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how about looking at your present years with regret b/c of that nice monthly pay deduction you have to swallow trying to pay down your debt+interest. sounds a little worse.</p>
<p>Got2havK,</p>
<p>Have you spent much time on Stanford campus? </p>
<p>A little story about my daughter. We live in SoCal now, but we lived in South Bay for a few years when she was younger. I am from LA and my wife is from the Bay Area. Half the extended family lives down here, and the other half up there. All my daughter heard growing up was she should go to Stanford, and it was always her goal. She attended Stanford’s EPGY program four summers ago, where she took a really engrossing science class while living on campus in a dorm. She loved the class, her classmates, and the rest of her “college” experience, but she started having doubts about Stanford. Loved the kids in her program, but said there was something odd about regular students on campus. Cold, stressed out, unfriendly was the general theme. I said maybe that was just during summer, let’s check it out some more during regular school year. We have, and the opinion just got reinforced. And after visiting the campus with her last fall, (although I’ve been there lots of times over the years, but never attempted to sense the “vibe”) I can see her point as well.</p>
<p>Also, she/we know a handful of current/recent students, and their opinions range from “four years of hell” to at best, mixed. OTOH, we know several dozens of Cal students and they all absolutely love it to the last one. We visited Cal on the same trip last fall, and the difference between two campuses was so drastic. Even though it was a cool, drizzly day at Cal, campus was full of people everywhere, filled with laughter and happy chatter. She absolutely loved it and I could see why. Cal became her number one campus “vibe” school, which is very important to her. We ended up making her apply to Stanford anyway, “just in case”, and she ended up getting rejected, but she also got Regents from Cal, and once she had that, she knew she was definitely not going to Stanford. She did also like a couple of Ivy’s that we visited, but just the two, and we’ve checked out them all, and then some. But in the end, she got the best possible offer from the school she liked the most. Driving out to make the ROHT event tomorrow, followed by Cal day Saturday.</p>
<p>Anyway, just one story. Doesn’t directly correlate to yours, since she did not get accepted to Stanford, but in a way it does, since it was also her dream since childhood, but she would not have gone even if she did get in, since she’s discovered something that suits her much better.</p>