Rower1738, are you waiting to hear from any of the UCs?
Berkeley or UCLA (in-state) would cost you ~$17K/year less than Texas or ~$25K/year less than Michigan.
For what it’s worth, USNWR ranks Berkeley, UCLA … and USC … a bit higher than Michigan or Texas.
Why would you want to pay a very high price premium to attend a peer school?
If we’re trying to compare the financial resources of public and private universities, I would think it makes sense to compare total revenues (rather than simply comparing private school endowments with an estimated, hypothetical public school endowment). Here are some revenue figures I get from the IPEDS data reports:
… USC … UCLA … Michigan … Texas
Total Revenues … $4.8B … $6.1B … $7.8B … $3.5B
Enrollment (FTE students) … 39K … 41K … 42K … 49K
*
Revenue per Student … $123K … $149K …$185K… $72K
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So by this measure, Michigan’s financial resources are indeed greater than USC’s, but not 3 or 4 times greater.
How do these revenues translate to resources available to enrolled students?
That’s a difficult question.
If you look at instructional spending per student, USC seems to compare more favorably:
… USC … UCLA … Michigan … Texas
Instructional Spending … $1.6B … $1.7B … $1B … $0.8B
Instructional Spending/Student … $42K … $41K … $24K … $16K
However, this couldn’t be a perfect apples-to-apples comparison (since each of these schools may be dealing with a rather different set of cost factors).
The one figure that the OP is in a good position to compare, on a more-or-less apples-to-apples basis, is his net costs.