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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Assuming UMC, at what point does a school stop being worth the money (say sticker price) over cheaper options? Is it just Harvard and MIT?[/quote]

Let's say that we're talking about families that would have to take a lot of loans to pay the difference, and we're talking about wonderful, spiky, quirky, intellectual kids who have a real chance of getting into a school like MIT or Tufts, not super well-adjusted, well-rounded, moderately brilliant, athletic kids who seem likely to be state flagship royalty. And let's say the state flagship is the University of South Carolina, not a near-Ivy like UVa or William & Mary, or a school like UMD that clearly attracts many broke, high-stats kids. Let's assume that the kids really do get into the state flagship; they're not using a private school as a backup for UVa.

My feeling is that:

- Top 50 schools with fewer than about 6,000 freshmen might be worth it for students who are at a high risk of getting lost at a big school. (If you double the odds of the student d getting through school, the risk-adjusted cost of the smaller school is about the same as the cost of the big state school.)

- Top 20 schools and some schools that, technically, rank outside the Top 20 (example: Harvey Mudd, if a list leaves out Harvey Mudd) are worth it for the kinds of students who were ready for college when they were 12. In some ways, a student that different has what, if handled incorrectly, could be a serious disability. If parents would have stretched to send a child with hearing problems to a boarding school for students  with hearing problems, they should be willing to stretch to send an ultra-high-stats child to Harvey Mudd.

- Top 20 schools and other schools known for producing future Ph.D.'s are worth it for very high-stats students who desperately want to be academic researchers.

- Top 20 schools and some lower-ranked schools with a lot of very rich students are worth it for students who want to go into investment banking or other fields where undergrad connections make a huge difference.

I don't think that taking out PLUS loans or facing severe reductions in living standards would be worth it to send a wonderful, functional, quirky kid who's bright in a fairly normal way to T10 school that costs about $10,000 per year more than a solid but unexciting state flagship, or to a school that ranks below the top 50 and costs any more than the state flagship.

If, say, Jane Doe has no idea what she wants to major in, but she could survive in a big school, and she could go to the University of South Carolina and find at least 50 intellectual peers in the freshman class, having the parents take out a lot of PLUS loans to send her to Vassar, wouldn't make a lot of sense.

If the choice was between MIT and the University of South Carolina, and Jane wanted to major in physics, maybe paying $10,000 more per year for MIT would be worth it. But, if coming up with more than $10,000 per year would cause severe hardship for the family, even MIT wouldn't be worth that extra money. Partly because, for most normal bright kids, it's never clear how well they're really going to do at a place like MIT. They might be better off as big fish, with enough money, at the University of South Carolina than as poor, stressed out serfs at MIT. If they go to MIT, blow a lot of money and flunk out, that's a catastrophe.

[/quote]

whoever wrote this is wonderful and spiky[/quote]

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