<p>We just went through a similar exercise with our D. We used proxies to assess various factors. For example, to compare the level of student preference at universities that we were comparing, we used the student retention rate simply because qualitative values (from student survey) were not available for one of the univ. under consideration. From a financial perspective, we looked at 4 year graduation; this, along with historical price inflation rate gave us an estimate of overall cost for the average duration of study. In some cases, we had to estimate the cost for more than 4 years of UG study. We weighted different factors based on the level of importance, and came up with different scores from parents’ and D’s perspective. It was an interesting exercise that provided us (the parents) with a fairly good cost/benefit analysis, and our D, a set of pros and cons that she could weight to score her preference for one univ. over the other. Since the weightage and the scores were subjective, they were used strictly to induce deeper level of thinking to sort out what are essential (again subjective, but based on objective metrics), and which ones are nice to have. All along, we informed our D our financial boundaries. </p>