All I see are well intending but shortsighted parents falling victim to clickbait rankings and a deal-hunting mentality when it’s your kid’s futures you’re talking about.
Go ahead, send your kid to Cal Poly SLO and ignore the fact that not only is a 5 year Bachelor’s a foregone conclusion in a public school engineering program, but the opportunity cost of a year of lost earnings nullifies any pertinent savings in tuition. Why is this part always overlooked? You’re not paying $130,000 for a degree at Cal Poly. You’re paying $130,000 + $100,000-$150,000 average mid-career earnings and 1 year of your child’s lifespan.
USC’s not just a place to go to to get a degree. It’s easy to view it that way from the perspective of a parent, when you’re not the one that has to live there for 4 years and has to affiliate with whatever school you end up attending for the rest of your life. When that school’s logo is the one you hang proudly on your office wall, stick on the back of your car, represent on your LinkedIn page. Most people ever only go to college once, and their perspective on life is formed by the people they meet at that school and the people they meet in the workplace that went to that school. Do you want your kid to be around people who are academically among the brightest and most ambitious in the nation, or those who went to a school just because it had the lowest price tag?
I’m not a financial planner, so I can’t tell you whether USC would be a good financial decision for your economic circumstances. But I can tell you there are 2,400 universities in America - a large enough selection to create a perfectly efficient free market for the consumption of higher education. Among these, USC is the 10th most applied university in the nation, and 1/3 of students who are admitted, enroll - a higher yield rate than any UC other than Berkeley. 52,000 families every year see some attraction in this high-price tag product, and there’s either something they’re all not seeing, or there’s something you’re not seeing.