It’s a thing that many people have to do. It’s sad, but many people end up choosing a school for financial reasons and they end up actually loving the place they enroll. Rarely do people look back with regret, it’s just how you may be feeling right now because decisions are looming. It doesn’t matter what your friends think, honestly it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because where you went to school will probably be 2 minutes of conversation out of the whole other things you will talk about. Plus, we naturally shift to people we are closer with in college anyway, not worth the month of interactions you may have with them left. It is not they that will have to bear the consequences to take out loans. And Berkeley is just as good as Brown if not better.
The best way to deal is to just meet and talk to people that will attend the same institution as you and get excited because you’re going places. Remember, the vast majority of students don’t end up going to college, so in hindsight, these matters are very trivial and are because we are in a relative position of privilege (and by we I mean the CC community).