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Comment by vomjom | Hacker News Reader

Rarely do most people who go to top schools pay full price. Only those from extremely wealthy families do.

All (yes, all) the top schools are need-blind, meaning they don't look at your financial situation when deciding whether to accept you. A few of them (Stanford, Harvard I think) are offering completely free tuition if your parents make less than $100k. For other situations, you typically would get around 75% of your tuition free even if your parents make over $100k a year.

The difference in first year average salary for an MIT grad vs. a state school grad is enough to make up that difference.

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"Rarely do most people who go to top schools pay full price"

The fact that you have to state that shows there is an issue with information.

I scored really high my SAT/ACT (and again on my GRE I scored perfect in 2 of the 3 categories - in English I was weaker). But I didn't grow up with friends/family who went to top schools, and growing up in eastern kentucky, my public school didn't let me know that I should be applying to "good" schools.

I think that many computer geeks grow up having a hard time fitting in at school, so they don't think that they have what it takes to go to the elite schools - especially if that geeks grows up poor in a rural setting.

Most of these pro-rated tuition policies are very, very new; until very recently, even students at top schools were expected to take out loans to cover some medium-sized fraction of the tuition costs. By comparison, going to a rather good state school, I got paid a net of around $8k per year to go to college.

The financial equation is different for every person, but the value add of a name-brand school over a state school is typically a hard sell--for a motivated student a decent education is available everywhere.

About financial aid: the previous year my parents had made at least 80k, and that's generally how people judge your need. The year I picked schools one of them had lost their job and my family was at below sustainability levels.

That being said, I got an excellent scholarship for the college I went to. But I still regret not going to a "name-brand" school independent of the educational quality of the college. The kind of people you're around and the contacts you make are really different. That can be useful on an ongoing basis, not just right after you graduate.

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