Our children’s eventual choices and prospects are irrelevant to the point I was making. I was making the point that, as the parents, we did not raise our son to consider any financial ROI on his education as we don’t consider job training the purpose of college, and we didn’t see any relationship between his earning potential and what we were willing to spend for his education. If we did, and he had embraced that idea, too, he would have selected one of his (much better) civilian college choices. In his case, due to the branch he was selected for, he will be 31 before the Army releases him. Most likely, he will make significantly less during that nine-year service commitment than his peers at the colleges he bypassed. Perhaps he will make it up later, perhaps not, but financial ROI is not part of his decision process, and he has zero interest in finance/Wall Street. He will certainly be able to support himself and a family if he so chooses, but that is irrelevant to our education philosophy and how we raised him.