As someone who went to a flagship state school for undergrad and ivy for phd…
A) Most of the people I know who turned down higher-ranked schools for lower-ranked ones because of money regret it. You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit. Random people you meet through friends of friends at brunches or happy hours will be weirdly accomplished and teach you things.
B) Your analysis seems to hinge on doing a phd at a top-n school. What if it turns out after a few years of college that you don’t want to do a phd after all? Then instead of being either mit phd, or mit bs, you are z school bs. This may not be terrible, but not optimal.
D) On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums. Anyway, median mit cs alum has some faang-y job throughout their careers, and these companies all know/understand that many top students can’t all afford top colleges, and so they recruit from state schools as well. So the tail outcomes can be quite different, mean/median isn’t that much.
E) For careers like management consulting or investment banking, some top firms only recruit at top-n schools. However, eg mckinsey even does on-campus recruiting at places like ut austin or georgia tech now, so then it doesn’t matter. You just need yo be at an on-campus recruitment target school.
In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.
It now only consists of a Intel n100 with a big SSD and 32GB RAM running Proxmox. These China TopTon-boxed with their 5x Intel i226-IV network cards are great and can be passively cooled.
Every night the Proxmox makes a backup onto a Raspberry Pi which runs the Proxmox Backup Server.