Highlights include the fact that Jack Lord could smell into the future, that Poutine is grown from seeds, that you can kill French people by carefully mispronouncing the French language in their presence, and that Lee Majors can travel through time.
Clearly I'm batshit insane, so thank God for bills like the one proposed, since I cause so much anguish to so many. I really need to be stopped.
They did the sensible thing and took my order across the street to McDonald's, returning to me (at a marginal reseller's markup) a quality steak from a trusted manufacturer.
The truly sad part is that I'd probably eat a McDonald's steak. Mmm. Charred cow flesh.
I'm man enough to admit that I have pirated music which I would have paid for otherwise.
I guess I'm not. I will NOT buy CDs or anything on iTunes, but as soon as Amazon started selling MP3s that:
Will play on pretty much anything.
Are unrestricted, and
Don't absolutely require the use of a funky downloader to get
I started purchasing every song in my download folder and that was available through them (I tend to keep my collection pretty clean and delete anything I don't like after a play or two). Yes, that meant a few hundred dollars over the last several months. Yes, that also means there are some songs in there that still aren't legit (they're not available through Amazon).
Amazon, in short, has what I want the way I want it, and I'm quite willing to pay for that. I suspect that, once this silly DRM thing goes away, people will be plenty honest enough to keep the music business from dying. The days of obscene margins on an artificially-scarce product are over, but the death of the industry is not at hand.
IF the labels keep a cool head about it and don't do anything (else) stupid.
Do what they did to muscle cars in the 50s and 60s--add fins to the back, a blower to the front, and retrofit a big speaker (for the obligatory loud revving noises when you turn it on).
Then again, if you add a "blower" to the front, who cares if it's "cute?"
Am I the only one who saw the words "EPIC Complaint" and got the image in my head about a guy driving a car into the complaints department at some auto manufacturer?
I was amazed at first by the negative attitude of most posts here. But then, I am in Silicon Valley and the mileage of those elsewhere probably varies...
I've known many sysadmins with no degree (indeed I WAS one of them until I graduated earlier this year). In many ways, Silicon Valley is a meritocracy and having the skill is sufficient qualification for many IT positions. That said, not having a degree definitely makes the candidate less credible and less likely to get pass the first filter (i.e. the HR/recruiting types).
As many have noted, the progression to sysadmin-ness without college means more work--like via phone support or similar in conjunction with classes or certifications (though certifications are never enough on their own). It's very doable, but it may be easier to get an AS through your local community college in something related.
Speaking of, I can't emphasize the community colleges enough. Here in California, they're awesome (and they were none too bad in the Phoenix area where I grew up, either). If you're hitting a brick wall in the search for an IT job in your area, that may be the path of least resistance to bridge the gap.
As for requirements listed on job postings, I tend to take them with a grain of salt. If you think you can do the job, then apply (just don't invest too emotionally and keep looking).
This is very much an engineering problem. What's better for you depends very much on what kind of development you're doing and what your "measures of goodness" are.
Multiple machines generally work well when you're doing large builds that take tons of CPU for a long time (say, repeated builds of a Linux kernel or similar). The big reason for this is that the machine you're on isn't being eaten up by the background build.
VMs are better when you just need to test in multiple environments (and things like snapshots really help). This assumes, of course, that the virtual hardware is OK and you don't have specific hardware requirements for your tests.
There are loads of exceptions to the above and there will likely be loads of (totally reasonable) conflicting opinions.
My personal development environment is a hybrid of the two, since I have both hardware-specific and hardware-agnostic work to do. My guess is that, if you're doing normal business-type development, snapshots will be more useful than background performance. As a result, my blind recommendation is a VM box (not necesarily a monster), with as much RAM as you can stuff in there (proc and HDD are generally less important). Maybe separate your interactive dev box to a discrete machine and use remote access to the VM box.
I don't know if that's so true for local elections, where you can actually get in the face of your elected officials.
If you don't want to vote for President, the Senate, or Congress, that's fine. But your local officials are actually somewhat beholden to their constituents and you can make some real difference there...
It is a shame (though understandable) that the President gets many orders of magnitude more press attention than your county, city, school district, and other local officials. Everyone has an opinion about who the President should be, but the fact is that s/he:
Does not have as direct an impact on your daily life as local government.
Is not nearly as accountable to you as local government (want an appointment with a city councilperson? Sure. Want an appointment with the President? Fat chance).
Nowhere is this more true than in education. Local school boards aren't generally as sexy as, say, Sarah Palin, but these people DIRECTLY impact what happens to school budgets, hiring/firing teachers, etc.
I implore US readers to do your due diligence and get your research done today (if you haven't already). Good places to start include Project Vote Smart, your state or county web site and local newspapers.
You used to see this a lot on computer games--one track with code, the others with background music. The game would load and then just tell the audio bits of the CD player to play the BGM tracks. This kept the CPU from having to deal with BGM, and you get CD-quality audio...
With Japanese, I understand i18n issues EXTREMELY well (word order, multi-byte charsets, the horrific beast that is iso-8022-jp, input methods, etc, etc).
With French, my understanding of English grammar and its idiosyncrasies was much improved. As an added plus, my wife thinks it's sexy:-).
Neither is probably an optimal second language for an English speaker, but they illustrate two goals that are different from the one you imply (i.e. to understand stuff written in a different language).
A language that has some similarities to your native tongue will grant you a much better understanding of your native tongue (plus it will be easier to learn because of cognates, etc).
A language that is radically different from your native language will open your mind to very different patterns of thought (without the flashbacks;-) ). Particularly for i18n code (and everyone's writing i18n-friendly code, right?), this is a big deal.
I won't be reading any heavy tech papers in either language, but the experiences have been invaluable.
My suggestions: Spanish for the Latin language, maybe Mandarin or Japanese (still) for the "weird" one.
Totally my new home page now. Since half my web searches start with me using a Google keyword search in Firefox anyway, this is just that much better.
Wow. Now it just needs "open in new tab," which I'm sure will come about in short order...
ObDisclaimer: I work for an Engineering college and am a part-time student. This is my opinion, not my school's.
As others have mentioned, the opportunity cost of taking that year off is a big deal. If you've been participating in projects and work outside of school, that is a Good Thing and will help you get a not-too-horrible first job out of school. Since money is looking to be a problem otherwise, save what you can and find a paletable flexible/online grad curriculum as soon as you can if you want to make up for a subpar bachelor's GPA. If you live in California, the Software Engineering (Online-only) Master's program at Fullerton is a great deal IMHO.
Your first job is unlikely to care about your undergrad grades. Your subsequent jobs won't care AT ALL. That said, you may want to keep a list of your weaker topics and review those that you aren't getting drilled on in industry. In my case, many language- and automata-related topics (e.g. grammars, push-down automata, Turing machines, computability) haven't really been hammered too much in my day-to-day work, but they've come in handy on occasion after taking the classes.
It also wouldn't hurt to live in a place with a lot of opportunity to get interesting work (like Silicon Valley) for a few years.
The summary has both "attorney generals" and "attorneys general." Does anyone care to hazard a guess as to which one is correct? The word "general" describes the attorneys--it's "general" the adjective, not the noun.
That and "son of a bitches." Bah. It's SONS OF A BITCH or SONS OF BITCHES (depending on the number of dogs involved). Our science isn't advanced enough to generate one son from more than one female dog, damn it!
This also doesn't explain why we need a Hummer dealership in the middle of Santa Clara, California (which is always at least 100 miles from anything that can reasonably called inclement weather).
I'm not a total tree-hugging hippie, but that's ridiculous.
Disclaimer: I'm the UNIX/Linux SA for an engineering college.
As with presenting to many other types of layfolk, it's usually best to paint a picture of exactly what it is that the person would do and why.
First: What is the before and after picture regarding what you've been doing so far? What improvements in the education experience have you enabled in your time there?
Second: What exactly are the ramifications of not having someone in your position? What falls apart and what gets lost?
Third: Who will vouch for that among the existing teachers/staff?
If you can say something like:
"Before I arrived, there were limited services available in area X. As a result, the educational mission was degraded because the students/teachers/staff couldn't do Y. By virtue of my work, Y is now possible and the educational mission is therefore improved in ways P, Q, and R (as corroborated by faculty A, B, and C).
Maintenance is required to keep Y working, however, and without it Y would degrade to Z, which would have a catastrophic effect on piece J of the educational mission. In addition, as a full timer, I could also enable the needed piece W, which I currently don't have time to do, and we can (eliminate/reduce) the contractor time, saving $D from the budget."
Wow. That was a lot of letters. To put it more simply, you need to put things both in context of the educational mission of the school (improving technical scholarship, easing the teaching of math, reducing the administrative headaches the teachers experience and freeing them up for more relevant work, etc) and reducing cost if possible. Show what has been achieved already, how that work is important, and how it will be wasted and useless if not maintained.
In a very real sense, this position is a high-tech janitor or facilities person in the mind of a school board--a necessary evil (lest everyone be overridden with crap). The more you can make your case that crap is reduced and will return without vigilance, the more likely they are to make the position. As others have noted, saying "district L has one" would help, but ultimately the people on the board have to see the value you bring. If it's not greater than, say, additional Music or PE classes (or other non-core services), you'll have a hard time selling it.
Making the position, btw, is the hard part. Getting the job is easier. Not trivially easy, mind you, but easier.
/me is a Phoenix expatriate currently living in Silicon Valley (both working full time and finishing up his BS part-time). I've also worked tech support, entry-level SA, and hybrid SA/coder for several years.
If you're in a typical backwaterish US outsourcing outpost (Boise, Phoenix, Vegas, e.g.), then getting the first piece of college paper (even an Associate's) makes a lot of sense.
If you're anywhere near Silicon Valley or the bigger SV wannabes (Seattle, Portland-Hillsboro, Austin, Denver-Broomfield, RTP, Boston, etc), you shouldn't have too much trouble transitioning to entry sysadmin or field support positions, even without the paper. Unfortunately, you might not get much past that without paper (except in SV, which is about as close to a tech meritocracy as you'll get).
Typical phone tech support turnover is about six months, so you're probably overdue for a change. If there's not a lot of obvious opportunity in your area, try hitting up your current employer for more interesting things to do. Second-level support, technical lead, or QA roles (or even partial roles) might perk you up a bit while you get some paper together (I once worked for several months as a scheduler, figuring out the work schedules for 800 people in a multi-site call center in Phoenix/Vegas/New Jersey--way less boring than answering phones).
Hit up your local community colleges--they're cheap and generally far more useful than people usually give them credit for. In California, for example, the GE Certification agreements between the community colleges and the UC and CSU systems make for a much nicer transfer. That said, make sure to file your syllabi as soon as you get 'em--you may well need them if you transfer.
ObDisclaimer: I work for San Jose State University and never got around to finishing my Bachelor's (though I'm working on that, and am currently a SJSU President's Scholar). I do have 10 or so years experience as both software developer and sysadmin. The opinions to follow are mine and not my employer's/school's, yada yada.
Despite years of attempts to quantify "education" in terms of standardized tests, class sizes, and other metrics, the one thing I've learned over the years is that learning defies quantification. This is true especially among the highly motivated like you. I've worked with everyone from high-school grads to folks with doctorates from MIT, Stanford (fairly common in the bay area where I live), and the advantages I've been able to note are that:
You have something more interesting to talk about in social situations, especially if those involve other grads.
As a fresh grad, you have less to "prove" to HR--you'll still get your butt kicked once you start working.
You've been exposed to more interesting cutting-edge tech.
It is easier as a fresh grad to get a job and/or get into grad school.
I've seen little evidence that high-end institutions have inherently better teachers than those who work for (say) the average State University or even Community Colleges in many cases. Their research might be unbelievably cool, but that says little (if anything) about their instruction. The best instructor I've ever known teaches at a CC...
I would love for a high-end grad to rebut me on the following point, but I see most of the real advantages evaporate once you have a few years of work experience under your belt--and they evaporate a lot faster than the resultant debt does. Mind you, my point isn't that these schools aren't better in whatever metric you want to pick--it's that what you go through to get there isn't worth it in the long run. In the long run, the work is what matters, not what name is on your diploma. If you're smart, motivated, hard-working, communicative, and do neat stuff, you're just as well off at any school in the longer term.
You're obviously exceptional or you wouldn't be making this kind of decision. I encourage you to question your assumptions (and those of your parents, teachers, and whomever else is pushing you to the high-end) and do a long-term cost/benefit analysis of your own. Maybe your conclusions will point to me being full of crap, or maybe you'll be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
...or at least one of them.
Highlights include the fact that Jack Lord could smell into the future, that Poutine is grown from seeds, that you can kill French people by carefully mispronouncing the French language in their presence, and that Lee Majors can travel through time.
Clearly I'm batshit insane, so thank God for bills like the one proposed, since I cause so much anguish to so many. I really need to be stopped.
They did the sensible thing and took my order across the street to McDonald's, returning to me (at a marginal reseller's markup) a quality steak from a trusted manufacturer.
The truly sad part is that I'd probably eat a McDonald's steak. Mmm. Charred cow flesh.
But I'd never admit to it. Oh, wait. Crap.
I'm man enough to admit that I have pirated music which I would have paid for otherwise.
I guess I'm not. I will NOT buy CDs or anything on iTunes, but as soon as Amazon started selling MP3s that:
I started purchasing every song in my download folder and that was available through them (I tend to keep my collection pretty clean and delete anything I don't like after a play or two). Yes, that meant a few hundred dollars over the last several months. Yes, that also means there are some songs in there that still aren't legit (they're not available through Amazon).
Amazon, in short, has what I want the way I want it, and I'm quite willing to pay for that. I suspect that, once this silly DRM thing goes away, people will be plenty honest enough to keep the music business from dying. The days of obscene margins on an artificially-scarce product are over, but the death of the industry is not at hand.
IF the labels keep a cool head about it and don't do anything (else) stupid.
Do what they did to muscle cars in the 50s and 60s--add fins to the back, a blower to the front, and retrofit a big speaker (for the obligatory loud revving noises when you turn it on).
Then again, if you add a "blower" to the front, who cares if it's "cute?"
Am I the only one who saw the words "EPIC Complaint" and got the image in my head about a guy driving a car into the complaints department at some auto manufacturer?
That would be an epic complaint.
I was amazed at first by the negative attitude of most posts here. But then, I am in Silicon Valley and the mileage of those elsewhere probably varies...
I've known many sysadmins with no degree (indeed I WAS one of them until I graduated earlier this year). In many ways, Silicon Valley is a meritocracy and having the skill is sufficient qualification for many IT positions. That said, not having a degree definitely makes the candidate less credible and less likely to get pass the first filter (i.e. the HR/recruiting types).
As many have noted, the progression to sysadmin-ness without college means more work--like via phone support or similar in conjunction with classes or certifications (though certifications are never enough on their own). It's very doable, but it may be easier to get an AS through your local community college in something related.
Speaking of, I can't emphasize the community colleges enough. Here in California, they're awesome (and they were none too bad in the Phoenix area where I grew up, either). If you're hitting a brick wall in the search for an IT job in your area, that may be the path of least resistance to bridge the gap.
As for requirements listed on job postings, I tend to take them with a grain of salt. If you think you can do the job, then apply (just don't invest too emotionally and keep looking).
This is very much an engineering problem. What's better for you depends very much on what kind of development you're doing and what your "measures of goodness" are.
Multiple machines generally work well when you're doing large builds that take tons of CPU for a long time (say, repeated builds of a Linux kernel or similar). The big reason for this is that the machine you're on isn't being eaten up by the background build.
VMs are better when you just need to test in multiple environments (and things like snapshots really help). This assumes, of course, that the virtual hardware is OK and you don't have specific hardware requirements for your tests.
There are loads of exceptions to the above and there will likely be loads of (totally reasonable) conflicting opinions.
My personal development environment is a hybrid of the two, since I have both hardware-specific and hardware-agnostic work to do. My guess is that, if you're doing normal business-type development, snapshots will be more useful than background performance. As a result, my blind recommendation is a VM box (not necesarily a monster), with as much RAM as you can stuff in there (proc and HDD are generally less important). Maybe separate your interactive dev box to a discrete machine and use remote access to the VM box.
I don't know if that's so true for local elections, where you can actually get in the face of your elected officials.
If you don't want to vote for President, the Senate, or Congress, that's fine. But your local officials are actually somewhat beholden to their constituents and you can make some real difference there...
It is a shame (though understandable) that the President gets many orders of magnitude more press attention than your county, city, school district, and other local officials. Everyone has an opinion about who the President should be, but the fact is that s/he:
Nowhere is this more true than in education. Local school boards aren't generally as sexy as, say, Sarah Palin, but these people DIRECTLY impact what happens to school budgets, hiring/firing teachers, etc.
I implore US readers to do your due diligence and get your research done today (if you haven't already). Good places to start include Project Vote Smart, your state or county web site and local newspapers.
You used to see this a lot on computer games--one track with code, the others with background music. The game would load and then just tell the audio bits of the CD player to play the BGM tracks. This kept the CPU from having to deal with BGM, and you get CD-quality audio...
iso-8022-jp. Yeah, that would be a horrible beast. (It should've read "iso-2022-jp")
I took both Japanese and French. Ramifications:
With Japanese, I understand i18n issues EXTREMELY well (word order, multi-byte charsets, the horrific beast that is iso-8022-jp, input methods, etc, etc).
With French, my understanding of English grammar and its idiosyncrasies was much improved. As an added plus, my wife thinks it's sexy :-).
Neither is probably an optimal second language for an English speaker, but they illustrate two goals that are different from the one you imply (i.e. to understand stuff written in a different language).
A language that has some similarities to your native tongue will grant you a much better understanding of your native tongue (plus it will be easier to learn because of cognates, etc).
A language that is radically different from your native language will open your mind to very different patterns of thought (without the flashbacks ;-) ). Particularly for i18n code (and everyone's writing i18n-friendly code, right?), this is a big deal.
I won't be reading any heavy tech papers in either language, but the experiences have been invaluable.
My suggestions: Spanish for the Latin language, maybe Mandarin or Japanese (still) for the "weird" one.
Totally my new home page now. Since half my web searches start with me using a Google keyword search in Firefox anyway, this is just that much better. Wow. Now it just needs "open in new tab," which I'm sure will come about in short order...
"Hasn't Street Fighter 2 been released on Wii Virtual Console?"
Three times. ...and I've bought every one of them. Now if they'd only support network play of the SNES games... Blargh, I'm lameYou could also try some of the lower-end Supermicro Chassis:
(SuperMicro SC512 - roughly $80)
Rackmount chassis, in my experience, only get really expensive if deep (requiring more oomph from the rail kits) or have hotswap bits.
Nah. It's reasonably safe for (e.g.) work. Sorry for the scare.
It's only a matter of time before we have this:
http://goats.com/archive/060403.html
One fight takes place in a sewer, featuring solid water effects.
Ugh. Solid water is the last thing I want to hear about when eating breakfast. Yuck.
ObDisclaimer: I work for an Engineering college and am a part-time student. This is my opinion, not my school's.
As others have mentioned, the opportunity cost of taking that year off is a big deal. If you've been participating in projects and work outside of school, that is a Good Thing and will help you get a not-too-horrible first job out of school. Since money is looking to be a problem otherwise, save what you can and find a paletable flexible/online grad curriculum as soon as you can if you want to make up for a subpar bachelor's GPA. If you live in California, the Software Engineering (Online-only) Master's program at Fullerton is a great deal IMHO.
Your first job is unlikely to care about your undergrad grades. Your subsequent jobs won't care AT ALL. That said, you may want to keep a list of your weaker topics and review those that you aren't getting drilled on in industry. In my case, many language- and automata-related topics (e.g. grammars, push-down automata, Turing machines, computability) haven't really been hammered too much in my day-to-day work, but they've come in handy on occasion after taking the classes.
It also wouldn't hurt to live in a place with a lot of opportunity to get interesting work (like Silicon Valley) for a few years.
The summary has both "attorney generals" and "attorneys general." Does anyone care to hazard a guess as to which one is correct? The word "general" describes the attorneys--it's "general" the adjective, not the noun.
That and "son of a bitches." Bah. It's SONS OF A BITCH or SONS OF BITCHES (depending on the number of dogs involved). Our science isn't advanced enough to generate one son from more than one female dog, damn it!
This also doesn't explain why we need a Hummer dealership in the middle of Santa Clara, California (which is always at least 100 miles from anything that can reasonably called inclement weather).
I'm not a total tree-hugging hippie, but that's ridiculous.
Disclaimer: I'm the UNIX/Linux SA for an engineering college.
As with presenting to many other types of layfolk, it's usually best to paint a picture of exactly what it is that the person would do and why.
First: What is the before and after picture regarding what you've been doing so far? What improvements in the education experience have you enabled in your time there?
Second: What exactly are the ramifications of not having someone in your position? What falls apart and what gets lost?
Third: Who will vouch for that among the existing teachers/staff?
If you can say something like:
"Before I arrived, there were limited services available in area X. As a result, the educational mission was degraded because the students/teachers/staff couldn't do Y. By virtue of my work, Y is now possible and the educational mission is therefore improved in ways P, Q, and R (as corroborated by faculty A, B, and C).
Maintenance is required to keep Y working, however, and without it Y would degrade to Z, which would have a catastrophic effect on piece J of the educational mission. In addition, as a full timer, I could also enable the needed piece W, which I currently don't have time to do, and we can (eliminate/reduce) the contractor time, saving $D from the budget."
Wow. That was a lot of letters. To put it more simply, you need to put things both in context of the educational mission of the school (improving technical scholarship, easing the teaching of math, reducing the administrative headaches the teachers experience and freeing them up for more relevant work, etc) and reducing cost if possible. Show what has been achieved already, how that work is important, and how it will be wasted and useless if not maintained.
In a very real sense, this position is a high-tech janitor or facilities person in the mind of a school board--a necessary evil (lest everyone be overridden with crap). The more you can make your case that crap is reduced and will return without vigilance, the more likely they are to make the position. As others have noted, saying "district L has one" would help, but ultimately the people on the board have to see the value you bring. If it's not greater than, say, additional Music or PE classes (or other non-core services), you'll have a hard time selling it.
Making the position, btw, is the hard part. Getting the job is easier. Not trivially easy, mind you, but easier.
Ditto. I haven't purchased a non-indy CD or DVD in three years now as a result of the *AA's inane stunts. I suggest that others do the same.
Or if you can't get rid of your addiction entirely, at least send a buck or two per disc purchased to the EFF or similar.
Tell a friend.
/me is a Phoenix expatriate currently living in Silicon Valley (both working full time and finishing up his BS part-time). I've also worked tech support, entry-level SA, and hybrid SA/coder for several years.
If you're in a typical backwaterish US outsourcing outpost (Boise, Phoenix, Vegas, e.g.), then getting the first piece of college paper (even an Associate's) makes a lot of sense.
If you're anywhere near Silicon Valley or the bigger SV wannabes (Seattle, Portland-Hillsboro, Austin, Denver-Broomfield, RTP, Boston, etc), you shouldn't have too much trouble transitioning to entry sysadmin or field support positions, even without the paper. Unfortunately, you might not get much past that without paper (except in SV, which is about as close to a tech meritocracy as you'll get).
Typical phone tech support turnover is about six months, so you're probably overdue for a change. If there's not a lot of obvious opportunity in your area, try hitting up your current employer for more interesting things to do. Second-level support, technical lead, or QA roles (or even partial roles) might perk you up a bit while you get some paper together (I once worked for several months as a scheduler, figuring out the work schedules for 800 people in a multi-site call center in Phoenix/Vegas/New Jersey--way less boring than answering phones).
Hit up your local community colleges--they're cheap and generally far more useful than people usually give them credit for. In California, for example, the GE Certification agreements between the community colleges and the UC and CSU systems make for a much nicer transfer. That said, make sure to file your syllabi as soon as you get 'em--you may well need them if you transfer.
ObDisclaimer: I work for San Jose State University and never got around to finishing my Bachelor's (though I'm working on that, and am currently a SJSU President's Scholar). I do have 10 or so years experience as both software developer and sysadmin. The opinions to follow are mine and not my employer's/school's, yada yada.
Despite years of attempts to quantify "education" in terms of standardized tests, class sizes, and other metrics, the one thing I've learned over the years is that learning defies quantification. This is true especially among the highly motivated like you. I've worked with everyone from high-school grads to folks with doctorates from MIT, Stanford (fairly common in the bay area where I live), and the advantages I've been able to note are that:
I've seen little evidence that high-end institutions have inherently better teachers than those who work for (say) the average State University or even Community Colleges in many cases. Their research might be unbelievably cool, but that says little (if anything) about their instruction. The best instructor I've ever known teaches at a CC...
I would love for a high-end grad to rebut me on the following point, but I see most of the real advantages evaporate once you have a few years of work experience under your belt--and they evaporate a lot faster than the resultant debt does. Mind you, my point isn't that these schools aren't better in whatever metric you want to pick--it's that what you go through to get there isn't worth it in the long run. In the long run, the work is what matters, not what name is on your diploma. If you're smart, motivated, hard-working, communicative, and do neat stuff, you're just as well off at any school in the longer term.
You're obviously exceptional or you wouldn't be making this kind of decision. I encourage you to question your assumptions (and those of your parents, teachers, and whomever else is pushing you to the high-end) and do a long-term cost/benefit analysis of your own. Maybe your conclusions will point to me being full of crap, or maybe you'll be surprised.