<p>Parents -</p>
<p>When you worked your savings plans, did you expect to pay for your kids education for 4 years or 5 years?</p>
<p>If you expected 4, and they went 5, did you help them out their last year?</p>
<p>Some majors frequently take more than four years. One of the problems with state universities with budget problems is that it may get much harder to finish in four years without very careful planning as courses fill up and you can’t get into the sections that you need to graduate on time.</p>
<p>Liberal Arts colleges are often better at ensuring that students graduate on time. They have additional resources to keep an eye on students’ progress more closely. State University systems are often great in that resources are available but the onus is on the student to take advantage of them. Smaller schools can often do a better job in guiding students to their goal.</p>
<p>Yes, but are you paying for 5 years or paying for 4?</p>
<p>As a student who graduated in 5 years, I’m well familiar with the difficulties in graduting in 4.</p>
<p>It probably depends on ability to pay. DD accepted a full tuition scholarship, so if she takes five years, which I doubt, we will help her. However, a good thing about state universities is that they are often more generous with AP credit than some private schools (obviously not all). My daughter will take some language credits this summer, and will be classified as a junior before she starts her second year of college. She was credited with just over 20 credits for her AP classes.</p>
<p>Unless money is no object (at which point this conversation isn’t too useful anyway), doing your best to pre-fund four full years (tuition, fees, supplies, room & board, personal expenses) at either your state flagship or private university (depending on which you’ve decided to fund) gives you pretty much all the flex you should need, particularly if you adjust savings (often upwards) to reflect college costs that increase faster than you projected. With those four years dealt with and some advance notice, you can probably figure out how to easily fund a fifth year out of current income if one is needed, and you presumably wouldn’t be dealing with debt in the prior years.</p>
<p>4 years is all I’m paying. Kids will have to make sure they fulfill requirements in 4 years.
(No savings plan here. If you have time to plan and extra $ to save for a possible fifth year, go for it.)</p>
<p>S’s 4 year graduation rate is 88.1% for the class entered in 2002 (Class of 09), and is the highest rate for a class going back 10 years (range is about 10 percentage points 79-88%). The five-year rate is 92.8%.</p>
<p>Given that S will take the classes he should take, doesn’t drastically change his major and manages to do well in all of them, we would expect he should be able to graduate in four years. However, let’s say he changes his major, are we going to cut him off in four? Probably not. If he flunks a bunch of classes? He’ll definitely be on a different financial model. We might still pay for it, but he’d be racking up debt to us because of it.</p>
<p>I paid for all 5 years by myself with student loans and summer jobs.</p>
<p>Only four. S1’s college had a 4-year plan of attack/agreement that the kids “signed” and along with that they put a plan together with their advisor. It enabled them to not commit to a major until mid-sophomore year so enough “time” to settle into something. It required 2 meetings per semester with their advisor the entire four years. They can’t register for the next semester without a “key code” from their advisor. Most importantly they signed a “pledge” where they pledged a certain GPA for freshman fall culminating in a “things gone right/things gone wrong” meeting with the advisor. I thought though the whole thing was a pretty neat because it kept the kids focused, kept the kids meeting with their advisor and gave them a ‘written’ goal for the most troublesome freshman fall. S is actually going to end up with a double major and will finish in 4 years. He just met with his advisor and has “paperwork” to go meet with the department head to “talk” about his senior year. Very touchy/feely. We parents like this because it’s not “us” doing the touchy/feely. We told him that if it was more than 4 it was on his dime and strongly suggested that he sign up for this 4-year plan back in 2007 and it really didn’t take much arm twisting. Asking about 4-year plans etc. is a great question for admissions people as you start exporing colleges. Some college/unis have different variations on these and call them different things but they are a great “tool” for the kids to stay on track.</p>
<p>Our son could graduate in 3 this May with two summer courses. It’s something that he could theoretically execute but he’d have to talk to his adviser this week to fill out the graduation request form. I’d rather he stay for 3.5 or 4 and then go to grad school.</p>
<p>It would depend on the reasons the fifth year is needed, which, in turn, would depend on the child, the major, the school, and many other thongs that can potentially affect the course the child takes.</p>
<p>With all due respect to your foresight and long term planing strategy, I really think you are getting ahead of yourself trying to plan this stuff before your child had even been born!..</p>
<p>Right now, I have about 18 - 20 years to allow compound interest to do its magic on savings accounts. By deciding now what I would like to have available for my kid in the future, I can set aside money early and give it the time it needs to grow.</p>
<p>Farmers don’t wait until it is time to harvest the crop to determine how much they should plant. They have to decided when it is time to plant the crop which is months before. There are lots of unknowns - weather at time of harvest, price of crop, amount of rainfall, etc - but they have to make their decisions early.</p>
<p>Same with me. Today is the time for me to plant my crop, and then in 20 years time I will be able to harvest it.</p>
<p>Worst thing that can happen is I roll college tuition savings into retirement.</p>
<p>I am not saying that this is too early to start saving. I am saying that it is pointless to try to decide whether you should fund your unborn child’s fifth year in college. Save as much as you can, then “roll college tuition savings into retirement” if you end up not needing them.</p>
<p>2 of our kids ended up taking an extra semester - both for good reasons - so we paid for it. If it had been because they were goofing off, dropping classes for no reason, etc., we probably would not have paid.</p>
<p>We told our kids we’d pay for 4 years but one of ours could get 2 complementary degrees by staying an extra semester. We paid.</p>
<p>We signed on for the four year plan with each of our kids. We told them anything beyond that was on their dime. We are paying for an online course for DD due to a medical issue last term…but that’s it.</p>
<p>Excepting for illness or financial reasons, the most common reasons for extending college past 4 years is changing ones major or not paying attention to graduation requirements and course offering schedules. Our children were told we would foot 80% of the bill for any school in our state system, R&B included, and any scholarships they get would go to reducing their 20% burden. But anything after year 4 was on them. The oldest engineering major did it in four and the second engineering major is well on track to do the same. This carrot and stick approached saved everyone a lot of grief and money.</p>
<p>S1 finished in four years.</p>
<p>S2 is getting his BA two quarters ahead of time but is staying for three additional quarters to get a BE. Net net, it’s one extra quarter. We’re paying for it.</p>
<p>We told the first kid that she had to finish in 4–there was another kid coming. We’ve also told the second kid to finish in 4–mom and dad need to think about retiring. Both went to residential private colleges–who also have a vested interest in getting kids out in 4 years.</p>
<p>My son graduated in 7 semesters when we told him we’d have to sell his car to help pay for the 8th semester… Doesn’t seem to have harmed him any. My D also managed to graduate in 8 semesters.</p>
<p>I think a student who needs five years should be helping to pay for that 5th year, either by working or taking on loans.</p>