IT WAS with some amusement that I read about the "painful" reality of choosing UMass-Amherst over New York University because of NYU's exorbitant price ("College-bound face dilemma," Page A1, April 19). I faced the choice, 10 years ago, of paying $27,000 a year for NYU or $7,000 for UMass. I chose UMass because it seemed absurd to pay four times as much for a university with a roughly identical research profile. I don't know how things would have turned out at NYU, but it certainly couldn't have been any better, and at least financially, it would have been a lot worse.
UMass is a world-class research university with an elite faculty that cares deeply about its students. It offers as many opportunities to its students as any other university, and at a fraction of the price of private schools. If those poor high-school students with their broken NYU dreams put in the effort at UMass to excel academically and learn about their fields, they're as likely to succeed as they would be at NYU, and they won't graduate with six-figure debt.
JONAH KATZ
Cambridge
The writer is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at MIT.
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