This is the value of a "brand name" education

The other night over dinner, my boyfriend and I were discussing tuition prices for our first year of college. He started at UT Austin in the Fall of 1988; I started at Johns Hopkins University in the Fall of 1989. His first semester as a Texas resident was $450 and the price rose to $500 his second semester, making the grand total for his first year of college education a full $950. Now I, the East Coast Sophisticate, as he teases me, paid (or rather, my father paid) $15,000 for my first year of tuition.

Insane? Obviously.

To the outside observer, anyway.

He was a student on a campus of 50,000 students, while I enjoyed the relative quiet of being amongst less than 3,000 undergrads and a few hundred more graduate students. I knew a large proportion of my graduating class, but I know he can't say the same. And while we are both very intelligent people, I have experienced being one of the least intelligent people in a class or just simply in a room. He has not. He understands not wanting to be the smartest person in a room, but he's never spent years in a place where, even in an elevator or bathroom, you knew with almost absolute certainty that you weren't the smartest person in the room. I can't quite explain the comfort in that, but there's something easy about being able to use all your SAT words and skip as many steps in logical thought as you want, over a bowl of Lucky Charms, and not feel self conscious about it.

But here's the true power of the designer label education. It's where your friends wind up. I not only know doctors and lawyers and professors and such, but I know a great transplant surgeon in New York City. I can email a friend and get a referral to one of the top specialists on a rare autoimmune disorder for a friend's brother. In the space of 20 minutes, I can get a full explanation on the current methodology for biopsies of breast lumps and a recommendation for a second opinion.

It's that part of what college is about? Making the connections that will help you throughout your life? I don't mean to suggest that there aren't many people who graduated from UT who have gone on to do amazing things and help their former classmates, just that there were probably a higher proportion of Hopkins alum who did and with the smaller number of students, one had a much higher probability of actually knowing them.

We're just going to ignore the guy I went to school with who produces Pimp My Ride. That works for you, right?