I believe the obsession is in regards to prestige, not cost. It just happens to be that the more prestigious schools typically have higher price tags (before aid).
Post-graduation placement and pay levels tend to be much more strongly correlated with one’s major than one’s school (with a few exceptions that mainly involve the most school-elitist employers like management consulting and Wall Street). Schools with lots of engineering majors tend to do better than schools with lots of biology majors, but that is more of a function of engineering generally having better job prospects than biology.
There are all different kinds of people and perceptions of what an education is. What works for you might not be sufficient for others.
It’s a basic economic concept. Some people value money more than education and some value education more than money.
Well if that’s the case then you can just get a degree in the field your going for at a cheap school and it wouldn’t even matter in the end where it came from. (This is in reply to ucbalumnus)
Of course, what is a cheap school varies from student to student, due to the practice of price discrimination through financial aid and scholarships. Obviously, those with higher high school achievements will have more choices of cheap schools through scholarships or admission to the more selective schools with better financial aid.
Coming at it sideways, a frequent question on CC is some variant of ‘should I choose wildly expensive / fancier named dream school A or affordable but not as shiny school B’?
The answer is as close to unanimity as CC gets: in almost every case I have seen, the CC community says the same thing: no name is worth big debt, and you can get to the next stage in your achieving your goals from nearly any (accredited) college. But…
…if things are seen as ‘easy’, people tend to devalue them. Anybody can go to a CC, so there is nothing ‘special’ about you if you go there. I have seen students mock their state u- until they don’t get in anywhere else. I have also seen parents in hyper-competitive academic circles desperately trying to convince other parents that the honors college at state U (that their child will be attending) is selective and special.
Also, don’t underestimate the marketing that the expensive colleges do, starting very early- our Ds were getting a lot of glossy mail by grade 10. Add in brand recognition and you get people believing that the only ‘good’ college education is on a leafy lawn in the middle of gothic buildings.
OP, try going onto a message board for car enthusiasts, and tell them you can’t understand why anybody would spend a lot of money for a BMW (or whatever) when a used Yugo will get you from place to place for a lot less money. What do you think they will say?
Y-U-G-O!!! Y-U-G-O!!!
YUGIOH! Oh wait wrong thing sorry.
Concentrating on the retail price is a mistake, as with most things in life, it is the net price which is the bottom line. T
As with any luxury item, there are people who will pay a lot more to get something that is really just a little better. A Rolex won’t really tell time better than a Timex–but people buy Rolex watches all the time.
Why do some individuals buy [super] expensive cars? Why would someone buy a Rolex for $10K, when a $10 watch would tell the same time? It is a status thing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is like this Asian Kid on CC who thinks his parents should spend $68K/year at Amherst over University of Michigan, which would cost his parents $27K per year.
It’s not just about prestige. You’d be hard pressed finding an even decent private school that’s less than $50,000. And it would be extremely hard to find an out of state public that is less than $30,000 per year. Not to mention that financial aid can bring the cost of a $60,000 school or even a $70,000 school down to below $25,000 or even down to $0.
Why would someone buy a house in San Francisco or New York City when they could buy one for one tenth the price in Scranton, PA? 
@ThankYouforHelp So, it’s “location, location, location”?
It’s appreciation. House appreciation depends on location.
As someone who went to a CC top university and transferred to an average flagship, I strongly believe there are substantial differences in the quality of education between universities. It’s not just about location or prestige (far more excellent employers in the city I will be interning in this summer have heard of my school than say Pomona or Amherst).
By the way, I also think this holds true for less selective universities. The moderately selective private college my brother will attend is IMO better than many Cal States and lower UCs.
It’s not the price tag it’s what you can get out of it that attracts people. I doubt there are many people who say, “I want to go to the most expensive college possible!” But there are probably a lot of people, especially on here that would say, “I want to go to the best college possible!” The two just so happen to go together a lot of the time.
While that is true, it can vary from one subject to another, and an accurate evaluation would require the assistance of those knowledgeable in the subjects of interest to evaluate syllabi, assignments, projects, and exams in the subjects at each school. Needless to say, few high school students have access to such knowledgeable people willing to put in the time to do such evaluation (and not all departments at all schools make the course materials easily available for such evaluation), so “better” school is often assumed using rankings or the proxy measures that are behind the rankings.