This association with buying the car or a house or whatever else is NOT applicable when one chooses the college. Not even close! There is no such thing as " the Toyota education vs Mercedes". Education depends much more on a student than the place that the student attends. This is getting lost in all this hoopla about prestige and ranking and the name recognition. If you want to attend at Harvard, please, do so!! There is no reason though, to call it the Mercedes education vs Toyota education at some random in-state public. We have seen personally the results of both landing in the same medical school class. There was no difference, everybody was on the same footing, there was no advantages for those who graduated from Harvard / Stanford / Berkeley / JHU…I can go down the list. The only difference for them was the bigger student loans at the end of the road. And when the time was to apply for residencies, that was even more evident that nobody cared about applicants’ college name.