My brother did his masters in operations research at Stanford after doing his undergraduate degree in our home country that is ranked in the 200-300 range. His

My brother did his masters in operations research at Stanford after doing his undergraduate degree in our home country that is ranked in the 200-300 range. His full undergrad cost 20kish, his masters cost (at least on paper as he got various fee reductions etc) over 100k. He said there was no discernible difference in quality of the lectures, lecturers, content etc between the two. I'm sure it would be a very different situation if he wanted to go into research but that is a much much smaller portion of all people who go to university. I also have a friend who went to Riverside college in Austin TX for the first 2 years before transferring to UT Austin for the last 2 years. She said that many of the lecturers from UT Austin also taught courses at Riverside college. Her years at Riverside cost her around 8k a year, her years at UT cost her something like 40-50k. She was on the GI bill so didn't have to pay for most of it anyway but still pretty amazing when you think about.