Your DD is not going to make up the $200K difference between costs, I can tell you that. You have a dilemma i that you can cough up the money, though it hurts. IF you couldn’t, this would not be an issue. Frankly, with an option that is so highly rated as UMich at such a good price, I’d start giving DD some finance issues. If she can’t see the magnitude of that kind of money, she is really naive in that area, $40K, maybe, but $200K when you can feel the sting of that kind of payment is crazy.
Well college is not all about the opportunities available, the grades, the campus or the professors.( WashU wins in all of these, except for grades maybe) It’s about your peers and the people you meet there. The people you meet and interact with at WashU will be a level or 2 above those at U Miami, and will challenge your daughter in many ways that will have a very positive impact on her. What’s the point of going to a place where you know you’re going to be in the top 10% of the class, that’s no fun, there’s no challenge. Also, WashU is a better school academically than U Miami, and grad schools know that. But ultimately, given the big financial difference, it’s your call. WashU all definitely prepare your daughter more for the very competitive job market out there. The 200k will certainly not be justified in the short run, but it will in the long run.
I taught math at Wash. U. for many years. The students are very bright, but the administration wants “retention” and “no problems”. Here is a summary of what happened when I taught differential equations at a level similar to MIT.
The chair of the math dep’t told me that he wanted me to make the class the normal “cookbook” course, telling me to teach students only the steps to work problems like those that will be on the test. He said to do this so that he wouldn’t have “problems”.
An Engineering Assoc. Dean (and Dean of Student Academic Integrity) was concerned about students doing poorly on an exam. I wrote him that almost all of the ones who had done poorly had cheated on the homework. He wrote back: don’t “discourage” them, “retention” is important.
Though the Math Chair kept refusing to show me the “complaints” he was “dealing with”, I finally managed to get a copy of them. Here is what I saw.
An Engineering student tutor “complained” that he “…cannot do…most [MIT} problems …and [he] received an A [in the standard “cookbook” version of the course]…”
An outraged father wrote the Deans that his “understanding” was that the average on a test was 47, and that I didn’t even curve! It was actually 67 – several points lower than the other three tests, and about 40% of the class made A’s, no one below a C. The Deans responded to the parent by asking for his son to report on whether I had “improved”. The student’s “report” made it clear that he did not even recognize that homework problems were on the test – some word for word!
The Chair of the Math Department told me that Math had just “wrested” a course from Engineering, and they weren’t going to let Engineering “wrest” this course from Math. Clearly, there was a competition to see who could meet the “wants” of a few students to the detriment of all students. The course was worth a lot to the winner’s budget. (A Dean had told a previous Chair that he wanted “no complaints”, even if that meant a reduction in standards. That is apparently how the winner is determined.)
I give this example because I was there, not because Wash. U. is the only school behaving this way. There are schools that are ok, though, but you have to beware of those that aren’t.
You can also look at my totally non-commercial site inside-higher-ed