As a sidenote, I'm also struggling with choosing a state school over the "higher tier" schools. Take, for example, OSU and X T20 school. I take less debt (definitely issue of concern as an aspiring premed), with a good experience and faculty/research opportunities (Sidenote: I personally do not care about differences in campus life for this). At X, I take on significant debt (200k+ income bracket), but with supposed "world-class" faculty, research ops, connections, etc. I do think the debt issue is winning right now, but I truly do not know of the significance of OSU vs X (plus, all those premeds who goto X can't be stupid, right? Assuming there are some "not loaded" ones, shouldn't there be some benefit besides prestige?). And yes, there will be differences between those subsumed in "X" but I want to differentiate in general.