It depends on how much $27K means to the family and the student.
Some families with discipline can pay off that amount in short time. Others even with high incomes may have difficulty to pay off.
What about the cost while your son attends. If we compare the Club Med all inclusive atmosphere of an expensive private school to a regional college, your son will need considerably more spending money at Millersville. For example, at Lehigh not only are the on campus movies free, so are the popcorn and sodas. The school sponsored day trips to New York City and DC are almost always free. The school sponsors free transportation to the local malls and Walmarts. They have massive support in the form of supplemental grants to pay for anything that your child would be interested in doing, like attending an out of town conference, or planning a week long research trip to Europe during spring break (like comparing museums, or visiting WWII memorial sites) any study abroad program is heavily supported. Lehigh also has a Presidential Scholars program where high achievers (GPA of 3.75 or higher) get a tuition free fifth year to pursue a graduate degree, second major, or independent research. Lehigfh also offers many contests and prizes for writing and research and many other things, they all come with very generous (in the thousands) cash prizes.
@ucbalumnus
“Reasonable” in terms of quality and “substantial” in terms of money will differ a lot by circumstance.
Personally, outside of maybe ABET-accredited engineering programs, I don’t think you can judge rigor and quality by course listings.
Re: ABET accreditation
It does happen that both Lehigh and Millersville have ABET accreditation in computer science. Although not particularly important for most purposes (unlike with many kinds of engineering), it does indicate that both schools’ computer science majors meet ABET’s minimum standards of quality. One could be better than the other, but neither one is “bad”.
Looks like Wichita St. CS is also ABET-accredited, which tells me that ABET accreditation in CS doesn’t guarantee quality (or if it does, an extremely low standard). Nobody cares whether a CS program is ABET-accredited anyway (as it typically just means the proper science classes are required for the major).
@PurpleTitan, do you know something about the CS program at Wichita St. that indicates it’s not a “quality” program?
@NUwildcat92, looked at an example of their OS final. The level of ability expected from questions on it is a fair bit less than that expected at top CS programs.
@PurpleTitan, fair enough. Are a Northwestern CS grad?
OP – take a look at both institutions’ career services pages (I did because I’m not from the region and know nothing about Millersville). Millersville shows a total of four employers coming to campus (one to interview, the rest are recruiting tables at the student center) between 3/31 and the end of April – one is the Army; Target is coming twice. I think you need a student id to get to Lehigh’s current schedule, so there’s no direct comparison, but they list that 174 employers came to the fall job fair. I’m not a fan of debt, but the opportunities are very, very different.
According to the Lehigh 2012 statistics
Lehigh on-campus interviewing, employment listings, and experiential education
Recruiting Organizations ^3… 247
Interviews … 2,557
Full-time Employment Listings^4… 3,349
Employers Providing Listings^5… 1,134
Internships and Co-op Listings… 1,021
Footnotes
^3 Includes only employers who conducted interviews on campus.
^4 On- and off-campus listings.
^5 Includes only employers who conducted interviews off campus