Jam- make a list right now- today- of what that super lean lifestyle would look like and make sure your spouse is on board before you get too far down the road.
Speaking from experience (not my own- spouse grew up modest means, never had an issue doing without or cutting back. But I know lots of marriages which faced a lot of turmoil over the “super lean” concept).
We had a similar view (although kid not interested-- at all- in Comp Sci). We did end up being full pay for MIT- and have never regretted it-- but rejected many of the colleges on the guidance counselors list as “Nope, not paying for that”. Kid didn’t agree with all of our vetos but did understand the logic behind it.
Not that it’s relevant- but kid was out-earning us a few years post grad school (not a doctorate, and again- not comp sci). I wouldn’t pay for MIT because it’s going to make your kid affluent at a very early age, but the guy in his frat with the lowest GPA (or so the brothers said) was the first millionaire (sold his start up at age 27). And many of my kid’s close friends have done amazing and astonishing things in the last couple of years! Some highly renumerative, some world-changing in terms of disease management/public health, sustainability and alternative energy, etc.
Make sure your spouse agrees with your financing plan though… don’t leave it until April to learn that YOU are fine living like a grad student for four years but spouse doesn’t want to give up the monthly cleaning service, eating out, gym, HBO, or whatever the particular “luxury” happens to be.
@jamgolf With stats like those, I would encourage your child to apply for some of the very competitive merit scholarships that still exist at some well-ranked schools. These are long shots for any child, no matter how qualified - think less than 5% success rate within an elite applicant pool. But I have seen people on this forum get these scholarships so it never hurts to try. I’m thinking named scholarships by separate application at Wash U, Vanderbilt, Duke, UNC, Richmond, USC (both South Carolina and Southern California) and merit scholarships that could bring costs down by 20-30K at places like Rice, Rochester, Tulane, and Case Western. There are still a few places where NMF can yield full tuition or full ride.
I would also look at public universities with well-ranked honors programs.
We went through the same process, FWIW. After revising expectations, we found many, many schools where our child could be happy and that were affordable with merit scholarships. Good luck!
@jamgolf
I wish I could find what another poster wrote the other day – it was spot on. Here’s the gist, about expectations and the potential for disappointment:
So, let’s say your kid gets into one or both of the colleges you consider worthy of stretching and making big sacrifices to pay for.
You turn down huge merit scholarships at other lower tier schools in order to get your kid to this exceptional school – which is not affordable — except by you making major adjustments to your lifestyle and finances for years to come.
And your kid gets there and…doesn’t like it. Or doesn’t appreciate it. Or begins to crack under the pressure and is miserable. Or one day says to you he thinks he could have done just as well at the state flagship where many of his coworkers came from and everyone is making the same $$ and aren’t in debt.
Or some opportunity crosses your path or his path, and you can’t take advantage of it because you put all your eggs into paying for that expensive UG degree. We’d like to help you start your business, or put a downpayment on your house, or travel with you to Europe, but…
It’s EASY to imagine it all going well. But how would it sit with you, if it didn’t go as you dream?
The Application Season is NUTS. It takes courage & strength to not get sucked up into the hype. You will see people around you react to the big name schools with amazement, big smiles and gushing. You will see people around you react to less sexy ordinary schools with blank stares, polite tight smiles and “that’s nice”.
Even my kid pointed it out to me. She was acutely aware of the social pressure & the varying reactions. Parents feel the pressure too. Where you go to college is not a measure of one’s self-worth.
But 2 years from now? 3 years from now? This will all be in the rearview mirror. Be careful.
@blossom
I think you are right on regarding thinking about “what the super lean lifestyle” would look like. To say it and to live it are two totally different things. And as a matter of fairness to my son’s younger sibling, we can’t just take away the experiences/opportunities that we made available to him.
You are spot on about being on the same page with my wife. She being the loving mom is actually more willing to do whatever it takes but I think we need to actually visualize and talk in concrete terms what that might mean, should that happen, as it did in your case.
@Midwest67
Thanks again. That’s profound.
Looking at the best case scenario is easy, but it’s more important to look at things through a less rosy lens.
I feel my son is a logical and reasonable person and I need to discuss these scenarios with him (and with my wife).
@jamgolf
@itsgettingreal17 might be able to chime in on strategies for chasing not only automatic merit scholarships for high stats kids like your son, but throwing your weight into some competitive merit scholarships like @mamaedefamilia mentioned up thread.
You might get the impression from your friends, neighbors, and relatives that kids with your son’s stats all go to top 20 schools. Nonsense. He’s going where?! But I thought he got a 35 on his ACT?! People say ignorant ridiculous things that have the potential, if you let it, to make you feel bad.
My one kid at the lowly University of Kentucky —she is there on a full tuition plus scholarship – goes to school with plenty of high stats kids who are there for the same reason: Big Merit Scholarships or In-State Tuition.
She is not in engineering, but fell into a group of friends who are in various engineering fields. The stories of the projects these friends are working on? The paid internships over the summer? It’s really cool to see these kids working hard and blooming where they are planted.
My D’s experience at UK has exceeded both of our expectations. And she was miserable about having to attend that school almost her entire freshman year. She’s a rising junior now and will tell people she didn’t like it very much at first, but really likes it now.
You and your wife might enjoy Frank Bruni’s book “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be”. It’s very good on audio. I made my D listen to it when I had her trapped in the car for a college visit trip.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1455532681/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Good luck to you!
Try living the super lean lifestyle starting now. This will give you an idea of how doable it is, and let your kids know what their expensive dreams will cost. And if you are successful in doing so, you will start saving some money to use for your kids’ college.
Also, think more about whether you can pay for the expensive dreams for both kids. If you pay for one but not the other, that can be bad for family relations.
Be sure to tell them the financial limits before they make their application lists.
@jamgolf so…if you think this belt tightening financially will work…start it right now. Cancel that vacation you have planned. If you lease a car, get a smaller and less costly one. Cancel cable, the cleaning lady, and stop going out to dinner. If you shop at Whole Foods or the like, start going someplace less costly. No new clothes or other discretionary purchases…and that is for the whole family.
Put every dime you save into a dedicated savings account for a few months and see how much you REALLY have.
My free advice, if you absolutely will not pay for a college if it’s not affordable, please tell your kid that BEFORE he applies, does the supplemental essays, and you spend money sending his test scores and Profile to these schools (remember, you are trying to save money…not cast it to the wind).
I did not think of it exactly as some of you have pointed out but I I agree with you that the conversations need to happen BEFORE the application process and the lifestyle adjustments need to happen NOW - if only to gauge whether this type of belt-tightening is feasible/sustainable.
And you are also right about setting the expectations NOW so that he is not hurt or angry later.
If you had known 17 years ago that college would cost $75k per year, and that you really wanted your newborn son (who was sure to be a genius) to go to MIT or CalTech or even Georgia Tech, would you have done anything differently? Would you have bought a smaller house, not let him go to gymboree, cut out boy scouts or marching band or summer camps? Most importantly, would you have had no more children?
In order to set aside that much money for college, it’s likely you would have had to do all that. I’m assuming you and spouse weren’t making $250k back in 2001, and probably couldn’t imagine making that way back then. If you had somehow been able to save $20k a year for just his college, what would you have had to give up? What experiences would he have missed? Would he be the same top student he is today if he’d not been exposed to clubs and robotics and summer programs? And siblings?
As you can tell by the responses here, many of us had to make the same decisions for our kids. ‘I’ll make the financial sacrifice for Harvard or Stanford or MIT.’ Really? I think most would snicker at someone who made a financial decision like that to live in Beverly Hills when they really couldn’t afford it just because it was lifelong dream and the investment is worth it to have the ‘right’ neighbors. Or buy an expensive car that is a dream but everyone else in the family has to take the bus because it was so important to get THE car.
People with one kid can make choices those of us with several can’t.
I will add my voice to those saying to have that financial discussion with your student now. The first time I had a discussion with my parents about college affordability was when I stood in our kitchen spring of my senior year with a big, fat envelope with an acceptance to an Ivy League school. [Voiceover: “He didn’t there.”]
I ended up going to a strong public flagship OOS on a partial scholarship – it ended up being cheaper than even my own state’s flagship – and I had a good experience there. But I wish I’d had that financial discussion in advance of applying to colleges so that of the 7 colleges I applied to (and got in to), only 2 were affordable. The other 5, selective enough that they could eschew merit aid, I don’t think were even close to affordable for my family. (We were most likely in the “donut hole” of the late '80s.) I probably would have adjusted where I applied had I known what my parents were willing to spend and where as a high stats kid like your son I would have received significant merit aid.
My D19 knows the dollar amount we’re willing to pay per year. Luckily, the NPCs for us at the schools we’re looking at are in the right ballpark, particularly if D19 is willing to take out some level of subsidized loans. And luckily for us, she never really looked at other schools whose net price was materially above our EFC. But if she had, we would have told her that it would require significant loans on her part, and suggest that that much debt was not a good idea at all.
You seem to be going about this thoughtfully, @jamgolf, so sorry if the NPC feedback has been a shock. Your son seems like a bright kid, and should succeed wherever he happens to spend 4 years of his life.
And to add to Borgity Borg’s fine post- the only way to make sure that wherever your fantastic and fabulous son ends up doesn’t feel like sloppy seconds or the booby prize-- is to have very clear expectations up front.
The old-timers here could tell you the story of the kid who heads off to XYZ college with a fantastic merit scholarship, tons of opportunities for paid fellowships and foreign research/travel gigs, and feels like a loser because it was his safety school. Or the kid who is part of a tiny cohort at her college who gets extra mentoring, time with professors, etc. as part of the Honors College and is still pining away for the college which admitted her with no aid whatsoever.
We made a rule with our kids that we had to conclude EVERY college visit (or discussion) by saying something positive about the school. It was a stretch for some of the more negative experiences we had but it really pays off. Find something to love. It could be an academic strength, or a very cool EC/community involvement opportunity, the food, a gorgeous campus even if your kid thinks the tour guide is weird and dumb (or both). Get in the habit of accentuating the positive and it will make your March/April so much happier!
@twoinanddone
Generally, I agree with and appreciate what you said but I personally have a different view with respect to your statement regarding Stanford or MIT is the same as living in Beverly Hills while not being able to afford to live there.
The reason I feel that way is we are talking about education. It’s not a consumable product like an expensive meal or depreciating asset like a car. I view it as an investment. Working in the engineering and software industry for 20+ years I have no doubt in my mind about the intangible benefits of the name-value of a select few schools being on someone’s resume. Far more doors open and lead to more opportunities. That I feel is worth it and not an extravagance. It’s still just my personal opinion, of course.
I would not pay one cent for my son to go to MIT and study Philosophy but I will consider paying for a Computer Science or Computer Engineering degree from MIT. I know it will pay back. My son is not applying to any Ivy League schools, only to top Computer Science schools.
So…what would you do if your son got to MIT and decided CS or engineering wasn’t his cup of tea? Would you make him transfer?
@thumper1
While the possibility of him finding out CS is not his cup of tea exists, I think he is past that point because he has been taking CS classes since 9th grade and has now exhausted all the CS classes available to him at school and is doing independent study. He spends his time learning programming languages and asks me how to this or that or if he should choose one database or another to do whatever he is trying to do. So, I think the likelihood of him switching his path is rather low.
Having said that, yes indeed, I would make him transfer if he were to switch away from CS/CE.
^My husband worked with a Philosophy major (Princeton) and I think a CS Masters at a well-known CS research lab. The guy was brilliant and very well known in the field. So one never knows.
@donnaleighg
I meant no disrespect to the subject of Philosophy and those who study it. I actually find it very interesting and those who study it to be very smart. I just used it as an example.
I just meant to make my point i.e. some schools/institutions are so good in a narrow field of study that they bring additional intangible value. It can be a music conservatory for someone aspiring to be a musician. John Hopkins for someone becoming a physician … MIT/CMU in the field of Computer Science etc.
My son started MIT as a physics major and ended up as a " not physics" major. The rigor of the core is the same for everyone, whether majoring in music, urban planning, political science, or economics. (My kid did have a minor in a technical field). There are lots of kids who start MIT planning to major in CS/CE who fall in love with something else (that was my kid-- physics was the love all through HS, and then he was “introduced” to something he felt was way cooler and more interesting).
So I don’t think it’s “finding out CS is not his cup of tea”. It’s meeting a cool professor who is working on something so intriguing a kid ends up working with him/her for a summer and then is hooked. Isn’t that what you are looking for at college- for your kid to “meet” something he never knew existed, and want to eat, live and breathe it???
If you plan to make him transfer if he switches majors, please make that clear to him up front.
As noted…schools like MIT have breadth of study regardless of the major.
And for the record…Johns Hopkins for undergrad is NOT a guarantee for medical schools admissions. NO undergrad school is. Just saying.
@blossom
Thanks for sharing your son’s experience at MIT. I suppose I should be more open to that possibility 
My point though is that if he falls in love with let’s say Philosophy, then MIT is not the place to be. MIT brings no additional intangible value, which at least I am willing to pay for. He would have to pursue that dream at a more cost-effective school.