No doubt the price is steep, although $70K+ is a little higher than the actual when you take out things like health insurance, which they include in that total COA estimate but we already have covered under our family plan. We focus only on tuition, room, board and any mandatory fees, since things like “personal expenses” are so subjective. TR&B for UCLA is just over $64K for OOS - still eye watering when compared to in state, but nowhere close to the $85K of a private school. My daughter got some nice scholarships from private schools that still come in higher than OOS for UCLA. UCLA also has a cool new program where they guarantee that your tuition won’t go up for a maximum of 6 years of enrollment, so none of those sneaky increases when you are already committed.
Plus we are lucky that my daughter has a little over a year’s worth of AP and dual enrollment credits that UCLA will accept, so it’s like getting a 25% discount. They are also the only school on her short list that will take her AP studio credits, which amounts to 3 classes worth of electives. If your daughter has taken any dual enrollment classes, there is a cool site called transferology dot com that can tell you if the specific classes taken at the original school (in our case, a community college) will be accepted by the new school.
We are visiting UCLA next week, and I’m really looking forward to it! We are getting down to the wire for a decision, and I think she is between UCLA and BU. Two very different experiences, but based on the way you describe the UCLA campus versus what we know of BU’s narrow urban campus, I think she will end up a Bruin!