But in some ways Cobrat that is the exact point. High achieving midwest kids have high quality universities to attend. It is more difficult to pull the cream of the crop into the midwest privates. The cream of the crop that choose a small private school in the midwest do so because they don’t want to attend a university with tens of thousands of kids. The private colleges tuition discount to bring in geographic diversity and more likely because they can’t fill their seats entirely from kids in the region with the same academic horsepower because alot of them are attending public unis.
But if you are a student trying to decide between a private college in this region vs. a private college in that region the parsing points are going to be more around the academic strength of the major, the cost and where that kid might want to live and work in the future. e.g. the question of this thread: Grinell or Middlebury or how important it is for the parents to have neighbors or co-workers that have actually “heard” of the college LOL. There are plenty of educated people in the midwest who have never heard of Middlebury and plenty of people in the NE that have no idea what Grinell is. But academically for all practical purposes and with only a few exceptions in major it really isn’t all that different to the educational outcome.
It’s far more difficult to put a cost value on the private colleges when they are both high caliber private colleges. Some people will take the money and run and others will continue to try and parse out justifications why to pay more. It might be a far easier answer the “more question” if you were comparing Middlebury or Grinell to a private college with weaker student academic strength.