Quote:
Originally posted by Cream
If you are African-American and your kid gets into Yale, do whatever you can to send him or her. Krueger and Dale found that black students get a bigger financial bang from a top-tier school.
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That's if you qualify for financial aid--which, at a lot of schools, isn't easy since it's based on parental income and assets (including additional homes and retirement funds, which really sucks). Everyone assumed that I would get a "free ride anywhere" I wanted to go--partially out of misconceptions about AA, partially because they didn't understand how much the schools I wanted to attend were.
I am a firm believer in that it DOES matter where you went to school, if even just for your first job and graduate school admissions. I have had so many more opportunities and interactions with world-class faculty at my university than I can begin to imagine at my state university--even with a full academic scholarship (merit-based). I have been able to do things that my friends who did go to those schools weren't able to do without a lot of pre-planning. I--and my parents--would fork over the astronomical sums all over again for my college. It was definitely worth it.