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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Living in Virginia means, for me, that my kids’ safety schools are state schools.  I see no reason to pay for private when there’s likely a comparable public option in our home state.  FWIW we would not get financial aid and could afford the privates. I honestly just think it’s a waste once you get below the top 20. [/quote]

So 20 is worth it but 21 isn’t. Gotcha. [/quote]
 
NP: I'm a professor at a research university and I know faculty at nearly all of the top 75 or so liberal arts colleges.  I would say the colleges typically ranked in the top 10ish are qualitatively different in terms of academic excellence--primarily because of the strength of the students and the capacity of the endowments, but that after that point to somewhere roughly in the 80s all are all excellent schools without meaningful distinctions in the academic value they offer students among them (though some have relative areas of strength--e.g., sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts etc.). I wouldn't hesitate sending my kids to any that were a reasonable financial fit (and many often are through merit aid offers). [b]Many of these private schools end up costing the same or less than UVA or W&M.[/quote][/b]

I don't think this is case anymore for most private school packages.  It used to be, but now that privates are 72K-80K and climbing, the packages offered no longer "end up costing the same or less than UVA or W&M".  In our experience of running the college admissions gauntlet three times, we learned a) schools that claim they meet 100% of "demonstrable need" don't mean our kind of real need.  This is obvious but I'm writing for parents new to this forum who may get sucked in by those claims.  All three times we applied for FAFSA or other types of aid we were given zero financial aid even though on paper we clearly needed it  We have expensive care issues involving parents; special need kid expenses; retirement to worry about (typical sandwich generation family) and our children's funds that we set up for college when they were born (no 529s back then) were decimated by the 2008 crash and never recovered.  In fact, we had to raid one to pay for a special needs school and tutoring.  FAFSA doesn't care that you are spending a fortune taking care of your parents.  So we received no financial aid for any child, but gladly took the minimum loan package offered ($5500).  2) as to merit aid, the better schools don't give it because they don't have to.  One child had a record for Ivies and very top schools but received no aid offers.  However, she  received two unsolicited offers from small LACs you've never heard of simply because they bought the ACT list and wanted DC's ACT score so they could include it in the range sent to USN&WR.  However, when we subtracted that $26,000 from the LAC's total cost of attendance, in-state was still, by far, a better option.  3) most parents don't realize they are paying the delta between a private and in-state with after-tax dollars.  So if Northwestern is $76,000 and you receive a merit scholarship of $26,000, you still owe $50,000 and that means going out and making $60-75K to pay the $50K in after-tax dollars.  Multiply that by three kids and by five years (most kids are now taking  morethan five years to graduate) and  you find you are spending more than you can afford.   At the time we applied, UVA was $16,000 in tuition a year and we locked that in.  DD is now off campus in inexpensie housing, no car, and makes her own meals.  The other two children also went in-state.  I thank my lucky stars every day that we live in a state with such wonderful choices as UVA, W&M, Virginia Tech and others.[/quote]

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