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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So which flagship school do people draw the line at? If you know that college will be expensive for your family and you will not get enough aid to ease the stress then which state college is good enough to go to and say no to a school like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Georgetown, etc. Because many families around the country are facing reality that their child can not go to any dream school they get into.
UC Berkeley 
UCLA
UVA
Michigan 
UNC 
Wisconsin
Texas
U of Washington
Maryland
Ohio
Minnesota 
Alabama
Are any of these good enough?
Penn State
And on and on

[/quote]

I was the first PP that posted pages ago regarding that the decision depends highly on what the OP's son's goals are (i.e. medicine, natsec/military, law, or direct-from-ug prestige occupations like consulting or banking).

There really is a simple rule IMO, the more technical and guild-based an occupation, the less school prestige has to do with anything. If my children were dead set on being doctors, and were good standardized test takers, almost any decent four year public school would be more than enough. Why? Because medicine is highly structured in terms of path by the AMA and the licensing requirements make it guild-like, thereby it doesn't really matter where you go for UG as much as it matters what your pre-med course gpa is and  your MCAT scores.

Hell it doesn't even matter that much where you go to med school (there is a difference between allopathic and osteopathic), but even a low ranked allopathic school will lead you to a top residency in a highly competitive specialty if you destroy your USMLE's and do well in med school and your rotations.

consulting and banking/trading...and silicon valley/tech marketing do not have the same testing, screening, licensing requirements so UG prestige matters more.

Higher ranked schools (like wealth) allow for greater margin for error and success in a wider range of fields.

That's the trade off for cost.

now given this, i'm going to leave off Georgetown from your list because gtown doesn't open the same doors as H,S, or M. I would turn down Georgetown even if I wanted to work on WallStreet or Mckinsey for Berkeley, UCLA, UVA, or Michigan. Gtown's added prestige is not enough to pay 50-100k more in aggregate over those four schools IMO.

This analysis, mind you, does not take into consideration student fit/happiness.....which I can't give a blanket answer to because one student might be happy in tuscaloossa while another might not and therefore destroy their grades and really shoot themselves in the foot.

but I hope my answer gives a rough idea as to why rankings matter.

I personally would draw the line at Maryland (and put PSU over Wisconsin due to its strength in engineering and the fact that given its ranking it does place decently well in nyc finance).

But even then, I would have a REALLY tough time turning down H,S, or M for MD or PSU (unless I wanted to be a doctor). [/quote]

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