@harper8 Thanks. I’ve more or less known this all my life. I grew up in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, went to a good but not great private school on a scholarship, and ended up at the UCSD school of medicine alongside Stanford, Yale and Berkeley grads. (Among other things, being a big fish in a little pond gets you really wonderful lab jobs and fantastic references). My oldest went to a great but not fantastic tech school, and ended up in a fantastic grad school, and works in a lab alongside MIT grads, which is the top school in his field, though his is not far behind.
Now, we are science nerds, obviously. A big-name school with a lot of intangible benefit might be worth it in some fields where merit is harder to quantify. But, at the risk of repeating myself, most kids aren’t at those schools, and yet their parents are spending close to that amount, or more, as the Ivies have generous endowments for merit aid. I can afford to blow the money, though I don’t want to. Luckily, the middle child who went to a private-but-not-Ivy school got merit aid so I didn’t have to.
It’s hard if they are disappointed. I’ve tried to tell the three of them how fabulous they are, and that a school is lucky to have them, and if the school doesn’t want them, or doesn’t want to give them merit aid, then pfffft. Someplace will, and why not go there? So far, so good.