We told all 3 that 4 years at full pay meets full need school was plenty. Accepting merit $$ at a lower tier school may have us rethink helping for year 5 of a BS/MS.
Oldest’s professional mentor mentioned freshman year that paying for a grad degree means you’ve done life wrong. Thank you!!!
Speaking for myself, a generation ago, my parents paid for undergrad, I did grad with mostly stipends and some loans. No money from parents except for occasional plane tickets home.
My s’s didnt go to grad school but understood if they had they were on their own.
We gave our kids a budget for undergrad. If they don’t use it all up, then they have it for graduate school. One daughter is going to spend less than the budget and therefore will have a bit left for graduate school.
Not even close to usurious, in a moral or legal sense. I bet your borrowing at 3% was a secured loan. There aren’t many lenders willing to lend unsecured funds to 25 year olds at 3%.
Fully paid their undergrad privates. D paid her grad school’s tuition with merit aid+ loans+her savings. I helped with living expenses. S did not attend grad school.
Not considering it but doubt kids would go anyway.
Totally agree with this for the most part (outside of med school and law school). H and I both got business school masters degrees, but they were paid for through corporate tuition reimbursement programs. I don’t think business masters degrees are worth paying out of pocket for. They look nice on your resume but don’t really do anything for you from a career mobility perspective that you can’t get by just being great at your job. If your employer pays, go for it.
I guess if you were an Art History major and want to break into Finance and can’t get in through an entry level roll, then an MBA may be helpful. But for $150K? Still don’t think its worth it.
For my own graduate degrees, I had a mixed bag of Teaching Assistanceships, Research Assistanceships, courses paid for by my employer, tuition waivers for no apparent reason, and courses which I paid for myself. But then the whole lot of them spanned 22 years, of which I was registered for something in at least 16 of them.
We plan to pay or significantly help pay for grad school which is a ways off for us - D18. AP/DE credit will allow her to easily complete undergrad in 3 years saving us $'s and has plans for OT grad school. The goal will be instate publics which I will gladly pay for - if OOS options or private there will likely be loans involved. Also, it may be necessary to try for instate public options a second year before opening it up to more expensive options. Grad school gets so much more complicated as the costs can be very high.
No grad school payment for the eldest because her employer pays that.
Pharmacy school for the middle one, that we pay, because the schools don’t pay for pharmacy.
Youngest already attends an expensive school. We are not paying for grad school for him because of his current costs and sister’s school at the same time. We can sort of afford it, because of recent inheritance, but otherwise we are on a budget.
Of course it is all relative. If our daughter had gone to a private school with no financial aid we would likely be paying $300,000 for undergrad. In the end, she is going to a state school and we are paying ~$100,000. So why would we not pay for her grad school if she decided to go that route?
On the other hand, if she wanted to go private school all the way, took extra years to graduate, studied abroad, etc. then we might tighten the purse at some point.
To follow up, and for clarity, we had a certain amount of $ earmarked for each s’s education. Younger s thought he wanted to go to med school so chose his undergrad that offered a full tuition scholarship and NMF scholarship, saving our education $ for med school. When he decided to go the engineering route there was a lot of $ left in his account. DH decided to let him have it in savings. I wasn’t really in agreement as it was supposed to be for education, but DH allowed him to have it when he turned 21. He has handled/managed it well, thankfully.
Given that prospective pre-med students here are often told “Go to the cheaper school and have your parents save money for medical school,” I’m surprised that few are willing and/or able to chip in for a professional degree after shelling out for undergrad.
My graduate degrees were fully funded by fellowships and teaching assistantships, thankfully. I don’t envy the grad students who have to take on a lot of debt, especially since graduate students can no longer borrow subsidized loans.
My wife and I were both fortunate enough to have parents that paid for our undergrad degrees. We each fully paid for our graduate degrees (MBAs). I hope to do the same for my own kids. So grad school: they are on their own. (Hoping I didn’t just jinx myself.)
I think it depends on how much money the parents have. One gets fully paid STEM graduate education for a phd so it is not an issue. One went to law school and I paid for housing and living expenses but not tuition
We paid the full freight for two kids to earn their BA and BFA.
For #1, I told him that if grad school meant PhD and if he was really qualified for a high-ranked department, he wouldn’t need any of our money. But if he chose law school, we would help him a little bit but he’d likely need to take loans, because we would be exhausting our savings on his and his sister’s undergrad degrees. He never applied to grad school.
For #2, who never thought she’d attend grad school after earning her BFA, we never had a discussion about grad school costs until – after she’d worked in the economy for 3-4 years – she decided she needed another degree, an MBA, to make a partial career shift. We agreed to pay her rent but she would have to take loans to cover tuition, in what turned out to be a 3-year dual-degree MBA/MS program. She graduated with $100,000 in federal direct loans. While she contributed to paying off the loans, the usurious interest rate was killing. When we inherited some money, we used the first $80K or so to pay off her loan balances.
We told our kids that we’d pay for the undergrad school of their choice. They could follow the merit $$ or go elsewhere, but if they chose to take the merit $$, we would be able to help with a car/some grad school funding. They chose the more expensive schools.
S1 wound up paying about half of his UG between scholarships, Stafford and well-paying summer internships. He had talked about grad school, but chose SV instead. He doesn’t need our financial help.
S2 went to a school that didn’t offer merit $$, so we paid more for his education. He took out Staffords and worked about 10 hrs/week during the school year for personal expenses. He’d like to get a MA, but he needs to have some solid accomplishments to offset his UG grades. He plans to pay for it himself, unless he is working for an employer who will help defray the costs.
When DH started law school, we’d been married about three years. He had a scholarship and took out some private loans in his name only, and we paid living expenses out of my salary. Neither of our parents helped with UG, so we knew we were on our own. I was fine with that, but once we had kids, I was more than ready to get into a house. We were 37 and had been married 14+ years by the time we bought a place. Student loans + child care + saving for a down payment was a heavy load. OTOH, the discipline we developed was useful in being able to pay for our sons’ college education!
I paid for my own. I did grad school part time while working at a job in my bachelor’s field. It never occurred to me to ask my parents for help since I was working full time.
As a kid growing up in a Jewish family, I absorbed a few values. The first value was the importance of education. This was the most important investment that parents could make in their kids. (Makes sense if they are always kicking you out of countries – human capital is the only kind of capital you can take with you). My parents were not rich but paid for four kids to go to college. Two got PhDs. Mine was in a math-y field and so I had fellowships for all four years to cover tuition, room and board (not living high on the hog). My sister’s was in clinical psychology and I believe that she had assistantships to cover her tuition and expenses, though my parents may have covered some stuff. But, a younger sister went to law school and they paid for it in full. They would have paid for a masters in education for my brother, but he was able to use an apprenticeship program in our state to get certified. The second value was the importance of putting your all into school (and into success at work after school was over).
As a consequence, I think I considered it something of a moral imperative to help my kids with their education. I don’t remember saying this, but apparently I told my wife at our wedding that we should start saving our cash wedding gifts for the kids’ college educations. She was baffled as there were no immediate plans for kids and we didn’t have lots of household stuff. I’m making no moral judgment about others who do differently, but it feels like something I really must do if I can. And I have.
We’ve been reasonably fortunate financially. We made big contributions to 529 plans and my wife’s mother contributed to all of her grandkids 529 plans as well. So, ShawD did a 5 year BSN/MSN program and we paid for all five years (including summers). She was a really diligent kid and had at least one job every semester including summers. She was exhausted, spent three months in SE Asia (I gave her a frequent flyer ticket to Bangkok) and volunteered in hurricane relief when she returned. She has been working as a nurse practitioner since her return – she’s just taken a new job after her first year somewhere else.
ShawSon was a special case. Brilliant, driven and seriously dyslexic with some medical issues. We paid for four years at an elite LAC. Rather than getting a job post-college, he started up a company with three other kids (at the beginning of the second semester of senior year). Raised a bit of money by graduation and lived on a ramen diet, We were paying for phones, computer, Netflix, etc. (and probably still are). The company is still slightly better than breaking even 4.5 years later though it will not be a blockbuster. But, after a year, he decided to turn it over to his buddies and went to grad school to get an MBA and an MS in Data Science at what I’d guess is the best school in the world for this. The 529 plan has just barely covered this (expensive it is) but a great investment. He could have gotten a very good job with a very good salary at tech and other companies, but instead started a new company, raised a several million dollar seed round from Silicon Valley VCs and is off and running while finishing his last quarter of school. I think it was a very good investment on my part (and I will have a few of the founders shares).
I’m not sure what I would have done if one of my children wanted to get a masters degree in a field that, while intellectually interesting, would not have helped their employment prospects. What would I have thought about medieval studies or folkloric studies (I think I have relatives with masters in each). But, both kids picked eminently practical professional degrees. I think if we couldn’t have afforded it, my son might have gone for a PhD fully funded rather than the degrees he did. But, I think his program of study really has helped him find a path that matches his strengths, so I am glad to be able to help.
Incidentally, I’m reloading the 529 plans for grandkids who do not yet exist. But, this should also help if my D wants to go back for an MPH or something like that in a number of years.
Sorry for excessive detail.
@shawbridge - I chuckled at your explanation of the cultural underpinnings of your decision. We are partly Jewish too, so maybe the same cultural background informs our decisions regarding education for our son! (We also started saving for college from the time of the wedding gifts! We thought about saving for college with almost every financial decision we ever made—sometimes even buying groceries!)
This reminds me of when my son was stunned when one of his friends said she wanted to be a doctor, and then her mother told her that she would be better off with fewer years of education and becoming a nurse instead. We joked that those are words you would never hear coming out of a Jewish or Asian parent’s mouth!
(But that’s stereotyping, and of course, individuals will vary, regardless of their background.)
It sounds like your kids are both accomplished and happy. Our kids’ happiness is what we all want as parents.
@shawbridge, I like your use of the term “moral imperative.” I feel that way about helping my children with their educations, although for slightly different reasons.
My ex-husband also believes in the value of education but has different beliefs about how to pay for it. At one point, he suggested that our daughters just not pay back their student loans. Ouch.