Talking about "public" and "in-state" is not the point.
College is mostly about the private institutions at a national level. That's where people would like to go.
College is mostly about the private institutions at a national level. That's where people would like to go.
Quality education can be public and free.
And not all private universities are "better" than all public universities. Think Berkeley, UT, umich, etc. All fantastic and in many areas clobber many / most private universities. There are some obvious outliers at the very top-ranked schools but, statistically, almost nobody goes to them.
It's messy and complex, but at the end of the day, the public universities educate drastically more people and generally do a good job of it; they have to be considered any time we talk about access to education.
I think the point is about access to higher education.
> College is mostly about the private institutions at a national level. That's where people would like to go.
Where people would "like to go" is highly subjective, and the statistics would wildly disagree with your statement on where people actually go.
Yeah, I think this is an uninformed take, and that many students never even consider a tier-1 private university. They attend their local university, or even a community college before transferring.