In contrast, kids who end up with substantial student debt often report regrets about attending their dream school and wish they had chosen a cheaper option
18 Likes
A reminder that debating is not allowed on CC.
My husband went to Illinois undergrad and Fordham Law School. He had a fantastic experience at Illinois, made lifelong friends, loves Big 10 sports, and, coming from a small town, did not want a small LAC atmosphere. No shortage of bright kids at Illinois, one of his peers was the writer Dave Eggers. As others have said, it truly is an individual decision with no universal right answer.
7 Likes
I agree that this is such an individual decision. I don’t feel like our situation is relevant but suffice to say our D didn’t choose the cheapest option (free), nor the most expensive (which we could afford without hardship) and none of us have any regrets that she is at her top choice.
I am chiming in about the grad school thing. I may have missed what your child is intended to major, but for some degrees, you may get a company to pay all or some of the grad school cost. I have an engineering undergrad who will go into the work force after graduation and her company will pay for her MBA down the road. One of her young colleagues is getting a MS in sustainability on the company’s dime. Company was willing to relocate her to a plant near the grad school she wanted and has given her flexible hours to attend class, which they pay for. My D’s other internship company had similar tuition reimbursement and her friends are reporting the same for their companies. This was a more common perk than I had realized in my D’s industry.
I realize it’s hard to predict the future (life would be so much easier with a crystal ball) but it’s possible you won’t have grad school costs.
5 Likes
If you change the question a little and ask does anyone have any regrets with whatever college decision their kids made, very few will answer in the affirmative. So what ultimately is the point? Discussion moves towards one of thousands of “is it worth it” discussions on this board that ultimately drift toward cliches. And resolving nothing nor helping in any real way along the way.
3 Likes
I went to my dream school - Syracuse for journalism - late 80s.
Had a great experience.
My dad doesn’t regret the $15K a year. So I agree that people will justify it because they made the decision.
But after seeing how overcrowded we were (too many students, not enough experience at being a newscaster, etc.) - and visiting my friend at Montana where her entire class of 20 people found employment vs. it seems like 90% of ours didn’t in the field -
I always thought - I should have gone to my #2 choice - ASU - and saved my dad the loot!!!
Of course, I got my MBA there - although - unrelated to it being my original #2 and more related to them paying me to attend.
2 Likes
I think you could go read the posts in the Transfer forum and the posts tagged as Transfer for some ideas about why kids want to transfer and that might give you some insight. Is it about money? Is it about being unhappy at their less than dream school? Is it about the dream school being too expensive or not living up to the hype?
9 Likes
Sometimes, there are students asking in the transfer section who are motivated to transfer because their current school is too expensive. But it seems like the OP of this thread can afford the more expensive school.
I think the OP needs to make a list of specific reasons why Baylor would be a better fit than CU. Find students at both schools and ask a lot of questions. What is the day to day reality at each school in relation to what the student wants from undergrad? What’s important to her and how do each of those things present themselves on campus?
How much more intimate are Baylor classes? Could she find a like minded religious community at CU or does she just really want a student body with the overall vibe she wants? What do the departments in her major offer? How is grad school placement? How does career services work on the chance that she changes her mind about grad school? Even other things like how does housing work?
5 Likes
Agree on the grad school thing. With the exceptions of medical school and law school, I think both of our kids could figure out a way to grad school paid for at least in part.
1 Like
We paid almost full fare at a private LAC for our eldest. We don’t regret it. We all feel that it was critical to the success she is now having in her career.
The school she ended up at had the environment she needed to become the best version of herself. I’m not sure she would have had that at the less expensive options she was accepted to.
8 Likes
That’s a different calculus to me - there is stretching to afford the dream and then there is taking on a significant loan burden. I’m not a big fan of the latter because I think it can be very, very limiting.
11 Likes
This is where I think the idea of a dream school comes in. Bowdoin at full-freight vs Keynon at $20k or Grinnell at $25k. Colgate or saving $80-120k at Santa Clara or Furman (which university is LMU?). These are colleges that all have similar classifications and that are going to have a similar environment. Here the poster’s children all had definite, strong feelings about their top choice even though the experience was likely to be similar.
Comparing a a full-freight T20 (whether national university or liberal arts college) to a flagship brings in different fit factors (size, classes, etc) that need to be weighed, although in sheer numbers, the flagship might have more high-stat peers than the T20 (owing to scale), and will come in significantly lower in price. Comparing a T50 to a branch of the state university or a directional state university is an even bigger difference. There’s a much smaller pool of academically similar peers, likely to have less extracurricular involvement, and other issues, although likely to be the lowest cost option by far for students seeking a 4-year option. There are definitely gradations in the comparisons that families are making in their college decisions.
11 Likes
Loyola Marymount. She was given their top merit ($30k/year) and direct entry into their honors program which applicants generally have to apply for admission. On paper, it looked awesome but LA county was so locked down with Covid that we couldn’t visit and get a sense of fit.
1 Like
I am not a fan of the “dream school” concept because it seems short sighted to me. However, that’s me. If the OP has done the financial analysis and has determined that Baylor is affordable then it should be considered. I also don’t think you should send your child to a cheap school just because it’s cheap. If it’s very affordable for you and fits the parameters you child has established then the cost is something on the positive column. My 2nd D went to her safety even though "higher ranked’ schools were just as cheap if not cheaper. It was her number one choice going into her college search and she would have been happy applying to just that one school. I definitely agree that if you have to borrow money or the money you use will stress you financially in the future then I would consider the school unaffordable. Most of the opportunities your child will get will be the ones they create. If OP’s child looks at college as a route to prepare for the future will there be fewer opportunities to be created at CU vs. Baylor?
2 Likes
My D wishes vet school, so we are expecting that, IF she can get in, she will be paying and paying and paying… Interestingly, at the big ag schools, many offer MS and PhD programs in animal science, so we are hopeful she may get interested in these! 
2 Likes
Call me crazy but I like to hear a variety of opinions when making a $150,000+ decision.
6 Likes
My S22 doesn’t have a dream school or even a clear #1. Once all decisions are in we will visit or revisit the schools he gets into. The lack of a dream school (or clear #1) is nice in many ways - no big disappointments, open to several options etc - but is also a pain since it means a lot of debate on the back end. There are significant cost differences between the schools, but we are letting him choose without regard to cost because we can comfortably afford it. If that wasn’t the case, we’d have discussed it up front and eliminated anything that was out of budget.
9 Likes
We paid for BS and we told DS to choose the best fit for him for college regardless of cost. But we had saved to do that. DS had a great experience.
Might he have had a great experience elsewhere? I suspect so. He saw different benefits at different schools he considered. He discovered things at the school he chose that weren’t even part of the consideration when he enrolled.
He’d have different friends, probably a different job.
I think you need to figure out how much of a stretch Baylor would be for you and what you think you’d be giving up. For our family, the whole experience-- not simply the academics-- seemed worth it. I think it was but there’s no way to replay those years under a different scenario.
4 Likes
I wouldn’t call anyone crazy for wanting to hear different opinions when making a $150k+ decision. Actually its smart, rational, wise, etc.
But where I think that falls apart to a very large extent is seeking opinions from people on an anonymous message board. Do you actually know the people from whom you are seeking opinions? Are they being totally honest? Exaggerating some (or a lot)? Is there confirmaton bias? Do you know the financial circumstances of the family? Or how their kid actually compares to yours?
Even if there are no issues with any of those, and lets assume someone else here checks off every box that applies to your kid, does that mean you should make the same decision their kid made? Not necessarily. They assuredly left off some factors (impossible to list them all) which may well have been different from you/your kid and that may well make a college choice very different. And even the boxes that do line up are certainly nuanced. Small classes do not mean the same thing to everybody for example. And as a result, making decisions based on what worked for them may not work well for your kid even if it lines up on paper/on an online message board.
Taking it back to something some one said yesterday, I would let my 17 year old kid make the college decision (on their own) before I let people on a site like this make or influence it.
To each his/her own.
6 Likes