In the spirit of "When you've got a hammer" as a business school guy I'm always thinking what's best from a discounted present value sense. It's hard for me to

In the spirit of "When you've got a hammer" as a business school guy I'm always thinking what's best from a discounted present value sense. It's hard for me to believe that the difference between decent performance at Harvard and better performance at a slightly less selective school is worth the enormous up front cost of the former.unless your marginal utility of a dollar really low. Another way to look at this is perhaps "Rich families transfer wealth between the generations in a tax-advantaged, inefficient, socially acceptable way" I went to a perfectly good college on academic scholarship (and therefore almost certainly could have gone somewhere better (well, more selective) not on scholarship) and my friends were going to UChicago and Yale for econ PhDs right out of undergrad, so I don't really feel slighted in terms of opportunity. The big advantage as I see it would be being surrounded by really smart people all the time and sneaking something ridiculous to the top of the dome would do wonders for self confidence later in life.