<p>
</p>
<p>They might not get to pick the public school (although in many areas only certain schools have certain specialty programs and you can transfer around based on what specialty program; in my own county, for example, there were two schools that hosted the IB program on the opposite ends of the county; there was also one high school that hosted a kind of pre-nursing program – students didn’t have to go there to do the program but if they went somewhere else they had to take a bus from their base school to attend the pre-nursing program’s school even though they took all of their other classes at the base school).</p>
<p>Free universal public education might play into it, but I don’t think anyone actually believes that college is free. Often, what I tend to notice in threads in my short time here is the assumption that the cost of the school doesn’t matter because if you have amazing grades and activities you’ll win a full-ride or another substantial scholarship that will let you go wherever you want. That does occasionally happen but it doesn’t happen often enough to make it a good idea to rely on that. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yeah. I’ve also noticed an odd tendency (at least according to posters here) that a lot of kids have no idea how much their parents make or what kind of property they own. If your parents own half of Dubai and several mansions on in the Bay State, you’re probably not going to qualify for the Pell grant.</p>