As @blossom wrote, I think it depends upon the kid and their motivation and drive. We paid full pay private for both and in both cases, it was a very good choice but for very different reasons (and ShawD did her first semester of college at an excellent Canadian university at very low cost as she is a dual US/Canadian citizen).
The two dimensions that might cause me to want to pay full freight at an expensive school are the business model of the school and the prestige of the school. In each case, whether that would make sense would depend upon the kid and his or her learning style and drive/aspirations.
Let’s start with business model. Some schools’ business model typically does not allow for close and ongoing contact with faculty (which a few directed students will overcome); Others’ business model is intended to have enable relationships between students and faculty. Some kids will perform better in a smaller, high-touch environment. That was true of ShawD, who did not enjoy or do as well at the very large Canadian school which was largely big lectures/exams than at the smaller school with lots more professor interaction. And, for ShawSon, who was/is brilliant and severely dyslexic, I felt that professors would quickly see how bright he was in small classes. He was assigned a fabulous freshman seminar but had an activity during the professor’s announced office hours. So, he professor agreed to meet with him for one hour per week individually. That would not happen at many schools. This latter category is correlated with size, but some larger schools do end up allowing for closer relationships in the more advanced courses, and probably some smaller schools don’t foster close faculty-student relationships.
So, you might think the right kind of student-faculty relationship would be worth the extra price.
Second, I would distinguish between high prestige schools that can confer advantage upon those who attend (though they may not) above and beyond a good education and which can include some state schools and other private schools. (I’m pulling this from some other posts but have tried to cut out irrelevant stuff). There are probably about 15 schools (including HYPSM, Amherst, Williams, Chicago, etc.) and some schools with prestige/specialized benefit in specific fields like Carnegie Mellon or Waterloo in computer science, RISD in art, perhaps Parsons in design) that function the same way in their fields as I observe in roughly the top 15.
For context on the prestige issue, I went to three of HYPSM and taught at one at the beginning of my career but still have an affiliation (usually teach a week a year). My son got an MBA and a tech MS at one of them much more recently. I co-founded a tech firm with a kid who had a good job at one of the tech majors and 4 Stanford degrees all prior to the age of 30 and I advise a number of startups and own a small piece of a specialized venture fund. I worked on Wall Street, helped start a hedge fund and run a specialized consulting firm that advises executives in companies around the world. I have had Presidents of countries as well as CEOs call me out of the blue seeking advice. And, I’ve been involved in hiring decisions at all three firms.
People on CC seem to go around and around on the question of whether good student outcomes derive from the student or the school. The answer is both. Reminds me of the old Certs commercial. More able people will do better than less able people regardless of where they go to school. And, especially for certain career paths as well as for minority populations or others not at the top of the economic or social elite, elite schools provide benefit above and beyond the individual students’ capability/effort and parental resources while for others they don’t. Going to an elite school may in fact encourage/enable students to pick different career paths than they might have chosen at a school lower down on the elite list.
People have talked about the revered (by some on CC) industries of management consulting and i-banking, where elite school background has helped. A number of years ago, I helped start a hedge fund (though I was never active in running anything) with another guy with an elite-heavy resume. At the time, it was clear that at a number of firms, Ivy degrees were, if not a minimum requirement, a highly desired characteristic. If you didn’t get into that game early, you would be a lot less likely to get in the game later. My absolute best employee was a math/econ major at UMass Amherst – and we had Princeton, MIT, Harvard kids. He left to become a portfolio manager at a bank – which is a good job but he didn’t land at a hedge fund where he could have made gazillions. I think quant funds are less elite-sensitive, but even there, we got an offer to purchase our firm very early on from one of the very famous quant hedge funds largely because we were doing something interesting and their founder called my PhD advisor (whom he knew) to see if I was smart. I turned it down because I didn’t want to work in a quantitative hedge fund full-time.
Similarly, your opportunity to be part of startups while at school and to get funding is substantially higher at Stanford than at many other schools. And, again, once you are in that flow and are on your second or fourth startup, you will have lots more opportunities coming your way. Some folks on CC debate this, but the ecosystem surrounding Stanford for building and funding companies is an order of magnitude more effective than anything I’ve seen elsewhere. The advantage is diminishing with time and COVID.
In contrast, I don’t know if an Ivy nursing degree (undergrad nursing degree at Penn and maybe others) provides any benefit over other nursing schools in terms of career prospects or income. Do Ivy psych or English majors who go into teaching after an obligatory stint in TFA do better career-wise than teachers with lesser academic backgrounds? I don’t know. I’d guess instead that that the Ivy-educated are more likely to seek out other options and leave teaching (no data on this).
My experience is that elite schools offer three things that many others do not or offer to a lesser extent. They may or may not provide a better education than other schools and one can get a good education at many schools. They provide (or can provide):
• Bigger Horizons (You leave thinking you want to be the best in the world at what you do and realize that’s feasible versus the best in Canada or the best in Texas);
• Contacts (the alumni networks are very impressive as are your classmates), and
• A National and International Reputation – they provide a great stamp on the forehead (the international recognition of Harvard is extraordinary) that arises in part because of their selectivity.
Similarly, there are regional effects. If you want to work in Alabama, going to undergrad and law school in Alabama may actually help you more than going to Yale and Yale Law School.
I am not saying that people from a less elite school can’t become the best in the world at what they do (that would clearly be false) but I am saying that many grads of the elite schools I have been associated with more or less come to assume this or something similar as a goal.
Third, it is helpful to think about the opportunities in terms of conditional probabilities and about the fact that in one’s career, there are a number of opportunities whose for which your probability of getting the opportunity is conditional on where you have gone to school to date and what you have done to date. In some fields like engineering, it seems like outside of places like MIT, Stanford and CMU, the probability is largely unconditional on school and more on experience. In those fields, the effects of education will quickly die out in explaining career success. In others like hedge funds or management consulting, relatively greater weight will be given to where you went to school. More importantly, the probabilities cascade. You get opportunities because of your background (as opposed to your work). Those opportunities make you look more attractive at the next stage. And you find yourself on a path you would have been much less likely to be on than if you had gone to a less elite school. One of my college classmates, very bright and very able, went to HBS and then McKinsey. Like many, he tired of the travel and took a job as head of strategy at one of his large publicly traded clients and then rose to be CEO. His undergraduate degree increased the probability of getting into HBS, which increased the probability of a McKinsey offer, which increased the probability of moving at a young-ish age to a senior position at a client. I have had an unconventional career (there were no firms doing what I do when I was in school) andI believe that at each stage the eliteness of my undergraduate school (combined with my performance) made it easier to get into a couple of highly prestigious grad schools, which increased the probability of getting hired at a prestigious business school in a field in which I had no training, which made it easier for me to get a job on Wall Street, all of which make it easier for me to get clients at my consulting firm. I’d say it made it easier to raise venture capital for my startup and definitely made it easier to raise capital for the hedge fund. I would also say that @ucbalumnus’s suggestion in another thread that going to elite schools was about getting social training was valid in my case: I looked at my education explicitly as an opportunity to learn about how to walk in the pathways of power.
I don’t judge things solely in terms of income/wealth, but if you asked me whether the price differential between my elite school and U of Michigan Honors College (which was my safety school) had a good ROI, I’d say likely quite large. Hard to know what I would have done and I might have ended up exactly where I am, but I’d say unlikely.
But the advantages of prestige a) only help in some fields; and b) are only really valuable for a kid who takes advantage of the potential advantages conferred by the school. So, whether spending the extra income is worth it depends upon the kid and what they are likely to want to study. (It is a little more complex, because a kid in the right environment may become much more motivated/driven).
@johncocktoasten, I hope this is helpful.