The story of the one kid who turned down the Ivies for public honors is catchy but sort of distracting from what I think is supposed to be the main point of the article: that public honors colleges can be a “prudent” path. As @boolaHI pointed out in post 64 above, of the elite schools that give only need based FA, HYPS are the most generous to middle income families. But that’s a handful of schools. Most other top privates can be very challenging for middle class families to afford, especially those in the 90-150K range (I’m not saying this is the exact range but rather guessing). I’m specifically thinking of top students at our public HS who were rejected by HYPS but got into other top schools like Rice, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, for example. But the EFC is just too high especially with siblings in the pipeline and grad school on the horizon. Those students are prime candidates for the public honors programs.