Avg. Salary of Wharton Grad debate

[Evan]

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the competitive advantage gained from going to a top school (Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, and even Stanford/CalTech) is worth far more than the tuition at these schools. hell, the professional hookups alone are worth it.

of course the value of a degree from a top school is obscured by the fact that the students coming out of these schools are (generally) the best and brightest and would succeed in any environment.

that being said, i'm hopeful that in 10 years i'll be making at least 100k more per year than if i'd graduated from umass with the same degree / credentials (this is a very, very conservative guess)...

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This is really getting off topic, but for the sake of maybe giving you a springboard to write a more thoughtful reply to my post, I'll say this:

1) 100k more in 10 years isn't really "100k more" as I'm sure you know. Let's say your hurdle rate for that moeny is 8%, which is probably a fair "market" return estimate. So a 100k difference 10 years after graduation (which is 14 years after you start paying the increased tuition) is (or was) a present value of about 34k. That is getting much closer to the range of differences between in state public school tuition and top private school tuition. I know you said this was a conservative estimate, so there's no need to repeat that or tell me it SHOULD be 200k or whatever. I just want to point out that the difference is probably smaller than most people realize.

2) For many families the difference in tuition goes beyond simple EV and the effective rate to consider is actually higher than market return, because instead of giving up potential investment income they're incurring excess debt that they may end up paying even higher rates on. So in this case you need to make even more excess to make up for the increased cost of the upfront investment.