You sound like a smart, down to earth person who makes sound and well-reasoned decisions. Don’t let other people make you second guess yourself. WashU is an outstanding choice and to be able to graduate debt free from such a great school is “icing on the cake,” as they say. Go to WashU with confidence in your decision, and enjoy all the opportunities it affords you. But most of all, be glad you aren’t going to school with some of those same people who are criticizing your college decision. If they are as snobby, judgmental and non-supportive as they sound, imagine how much fun it would (not) be to spend the next four years with them. Good luck!!
Congratulations on all your acceptances, and on your fantastic choice of WashU!! You made your decision taking all factors into account, and of course finances are a huge factor. WashU is one of the top schools in the country so you certainly have nothing to be ashamed of. People “in the know” consider it as prestigious as any Ivy. Remember, the Ivy League is a sports league in the Northeast…it’s not a finite list of the only prestigious schools in the country. And you will rest easy on your Tempurpedic mattress (ha!) in your WashU dorm, knowing you will graduate debt-free and your parents will breathe a lot easier!
We’re facing a very similar dilemma here…my daughter is trying to decide between Brown with pretty much no aid, and Northeastern with a generous scholarship. She’s getting similar comments and it’s not helping her at all.
Congratulations again and have a wonderful, successful four years at WashU!
OP I can’t tell you how much I admire you for your sane attitude and your maturity. It is nobody’s business to tell you to spend an extra 120,000 plus tens of thousands of dollars more in interest – no matter what the school.
S is at an Ivy. Guess what his second choice was, over other Ivy schools and top LACs? Yup. Wash U. He preferred Wash U over Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Amherst, etc. He even convinced us to fly out to St Louis, spending $ on flights and a hotel, and considering our limited resoures you can imagine that he lobbied pretty hard.
His hunch was right on. The School of Art is fantastic, There is enough flexibility that he could have pursued a dual degree. The housing and campus were great. The food was great. We sat next to a PhD student in the cafeteria and had an amazing conversation about how underrated Wash U is, which…if you think about it, is amounts to more merit money and financial aid for those who want to be there. 
You will no doubt find many of your Wash U classmates turned down ivys as well. Once you graduate from BS, you won’t often (if ever) see most of your BS classmates. Congrats, and here’s to you!
@kitkat231 Congrats on WashU – wise decision. Some of the most successful people I know went to WashU, and many attended top grad schools (Chicago-Booth for MBA, Ivy schools for other things). You will be successful at WashU. I recall reading a study that admission to an Ivy – and not attending – correlates just as well with future successful outcomes than actually attending. Your maturity is admirable and will take you far in life.
I am a proud WashU alum (from 25+ years ago) and I absolutely loved the place. I feel like I really figured out who I was freshman year at Wash U and I grew so much in so many ways over my four years. I chose it over several better known schools because it just felt like home from the moment I stepped on campus for the first time and that feeling persisted throughout my time there.
As an aside, I later went to grad school at Penn and hated it. I kept comparing my experience to my time at WashU and it just wasn’t the right fit at all.
Good luck next year!
You could just tell them you chose WashU because academically it was the equivalent to any of the other schools you were accepted and you wanted to get away from the pretentiousness:)
Are you talking about WUSt.Louis? Wow! Your classmates are idiots if you will pardon my French…“vast difference in quality?” Even for prestige hounds, Penn and WUSL are very close in the Forbes rankings!! If you were offered a Porsche for 100k or a Maserati on sale for $20k, you’d be a fool to insist on the Porsche!
Tell noses classmate you can’t believe she’d give up a free house…
@Sunny66 just found an article about that study - very interesting!! Thanks for mentioning it.
https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/2011/03/01/the-ivy-league-earnings-myth
“OP I can’t tell you how much I admire you for your sane attitude and your maturity.”
I agree 100% (as apparently does everyone else on CC! With good reason).
“If they are as snobby, judgmental and non-supportive as they sound,…”
One thing to learn from this, sometimes good people will have bad ideas. The people who are criticizing your choice have a bad idea. This does not necessarily mean that they are bad people. Sometimes when a friend has a bad idea we just have to ignore them on one issue.
Wash U is a great school and to try to make distinctions among the top 20 universities really is an exercise in splitting hairs. My D was admitted but did not get a scholarship so it was not affordable for us. I know many top students who were waitlisted or denied. Be proud of your accomplishments!
The area around the university has a lot to offer and you’ll be in a position to enjoy it because your parents won’t be stretching to pay for your tuition.
Thanks for the link @jillpnk, chances are the OP will be a happy, well-adjusted college student and also will be highly successful in career and/or grad school results. My sense is that the snobby prep schoolers (1) will be at weaker schools than OP, and (2) even if at “more prestigous” schools, will be less happy and less successful than OP.
The fact that your peers feel to need to simplify the vast complexities of a school’s worth down to whether or not it’s an ivy ought to serve as an indication of their insulting lack of knowledge on the subject.
It sounds like you KNOW you made the right choice — a great school a great price. Keep in mind that you are one of many many people who choose a lower cost option. In your case you are fortunate that your lower cost option happens to be a fantastic school that you feel comfortable at. You already know that if you do well at WashU, which I expect you will, you can get anywhere you want to go in life. Don’t worry about anyone else when you know you did the right thing for you and your family.
A while back I compiled a spreadsheet to track the college matriculations of approximately 6,000 students from 10 “elite” US high schools (Exeter, Trinity/NY, Hotchkiss, Horace Mann, Dalton, Harvard Westlake, College Preparatory/Oakland, Lakeside/Seattle, Ransom Everglades, and San Francisco University High). By my count, Washington University St. Louis ranked 15th out of 204 colleges in total matriculations from those 10 high schools (ahead of JHU, Tufts, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Duke, Williams, Berkeley, MIT, etc.) So, its matriculation preference ranking seems to be slightly higher than its US News ranking (19th).
15th is its aggregate rank for matriculations from all 10 high schools … but there are regional variations (as one would expect) in the individual high school preferences. Among the 5 northeastern high schools I tracked, I counted only 35 matriculations (with 21 from Horace Mann alone). From Harvard Westlake alone, I counted 59. Stanford got <= 10 matriculations from several individual northeastern high schools, but many more from some of the west coast high schools. See, the median distance students travel from home to college is only 94 miles. Although that number does vary by SAT scores, family income, etc., I’d expect to see regional preference variations even among top students.
FWIW, I think you made a great choice.
Who cares what they think! WashU is a top 20, top 15 school, and the difference between WashU and UPenn is minuscule; it is an Ivy level school. So who cares if it doesn’t have as much prestige among these snobbery kids?
Oh, and apparently the food at Washington U is awesome.
You will get to devour some 2500-3000 meals there. Bon appétit!
People will second guess most of your life choices; your college, your spouse, the kind of car you buy, your religious beliefs, how your raise your children, etc. I’d say just tune 'em out and try not to be that way to others.
^that. Soon these ppl will be in your rear view mirror!
You should be very proud to say you turned down several Ivies to go to WashU on academic scholarship. Congrats and well done.