I’ve been following Pigginton’s blogs for some time — very informative and smart comments. I thought I would make my first comment on this topic, as we have basically re-designed our life around the outrageously high tuition costs in the US. For anyone who hasn’t, I highly recommend watching Ivory Tower, the CNN documentary about Ivy League v other schools – it basically supports the argument that Ivy League schools are overpriced, and I agree. I attended a top-tier law school and graduated with honors, finished my LLM with the highest GPA (for which I received an award), all debt free. Now we are focusing on UT Austin for our daughter, who has expressed an interest in pursuing an engineering degree. We’ve given up on UC, due to budget costs and the seemingly prevailing policy of accepting more out-of-staters who bring the bigger $$. UT Austin ranks 8th for engineering (not as high as UCB, but realistically I don’t think our daughter would get in with an 8% acceptance rate mostly met by out-of-staters or foreigners); it’s considered a “public ivy”, and tuition is only $10k/ year for engineering. We sold our San Diego home last year for asking price and bought a house in Austin to qualify for in-state tuition, where she/we will live during her college years. We managed to find a loophole to get an ag exemption on property taxes, which be in effect in 5 years, basically our current property taxes will finance her tuition. Assuming she gets accepted, her degree will be high quality, she will be debt free, and we can pass on real estate to her, which will provide a starting point for her life. And if she doesn’t get accepted into UT Austin, we could sell the house at a profit (it’s paid off) and pay her tuition wherever she ends up (including an ivy school if that was her choice). And my husband and I will retire in our home in HI knowing that our daughter will be financially stable and debt-free, which, to us, is more important than an Ivy League degree, but which doesn’t necessarily result from it. Most importantly, all this moving around was our daughter’s decision – she prefers HI and Austin over SD. Go figure…
