chops to succeed at a T20 school but didn't get in or didn't go for a variety of reasons - including money - but the simple fact is that every elite school rejects a dozen or more qualified kids for every kid they accept. They have to, they don't have room for all the qualified kids. And those qualified kids go somewhere... like UMD.[/quote]

Yes, as I said in my post, there are tons of smart kids at UMD and there are people from all over the country and the world as well. But attending a state flagship that draws 3/4 of its undergraduates from in-state is not an identical experience to going to a highly competitive private school like Emory. If the OP's kid is going to turn down Emory just to keep the money in the bank in case it's needed for grad school, they should know what they're missing. There's no way I would be doing what I'm doing today if I had gone to my state flagship.[/quote]

UMD won't be an "identical" experience to Emory, but it won't be a worse experience either. The OP would be paying four times as much for Emory as for UMD, and I certainly wouldn't consider Emory four times better than UMD.[/quote]

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