I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. The University of Colorado (CU) sits right in the middle of town. To many of my high school peers and their families, attending CU was a fallback. It was seen as unadventurous and not at all prestigious. Despite the many good reasons I had for attending CU, I recognize that these perceptions weighed on me somewhat over the last four years. Now, two months into graduate school, my last subconscious traces of insecurity about my undergraduate education have finally faded. The semester is still ramping up, but I feel very well prepared for success in my classes and research projects. I write this with the hope that others in similar positions in high school will feel more confident than I did in choosing what's right for them and not caring what anyone else thinks.
In my experience, here are the four main reasons for strong students to consider attending their state universities for undergrad: lower cost, lower stress, more opportunities per capita, and connections in your home state.
The cost of college nowadays is insane. For almost any family, paying between $30,000 and $300,000 for a four-year degree per kid is going to be difficult, if not impossible. If you can get a sufficiently large fraction covered by financial aid or merit scholarships, great. If not, these amounts of money have extremely high opportunity costs. The way my parents described opportunity cost to my brother and me was by telling us how much they had saved for each of us and asking us whether we'd like to spend all the money on college-related expenses or save some of it and put that towards other things such as a graduate or professional degree, a down-payment on a place to live, or traveling. This perspective made the financial choice much more tangible, and motivated both my brother and me to go to college in-state. However, I think that many families do not discuss family resources and choice of higher education in this way.
If it's a question of taking on debt to pay for a more expensive education, then the choice is even more stark. In addition to hearing about the college debt crisis on the news, this fact was driven home for me the year before I started college when my dad helped me make a realistic model of the long-term economic outcomes of college choice in Excel. Between paying off debt (with interest) and losing the opportunity to invest savings early on in life, the total cost of college debt can be enormous.
Another thing that I imagine few families discuss is the large number of opportunities per strong student at a large state university. Whether you're interested in gaining leadership or research experience, there are often more open resources and faculty members to engage with than there would be at a school where everyone is constantly jockeying for spots in clubs, teams, and research labs. During my time at CU, I observed that highly motivated undergrads (who took initiative in reaching out to professors) were able to gain research experience on par with the graduate students. This may also be true at more prestigious universities, but I think it is much less common and more competitive because the professors already have plenty of highly-qualified grad students.
I strongly suspect that I personally would not have been able to maintain good grades, work continuously as a research assistant, and engage in volunteering activities at the level I did at CU had I attended a more elite university. In addition to having less opportunities, I believe that attending a more competitive school would have prevented engagement in this volume of commitments by raising my stress level and inducing burnout.
Even at CU, finding an optimal stress level for myself was not easy. What seems like a fine amount of activities at one point in the semester can very easily feel like too much at other times in the semester (around exams, when a club has a large paperwork deadline, etc.). Another major challenge for me has been building confidence in my technical skills and fighting impostor syndrome. Perceptions abound that math and computer science are difficult, that one must be "smart" to do well in these fields. My personal experience over the last four years was that I have had to work very hard to do well in technical courses, but that with enough time, I can learn pretty much any material. This all might sound obvious, but truly internalizing a growth mindset is often quite challenging. I imagine that being in a more competitive academic environment would have made it even harder for me to feel competent, possibly to the point that I would have decided to pursue a less technical degree.
A side note about academic competition: a motto of the CU Engineering Honors Program, a residential-academic program that was one of the defining elements of my undergraduate experience, was "being ambitious without being competitive". While this is of course easier to say than to do, I believe that it is possible to be a content and successful student with this mindset, especially if academic programs incentivize collaboration. For instance: in my current graduate program, our class grades are not curved, and it is encouraged that we study together and help each other to pass the qualifying exams (comprehensive exams we take after the first year, as a gateway to becoming full-fledged PhD candidates). Being encouraged and supported in maintaining a collaborative mindset in undergrad prepared me well for this environment.
Finally, I have found it meaningful to be able to pursue connections in my home state. Whether volunteering for or collaborating with organizations that are based locally or networking with local professionals inside and outside of academia, I have found this personally fulfilling and professionally promising. My perspective is of course biased because I love Colorado and would someday like the choice to be able to move back and be close to my family and the mountains, but I suspect that many young people might be coming to similar conclusions about the appeal of having geographical roots. Especially when considering the financial and environmental costs of travel, choosing to live in a place that fulfills your needs and wants is important.
One perception I have not yet addressed is that attending one's state school is unadventurous. However, I found that to be a non-issue in my time at CU, despite having grown up less than 3 miles from the university campus. In fact, I suspect that by getting involved with Engineers Without Borders, I learned more about the world than many of my high school peers who went to university in other states. In general, making an effort to get to know lots of different people, taking classes and intellectually engaging in areas which challenged many of my views, and trying out new activities (such as swing and salsa dancing and rock climbing) made my time at college feel plenty adventurous. This might sound cliché, but I tend to think that wherever you end up, there are ways to make life novel if you have an open mindset.
Of course, all of us tend to rationalize the choices we have made. Despite having no regrets about my choices of undergraduate education, I recognize that attending CU drove me (and many of my peers) into STEM more strongly than we might have been driven at more elite colleges. One reason for this is that STEM classes at state schools are often more comparable with those at more prestigious schools than are humanities classes, which causes and is in turn caused by students with stronger academic backgrounds gravitating into STEM degree programs. Another reason for this is that in certain fields such as consulting and law, prestige of your undergraduate institution matters, whereas in STEM (and some other fields), the institution at which you got your terminal degree tends to be the only one that matters.