I appreciate your previous posts.
It's clear that you don't appreciate how you came off in the next one.
It also seems that you may not appreciate how much you look like the mirror image of the folks who are rabidly anti-Harvard or even anti-Ivy (or anti-elite anything). Like the poster to whom I directed you.
At this point, I'm a little turned off by the more absolutist views that don't appear to see that the final decision doesn't seem so straightforward to my son and his family.
sitetest
Your son's "quandry" is that he's trying to decide between three excellent choices: no matter where he goes, he will have to try, and try hard, to get a bad education.
All three schools will look very good to potential employers.
All three schools will enable him to get a major in the Classics; Hopkins has spoken of starting him with graduate-level courses.
All of the schools will act as a sufficient springboard to a Master's or PhD: Maryland and Hopkins in fact will give him a Master's in five years. Not bad.
The question to my mind, if you will bear my "sententiousnessosity," is threefold:
1) Which will give him the best undergraduate experience (friends, lifestyle, overall "feel" and atmosphere, accessibility of professors instead of TAs, ability to change emphasis within engineering, or major?)
2) Which is the best in terms of
i) absolute cost
ii) cost-to-benefit ratio
3) What does he want to do with his life? "Hands-on" engineer, climb the corporate ladder, start his own business? For hands-on I'd rank Maryland, then Hopkins, then Harvard; for climb-the-ladder Harvard would give an initial advantage, but corporate politics or other factors could negate this; for catapult-into-corner-office it's Harvard; Harvard would give "man in the street" cred for his own business, but within the engineering community, it'd be Maryland, unless he wants to work for a "Beltway Bandit" in which case both Maryland and Hopkins would be good -- the whole local thing.
His MBA-style decision tree will have to weight the probability of each of these factors and their relative importance.
As Zasu said in The Lion King:
(sighs) "Simba...Good Luck."
Cheers!