As parents, we must be fair. Our younger son is ~8 years away from college, so we have a little but of time. But absolutely, we cant make all the sacrifices for his older brother. If anything we need to 4X our 529 contributions to his account, based on the lesson we’ve learned. Probably these schools would cost 100K/year then.
Inflation in the cost of college is far higher than general economic inflation. Its ridiculous at best and criminal price gouging in reality, IMHO.
It isn’t just about college costs for siblings, either. We have a very large family, and we have had to weigh EC and educational costs for our younger children as well. If we had to cut out all expenditures, what about the ECs that the older kids got to do that cost $$ that would have to instead pay college tuition? What about summer camp opportunities? Dual enrollment costs? etc. (which all in turn impact the competitiveness of the younger siblings as well!)
If a private school wants to charge $100k, it can. If no one goes there the school will learn that it’s not worth $100k. A few schools could do that and there would still be a line to get in, but a lot of people would say 'Hey, that’s crazy. I’m going to pick the school that is half that price." If they did that today when schools ‘only’ cost $70k, they’d still save $20-30k per year.
It would be better if schools did just jump the tuition to $100k. People who can’t afford $70k, but think they can, would know they can’t afford $100k and never start at that.
Have you thought about pursuing private scholarships and/or competitions? There are at least some scholarships that do not require financial need… If so, I would suggest approaching them like one is writing a grant – tailor the application exactly for the mission of the organization. My DS has done with with grants this year for CMU.
I also wanted to mention that MIT is arguably the top university for Linguistics, one of those “soft” majors. An undergraduate degree from Linguistics at MIT with good letters would practically guarantee full funded admission to a doctoral program, possibly in a field such as computational linguistics, which can be very lucrative and versatile. I would not assume that non-CS degrees from MIT aren’t worth the funds…
Isn’t University of Pittsburgh great at computer science? He can probably get quite a bit of merit for that school.
Pitt has become highly competitive for their top merit awards.
Apply as soon as the application is live for Best merit chances