Yeah, working full time while going to school far time is no picnic, to put it lightly. It’s even worse if you do it with an engineering degree, which probably takes closer to 5 years than 2 (which is common for MBA part-time). Probably has a lot to do with why many people who say they will go back to school never do, even when their career starts to take a hit for it.
In some ways it it like buying a new car (ok… a new car 4 years in a row… ha or more for multiple children). If you can do so easily out of savings, it might make sense to splurge for a high end car. But it’s not worth going deep into debt. There is a lot of value to a basic Honda Civic, and it gets you where you need to go.
Well… I buy used cars that aren’t high end to start with, partly so I can afford tuition. 
Both a high-end car and an elite education are important and valuable quality of life boosters - you could get by without them, but they really do help. I know exactly how different my perspective was about driving before and after I got my first high-end car, and I’m sure the same would be true about education for a high-end school. But you would be a fool to spend money that you don’t have on an education/car that you cannot afford.
The truth of the matter is that most American families can’t afford a high end car or full sticker price for private colleges. Of course being frugal on cars helps save for college…
Re: #63
What quality of life boost does a high end car necessarily give?
@ucbalumnus, I upped the trim package on my last Honda Accord from LX (which is what I always had) to EX…I feel like I have arrived…
Higher quality things that are more than just functional aren’t just nice to have, but they also make it much more pleasant to use them. If you spend quite a lot of time in a car, especially if you have a fairly long commute to work (1 hour daily in one direction is not uncommon for many people), and if it’s unpleasant, then that detracts from your day-to-day performance in the long run. In the same vein, someone who travels very frequently would probably be much more productive if they fly first class, because those plane rides are pretty exhausting and it’s so much worse when you sit in a cramped space and are given minimal service. That might seem kind of trivial, and I know why many people think it to be so (I did for a long time), but when you have fewer minor but persistent annoyances to deal with (e.g. sitting in a “functional but sort of unpleasant” car for 15 hours a week), it’s a lot easier to put your best effort into your work.
I’d say that elite schools can be thought of in the same way. There are more than enough top-tier students, who end up being high-achieving and who go far, who come from the less prestigious schools. Some of them do their post-undergraduate education in top schools, others do not, so there’s not necessarily any requirement that their success directly necessitates a top school education. And yet, it’s a useful boost. Top schools have more advanced classes, more support for students, better professional/graduate preparation, better instantaneous appeal to admissions/employers based on the school+GPA, people will give you the benefit of the doubt by default, etc. More than enough people have managed to succeed without any of these advantages, but I think we can all agree that it’s simpler to play life on Easy rather than on Hard Mode.
The giant qualifier here is that it’s much, much, much easier to go through life with low debt than with high debt, which eclipses all of these little advantages. So paying out-of-pocket for a degree or other luxury that you can’t really afford is an extremely foolish decision.
@NeoDymium, I think the problem with that argument is it’s basic presumption, that the elite schools are actually better. I’m not arguing that they are or they aren’t, but I can say some former grads and professors of said schools (CalTech, Stanford and MIT) dissuaded my son from even applying. They raved about the quality of the graduate programs and said the connections were valuable, but each felt the undergraduate teaching at their respective institutions was not great. Small anecdotes for sure, but I think the underlying argument isn’t as black and white as painted with the car example.
“but each felt the undergraduate teaching at their respective institutions was not great.”
In the bad old days I would agree with you about Stanford. But in the last 15+ years they have addressed that problem very successfully .
As for MIT and Caltech especially, they do not and never have “coddled” UG’s but instead throw as much at them as they can handle.
That is why getting an UG education there has been described as "trying to drink water from a firehose. "
Its the same way now.
Neither are the best places for “typical” smart UG students.
Those who are really really smart, are very fast learners, and lover challenging problems do the best.
An education benefits you for a lifetime. A nice car depreciates, and is gone in a few years. The difference is huge.
It never is black and white. More expensive never means that it is necessarily higher quality, but higher quality things are usually more expensive. While going overboard on price is not worth it, neither is cheapness - you want the best value based on affordability and quality in all cases, and that isn’t found on either extreme of the price spectrum.
I am aware of the many disadvantages of top schools. To those who aren’t, I offer [this thread](What are the Lifetime Advantages of Attending Top Colleges - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums) as a somewhat nuanced, very opinionated take on the elite/non-elite debate. And yet, I would highly doubt that too many people would, all else held equal (let’s say overall cost is the same), choose to go to State U over MIT or Stanford. Sure, the teaching may not be the best (I have enough experience with the ineffective “elite” way of teaching to last a lifetime), but like with any school there are better and worse teachers and you just have to get through it. For any of the faults that the “best in the field” schools may have, very few people will say that the education provided is anything lower than “above average” - State U may be a 1 or a 10, but no one would think that MIT is anything below a 7.
You’re right that quality and prestige are not always directly correlated. But I’d say that after each school is properly evaluated, if you find State U to be a 7 and Elite U to be a 9, which is the most common trade-off between “affordable and pretty good” vs “top tier luxury” then the choice really does come down mostly to money. Since that’s how it goes quite often, I think that the presumption of elite being better is mostly true. Similarly, a $3k car may be better than a $30k car, and in fact this happens often, but you’d be very wrong to think that you couldn’t get something better for $30k than for $3k.
@menloparkmom, effective instruction does not equate to coddling in my mind. And, is “drinking water from a firehose” better? Both are considered the “elite” schools. I can’t argue with their reputation, but how much of it translates to the quality of the undergraduate experience? I don’t think that’s clear.
Well, I’m not sure how true that is for education. A proper education gives you a strong foundation to build upon, but it is not and never can be enough. Coming from Elite U does a lot for you when you’re 22, but if by 30 your most prominent achievement is that you went to Elite U a decade ago, that’s not really very impressive and may even count against you. Or another way of thinking of it: do people care more about whether Prominent Expert X came from Elite U or State U, or whether New Grad Y did?
But of course, the fact that things depreciate don’t mean that they are bad or that they don’t matter. A car depreciates, but in the meantime provides a very valuable service (and since they lose 70% of their cost but only 20% of their usability in the first few years, can be bought on the cheap 
). An education is less valuable than what you manage to do with it after you graduate, but it’s valuable whether or not it actually depreciates.
Students who graduate from Caltech and MIT will have received superior educations in STEM. And are well qualified to go on the high paying jobs or to graduate school [ which is the goal of a very hi % of UG’s at both schools, especially Caltech] . That is why students choose to go there.
Neither are the place to go for a “typical” UG experience.
There are plenty of other colleges that provide that kind of experience.
Re #67
However, there are nice comfortable cars that are relatively inexpensive. It is not necessary to spend high end money to get a pleasant car.
This is the classic YMMV situation right here. 
What is your opinion about paying full sticker price for an engineering degree at a prestigious liberal arts university (Vanderbilt, WashU, Rice) vs. paying very little (with scholarships) to a State U that has a great reputation for engineering (UT, TAMU)?
No engineer that hires you is going to care if your school is strong in the liberal arts. They care if it has a solid or better engineering program that will give you the skills necessary to succeed at their company and as part of their team.
That said, Washington University, Vanderbilt, and Rice all have fantastic engineering programs in their own right. There won’t be any advantage to them due to their liberal arts strengths, but they’ll hold their own in an engineering vs engineering battle against just about any other school.
Naturally. It’s generally the most reasonable choice to wait for a $50k car to drop to $15k after just a couple of years than to buy it new and lose 30% of its value as it drives off the lot. The real comparison is more along the lines of functional but bare-bones $3k vs luxury $15k. Colleges offer discounts from their sticker price too.
Buying high quality things doesn’t mean that you have to be financially irresponsible in getting them. If anything, you have to be more financially responsible to make sure your money was well-spent.