To be honest, I'd accept the offer to the universities that won't leave you with nearly $100,000 in debt, especially when they're already that prestigious. That's the kind of money that would pay off an entire small house/ trailer out here in Alberta, and considering I make shy of $70,000 a year, and I put the $20,000 I had in inheritance into a reliable truck, I still am nowhere near close to making up the amount of money that truck cost. Living is expensive, as is actually doing anything that goes beyond the essentials of living. I'm looking at saving up another $20-$40 thousand just to put a deposit down on a house so I can move out of this apartment, and I have no idea how long that will take without doing some serious hard crunching of numbers. The thing is, I've had an extremely lucky break in life (outside of medical issues, but that's not important to this) and I have no debt I'm paying off and the money I'm trying to saving is daunting. I'm probably looking at least a decade worth of hard saving to still live comfortably and have enough money to pay off that down deposit, and I'm not saddled with a soul-crushing debt.
Honestly, sure, it's cool to say you went to one of the best universities in the world, but ultimately it all depends on YOU getting a job. Unless you're certain there's enough work in your field of interest (something to do with physics, if I recall right), you may only have a piece of paper to show for the vast amount of time and wealth you put into your education. Will this school get you a better job or position than one of the other universities, or will the end result be exactly the same? If the latter's the case, go with that. It's still extremely prestigious and you can start getting ahead in life instead of paying off a horrific loan into your 70s. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not live my entire life wondering if I'm going to make ends meet or not being able to afford to do fun things with my youth. The thing you gotta ask yourself is this; if you put in all the time, and effort, and money you've ever earned into an education to become some fancy pants rocket scientist (or whatever), and you find yourself in your 40s or 50s, could you look back at all the things you turned down or never did because you favoured your education over the rest of your life and still think it was worth it? If you only start making a profit for your investment into your middle age, what kinds of experiences did you never get to do? It's a seriously hard question you have to ask yourself, especially if you aren't 100% sure if you have a career waiting for you right at the end of your education. It all depends on what you want to get out of life.
I did a one year fast track certificate in college (which was founded in 1967, which I might point out, is nowhere near as ancient as the places you got accepted to) which I paid for up front with the money I saved from the army, worked my ass off in dead-end retail jobs to take the test to earn my Operator in Training License to get into water treatment/ wastewater management which is a HIGHLY demanded field that lets me literally work wherever I want in the country, and then I put in my time, kept applying to jobs, and moved across the country to where I am now, a place that pays fantastically well, has amazing benefits, wonderful people to work with, and they give a shit about family and work life balance. I also am playing a huge role in people's communities, providing an essential service that they depend on to survive. That to me is way more important than having my name recorded in the history books, or potentially discovering a new planet or winning a Nobel prize or whatever. I don't have to worry about affording to live, I can go out and enjoy my weekends, drive out to the mountains on a whim, go on a vacation somewhere new and exciting, visit my family across the country, visit my family in another country, and be happy and really satisfied. I am a really, really lucky individual and I honestly am really happy with where my life is now. I made it, and it was a hard road I put a lot of work into but I did it smart, so I had a quicker pay off. I'm way ahead of almost everyone I know in my graduating class, and most of the people with the higher education are having an impossible time finding work for what they went to university for. When you have people with bachelor's degrees managing Burger Kings because there's nothing else that's available, you have a system that royally failed an entire generation's potential.
What you need to ask yourself is what you want to get out of life, and what you're willing to give up for it. No matter what the school name is on that diploma, it's still at the end of the day a stepping stone to a career, and at the end of the day, it's just a name. As I said before, if it gets you access to the same doors, why saddle yourself with a crippling debt?
