Housing prices here in Silicon Valley are just nuts. If you want a house in one of the better school districts, like Cupertino (home of two of Newsweek's "Best High Schools in the Nation") or Saratoga (home of the infamous cheating-by-hacking scandal), you'll pay $1M or so for a house that'll cost you $250K somewhere else in the country.
So this begs the question--is it really that important (like, $500-700K worth of important) to have your kid go to the best school possible? Especially if that school is such a pressure cooker that kids: a. commit suicide. b. hack into their teacher's computers to steal test answers. c. feel that MIT isn't as competitive as their high school. Can your kid be a star if 1/3 of the senior class has a > 4.0 GPA?
We all want the best for our kids. But in the whole scheme of things, what's worth it? Can we fit an econometric decision model against these types of strategic decisions?
I figure, as long as my kid goes to a better school than I did, that's ok. Like I was reminiscing the other day how we had just a couple of crappy scales in our Chem lab--the others were stolen by fellow students who needed to weigh their drug inventory. And yeah, I'm sure those kids were making six figures way before they went to the prom, but they're probably living rent-free courtesy of the California State Penal system nowadays.
Posted by jameshom at February 25, 2004 04:54 PM | TrackBack