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Comment by abdophoto | Hacker News Reader

Every kid I come across that plans to go to college I tell them to find the cheapest route possible. Start at either a good community college or go to a public in-state school. You can still go to a good college for a reasonable price, but it seems more and more that kids are taking the more expensive route (dorms, out-of-state, etc).

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For kids from poor or middle class families, Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Caltech will usually cost less than an in-state public school when it comes to what the student and his family actually have to pay.

In-state public school has a lower sticker price, but have less non-loan need-based aid so students have to come up with a high percentage of the sticker price. The top private non-profit schools have higher sticker price, but provide a lot more non-loan need-based aid, so students have to pay a much lower percentage of the cost. At Princeton, for example, the average debt at graduation is only $5k.

I wish that I knew this when I was a senior. I saw the number with four zeros per semester and ran.

That last example is meaningless in isolation. What percentage of Princeton students take out student loans (and how much)? I'd guess it's much smaller than in public schools.

Unfortunately you public in-state advice is almost now outdated; many privates are cost-competitive with public schools and it's not because the private schools are cheap. e.g.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/nyregion/seton-hall-univer...

This is definitely a trend in private education pricing as sticker shock is a real problem for students considering private schools and the privates compete for the same students the publics do.

Not entirely. From the article - 31,440 for Seton, 10,104 for Rutgers. They are saying max merit aid is 21,000 at Seton, so tuition w/max merit aid is 10,440. I don't know about Rutgers specifically, but it's not uncommon for public state schools to offer up to 8,000-10,000 merit aid, covering the bulk of the tuition. So you'd be looking at paying 10k/yr vs 0-2k/yr, still a huge difference.

This assumes no need-based financial aid, and doesn't touch on housing, which is assumed to be 10-13k these days regardless of public or private.

The best college advice I ever received was from my middle school history teacher: Go to the cheapest college you can. Harvard doesn't have a secret extra organ to teach you about.

Just about everything in undergraduate education is well established enough that you'll learn the same material anywhere. You'll find variation in the material covered (e.g. Catullus versus Ovid), but it's mostly window dressing on the same core concepts. By the time you get to a graduate level, it becomes important to pick the right institution to ensure that your personal area of research was well represented, but paying extra for undergrad is simply a waste of money.

Going to Harvard is less about learning things and more about meeting people. It's a lot easier to start a startup or join a big firm when your roommate's (girlfriend's, teammate's, etc.) daddy is a VC or a Partner.

Harvard has need based financial aid for 100% of your tuition (aka, perfect price discrimination). If you can get in, you can afford it.

The problem with need-based aid is that the numbers they use don't make sense. When I went to college (not Harvard) the financial aid dept told my parents they made too much money to get assistance. My tuition was over 50% of their post tax income and I have a brother who was only 2 years behind me.

How are you supposed to afford spending that much on a single child's schooling and still have enough to afford the rest of the family, retirement, insurance, mortgage payments, etc? Sure they could have planned better and saved for 20 years but the reality is that a very small percentage of people do that.

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