Oh yeah, state schools are absurdly expensive for out-of-state students. I think here they pay more to come to my school than they would at almost any private u

Oh yeah, state schools are absurdly expensive for out-of-state students. I think here they pay more to come to my school than they would at almost any private university. On the other hand, the way the system is set up, it is actually cheaper to go to a state school if your family is richer--financial aid depends on how much you can afford, while in-state tuition is just cheaper for everybody. One of the reasons I ended up going to Berkeley over CMU is that my dad had just cashed out some stock options so I was offered no financial aid at either place. (Maybe we filled the forms out incorrectly, of course, and I would probably have still gone to Berkeley for other reasons, but it's an interesting reversal of expectations--Berkeley was cheaper because, on paper, my family made more...) So the real irony is that going to a nice state school is actually a better deal if you're in the upper-middle class in the Bay Area. It helps if you're also into engineering :)