Absolutely, but that means they must be spending, or planning to spend, or both, their financial resources in some other way, and that will likely also involve some sort of diminishing marginal utility.
And normally this is a form of opportunity cost question. Meaning do they want to use their financial resources for a more expensive college or something else, where they can’t afford to do both. And I am definitely not saying they are wrong to choose something else, it is a very personal question.
The one thing I do think is worth knowing, though, is that sometimes paying more out of pocket leads to an even bigger subsidy. This is normally only going to be true if you get an offer from a very wealthy college, although might work out with merit at some other colleges.
So for example, Pitt in FY 2023 had about $2.8B in operating expenses spread across about 29.5K students, so about $95K/student. In-state direct COA was a little over $33K, so that was a little under a $62K/student subsidy, and again this doesn’t include capital costs. So not bad.
Duke, though, had operating expenses of about $3.44B, which across about 16.8K students is about $205K/student, which was about $122K subsidy even at full pay (direct costs) of about $83K.
OK, so on the one hand, Duke full pay was $50K more/year than Pitt in-state. However, not only did Duke return that extra $50K in operating expenses per student, it added another $60k or so of additional subsidies (in these terms). And again this doesn’t include capital costs.
But is whatever Duke is buying with all that extra money worth $110K more/year in actual value to the student? Or even $50K more?
Very personal decision, of course.