We have saved $600 a month in a 529 since birth and still don’t have enough to send two kids to the state public university. I think it’s deeply misleading to readers to suggest that you can save $25 a month and take only camping vacations and belt tighten a little and you’ll end up having enough to pay for college nowadays. I just put some numbers into a savings calculator, and we would have had to save about $416 per month per kid for 18 years to afford our in-state public universities, and that’s without assuming tuition will go up, which of course it will. Double that (or more) for private schools. That’s a pretty big chunk of change for a young parent who is also probably paying about $1500 a month per kid for daycare, and is in the earlier days of their career. Most full-pay parents cannot afford the prices of public OR private colleges currently–even if they were frugal all along. Run the numbers.