<p>Yes. It happened with our oldest son. We just couldn’t afford Wash U, even with the generous aid package they offered him. If he’d been an only child, we would have figured out something, but it just wasn’t an option since we have three kids.</p>
<p>As it turned out, due to his illness, he had to come home to our small, no-name university which has turned out to be awesome! Makes me think twice about spending a fortune on the other two, to be honest.</p>
<p>See the other thread about loaning your kid money for college–surely a perilous path for the parents AND child. Not something that has much support on this forum, especially with the continuing uncertainty about the economy going forward.</p>
<p>We promised our daughter that if she got into a top 10 school we would pay for her undergraduate degree. She got into Penn so we’re sticking to our end of the deal. We’re fortunate not to have any loans to do it however, she will be on her own for anything beyond (for grad school, etc.). I’m thinking student loans will be in her future.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
I have to look at the URL that you linked to get the other schools’s name. It’s interesting that Vandy and WUSTL are nowhere to be found on your list.</p>
<p>WashU isn’t quite like the Ivies/Ivy-equivalents in being stellar in the “pre-professional” rankings but it’s certainly good enough in the “academic” rankings (you can see in that thread that some Ivies are merely above average but nowhere near the top 25 when it comes to the proportion of their alums who get PhDs or win prestigious national student awards). In that sense, WashU’s profile is actually pretty similar to those of several LACs (like Colby or Grinnell or Macalester) as well as Brandeis.</p>
<p>Vandy doesn’t look all that impressive when you judge by alumni achievements. Rochester and Brandeis actually rank higher than Vandy in all the subrankings I looked at.</p>
<p>Let’s say that I wasn’t surprised when I read on CC that Vandy and WashU are among the schools known to heavily emphasize test scores and other components that the USNews ranking deems important.</p>
<p>We told kids we would cover FAFSA EFC as much as possible, so yes cost does come under consideration when budgeting.
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