A big reason why children of professionals, or business owners, are choosing to go to their excellent in-state flagships is that they come from upper middle class families, and as such, will pay rack rate. Their parents are very reasonably saying that 160K for undergrad is better than 360K, whether they’re going on to expensive professional grad school or not.
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I think your premise about the costs they are facing is correct, but at least at our HS, my experience is the pre-med kids/families specifically are more thinking this way than most others.
Frankly, a lot of the other families are obviously not reluctant to pay full market rate for various private universities and colleges, because a large portion of every graduating class goes off to such colleges.
And just anecdotally, from talking to other such parents it is clear they are thinking their kids are likely to either go into reasonably lucrative jobs right after college, or maybe to funded grad programs. These are often kids of business executives or professors or engineers or whatever themselves. But regardless, they are not particularly concerned about using their 529s and such to pay for such colleges.
The interesting in-between case is maybe the pre-law types. Again frankly, I think most of us lawyers just hope our kids will not go into law! But there are also ways of getting less expensive JDs, and work before going to law school can help, work during summers can help, and so on. So, it is not such a pressing concern if you actually understand all the angles.
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You might try to identify those schools on your list that emphasize test scores over GPA, based on the information in Section C7 of the Common Data Sets for the respective schools.
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Honestly, our parents are both physicians, and I think it’s worked a little against us for cost estimation; med school tuition was a totally different animal in the 90s when they graduated, and they were both able to pay off their loans relatively quickly after entering the workforce. I’m not sure they understand that it will not be that easy by the time my brother is in med school.
(That’s part of why I’m on CC so much in general—their frame of reference for admissions, etc is also totally off, especially since each only applied to one school during their own process. My father when I was building my list: “How about Tufts for one of your safeties? Or Vanderbilt?”)
Yes, and I am definitely not suggesting all doctor families are thinking like this. I just think it is relatively common among that set in our HS (well, the part of the HS I know about, at least).
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