@hapymom I agree that the suggestion of @Hoggirl is great—assuming that spending the $250K in savings for undergrad, med school, or a combination of the two won’t pose undue hardship for you later on. Since you said that the amount was a good chunk of your savings, my strong inclination was for you to save it. Important other factors to consider would be your age, income, income stability over the long term, retirement accounts, any potential inheritances, etc. If $250K was just a small portion of your savings, my answer would have been different (though I’d still recommend thinking hard about the decision).
This is spoken by someone whose son had little interest in applying to schools like Duke, Chicago, Rice, Emory, etc., that offer substantial merit scholarships—not because of the scholarships, but because the schools weren’t a good fit for him. He was willing to do it, though, but we told him not to. We were afraid he actually would get a free ride somewhere and that turning down an offer from his preferred schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and one other) might be too difficult and lead to regrets. Our situation was a bit different, though, because we were pretty sure he’d get good financial aid from these other schools (and he did, at all except the unnamed school). The amount we pull from our savings to pay for Stanford is (to us) significant but doable, within the context of our total savings, retirement accounts, etc. Paying for everything would have been very tough and a poor financial decision, though we could have done it.
I’m also speaking from the perspective of a first-year college student parent now. I’ve seen and heard about the experiences of my son and many of his friends and acquaintances, and at this point my view of the value of attending one’s “dream school” has changed, just because so many people do just fine elsewhere. There really will be excellent opportunities at any good college, and a student can be happy anywhere (or unhappy anywhere). My son didn’t have a dream school, though he did have preferences—ones that changed over time. He got in somewhere early and so didn’t end up applying to all the 12 or so schools on his original list, but he (and we) were actually really happy with them. There were two in particular that we all liked a lot. Neither had quite the prestige of his final choices—they were comparable to Emory—but both were very good schools that would have been excellent fits and that I’m sure he would have enjoyed attending.
@renaissancedad I agree with you about the difference between Duke and Emory. I just mentioned the Duke example because I remembered @terminatorp and his situation, which was similar in some respects to that of @hapymom.