<p>Just pondering. And this is aimed toward people who won't get need-based aid.</p>
<p>How do any of you justify/afford your child going to a $45,000 per year school when there are decent public schools in your state. For example, we have UVA and W&M, and my son will probably be accepted into both, at a cost of about $15,000 per year. Is it really worth an extra $120-150k over his 4 to 5 years in college to send him to Vassar, GW, etc?</p>
<p>I have heard that it doesn't really matter too much (within reason of course) where you go undergrad, if you plan on going to grad school anyway.</p>
<p>If you click the more featured discussion link in the parent's forum, there are a number of discussions about education and money
here's another one
Death of hte dream school</p>
<p>That's pretty much true Ray. But in this case the benchmarks are UVA and W&M, which have a cost of attendence at (I'm guessing) the high teens for instate vs. about 50K a year for GWU.</p>
<p>Namtrag, there was another recent thread regarding someone that had a choice between U Illinois OOS vs. James Madison.</p>
<p>Our state flagship U is both large and in the middle of the boondocks. For one kiddo, the need to be in metropolitan area justified our decision to send him to an expensive school (and it has been WELL worth the expense) because of the opportunities that would have not been available to him in his major if he had been in a rural area. For second child, we made the decision that a smaller school was essential. Sorry...but the flagship U has over 25,000 students. We looked at the costs, but also added an extra year of the instate costs to our formula bacause almost no one is able to get all of the courses completed in four years. We decided that the smaller school was the better way to go. We do not have instate schools like the ones in Virginia. If we lived in that state, our kid would be going to an instate public because there are a number of good choices. Not so here.</p>