@doschicos Actually we have thought about that! But as a method to pay for medical school, not undergrad.
@Massmomm I should have been reading what you were reading. I remember thinking college would cost about $150,000 for each kid. We saved. Heck I’m still driving a 14 year old car and dh’s is almost as old. But in the end it was an inheritance that paid most of the bills. My parents paid for my education and my husband had only a small amount of loans that we paid off early in our marriage in one fell swoop because I was tired of paying postage from Germany. We seem to have enough to retire. We’ve been lucky in both our real estate and stock investments. Grad school is on the kids if they ever want more education.
I get that we were incredibly lucky to start on third base. I don’t begrudge the fact that those who earn less and have been unable to save as much get help by need based aid.
@mathmom online college calculator predicts that private tuition will be about 90,000 per year by the time my D3 attends. And that is only assuming a 3% annual tuition increase. Its mind boggling.
@gallentjill:
“How well accepted are those online degrees? I’ve heard horror stories of worthless online degrees. I imagine University of London or Harvard extension have some more credibility. But can people get into graduate programs using them?”
From UoL and HES, most definitely.
For the UoL degrees, they grade your final exams (and being the British system, all marks come down to final exams) just the same way as they grade their campus students, so a first or 2:1 would mean the same thing. LSE actually offers scholarships to their masters programs to the top UoL students in the degrees they lead.
Labs are trickier. There are post-bac programs for people who want to get in to med school, though they don’t tend to be extremely cheap and you still have to physically be at that school.
And frankly, many/most kids who are able to get in to med school will have achieved enough in HS to win full-tuition scholarships to somewhere.
You do have kids who messed around in HS and turn it around later on, though those kids will have to hit the ground running when college starts as a high GPA is almost a prerequisite for med school admissions.
@gallentjill Other options for funding med school is through loan forgiveness for public service work or working in areas with shortages.
https://students-residents.aamc.org/financial-aid/article/public-service-loan-forgiveness-pslf/
I don’t think it’s parents responsibility to pay for college. I think it’s a very generous gift that many parents who can afford give their children.
Just circling back to say, I know how lucky we’ve been. Things can change in an instant and bad things happen to good people. Because my spouse and I work in fields which are predictable and steady, we haven’t had wild swings or been hit with long periods of unemployment. We’ve had challenges, but they sapped us emotionally more than financially. We all do the best we can for our kids with what we’ve got.
It never crossed my mind who would be responsible for my kids’ college tuitions except for me. I also figured I would pay for most of it out of my current salary and that’s why my kids are 5 years apart.
I think it is a parental responsibility to provide their children the tools to be self supporting/self sufficent. For some that means paying for college, others by teaching them trade skills, for others encouraging military service, and still others that means keeping their kids on the “family payroll” indefinitely. For my family it means paying for college (and maybe a portion of grad school). Unfortunately in the modern age it is nearly impossible to be self supporting with only a HS education.
When we had kids, we expected to pay for college for them. Never dawned on us that anyone else should do this.
@Midwestmomofboys, you’re right. Our kids’ mental illnesses really threw us for a loop. Being self-employed, it was terribly hard to motivate ourselves to keep pushing ourselves as we knew we should. And any “personal time” we had to take for our son came out of our money. We’ve had to take out more loans than we wanted, but that’s OK. All three kids are doing well at the moment and that’s what matters.
We have always been lower middle class income wise. There have been several times where we have had thousands of dollars in medical expenses and no way to pay for it except for $20 or $50 a month. We never had any money saved back for college. What we did do was prepare our kids in a wide variety of ways for college expenses.
Both kids qualified for pell grants. The youngest lived at home and went to community college, which the pell grant and a vocational rehab grant paid for, no loans and no tuition payments.
My eldest went to a private school 1200 miles away, so there was transportation costs involved. She earned merit and need based financial aid, worked as a RA a couple of semesters to pay for her room and board, and worked 20+ hours a week at a local restaurant all four years. She paid for all of her expenses for the last 3 years. I paid a little bit the first year. She did take out the subsidized loans she qualified for on her own, I required to her refuse all other loans.
I also worked hard at making sure my eldest had skills that would make it easy for her to find employment while in college. I did not expect her to work in a restaurant but the tips were good. She is a very good pianist and could have given piano lessons to music majors or accompanied voice majors. She could have lifeguarded at the local Y or the school pool. She knew from an early age that she was going to have to work her way through school and had the grades to get decent merit and skills to work off the rest of it.
The short answer for us is we do whatever we can for our kids. Also, we don’t do what we can’t (not going in to big debt). To mitigate debt, we started saving a long time ago and have saved more than enough to pay 100% for in state flagship yet not enough for elite schools. So we cash flow the balance and it is manageable. We too have reduced spending on other things like vacations. But we don’t view it as sacrificing our fun. It is fun to watch our kids thrive in a setting they love. It’s a blessing.
I think this is a very rude and judgmental question. The fact is, I don’t think any family goes in with the attitude that they EXPECT someone else to pay for their newborn’s college education 18 years later. But, the reality is that college tuition rates have risen faster than incomes over the past 17 years. Add to that the recessions, the increases in costs of living, housing busts, medical emergencies, divorces, deaths, siblings who need extra care, etc., and you will find that these same parents who thought they could handle the costs of college are finding that the costs are far and above what they thought they would be. It’s not for lack of planning … it’s just life. The only people I know who can truly afford college regardless of obstacles thrown in the way are the 1-percenters.
However, you seem overly concerned with bright children who are accepting merit money and low-income children who are accepting need-based aid. Here’s the thing: The money belongs to the colleges and they have every right to spend their money they way they want to. To put it in perspective, just because you want to drive a Honda and take a vacation every year does not give you the right to judge your neighbor who wants to drive a Lexus and stay home.
So as a parent who will have to “spoiled full pay kids”, my DH and I always assumed we would pay in-state tuition and began saving for that amount. We are fortunate that financial circumstances allow us to now be full pay at a private U. This was because my DH has been very successful (sometimes this is just about being in the right place at the right time!) and I have gone back to work part-time and will be transitioning to full-time employment when the last spoiled kid goes off to school. I am honestly really offended by the spoiled rich kid comment as you can probably tell. It’s wrong to assume a kid is spoiled and ungrateful just because their parent’s can full pay, just as it is wrong to judge parents who were unable to save or provide that kind of support for whatever the reason. Emphasis on the word unable. DS had a friend whose parent told me that they had saved a considerable amount for said student’s college education, but would not be contributing to the costs of college because they were capable of getting a full-ride. I thought after the process was through parents would realize that a full-ride was something that was very difficult to obtain. Nope! Last I heard student will be attending State U and taking out loans. I can’t believe it! I really hope they come around and help their student.
Probably a topic for a different thread, not everyone should go to college. And while I agree only a HS degree is problematic, add in some post high school training in the right fields and you can make a darn good living without the college debt. I have three toolmakers earning $61k, 85k, and $87k with a GED and 4 years of formal apprentice training (plus work experience). Company paid for all their training plus a job – earned while they learned.
So while we think about who is responsible to pay, the other question is why should we pay?
@yourmomma You bring up an excellent point. Not every person should go to college and there are many avenues to success through the military and trade schools. I would also add that if my students were not doing their best in HS, we would not allow them to go to a full pay private college. They would have to prove themselves by living at home and going to a CC. There are kids who are fully capable of doing well in college but have chosen not apply themselves in HS. We have friends in this situation and I think their student is going to be very disappointed that he has to go to CC. However, he could not be trusted to go to a 4 year U away from home. He has poor judgment in behavior and consistently works below his capabilities. I believe that students do have a responsibility in their college education whether it be financial or effort-based.
I don’t actually think it’s the parents job to fund college but so also think it’s pretty crappy to be able to help and not.
We can only help our kids in college. We give them the biggest leg up we can with the best fit schooling we can manage, a parent home after school (I have always worked but part-time during school hours,) and encouragement and financing the activities they are interested in. Our kids have worked since they were 10 and they help fund their activities too. When we can’t fund them or they don’t exist, we find a way to make those experiences ourselves.
The kids know our situation. They’ve always known our situation. They work hard and are lucky enough to be born with strong capabilities. They get scholarships and yes, financial aid that we aren’t so grateful for. They also take out a small amount of student loan for tuition and work summers and during the school year to cover their own books and incidentals. As parents, a fourth of our monthly income goes towards paying for college and we so gladly though it’s not without sacrifice (like any person cutting out a large chunk of their income whether it’s a big income or small.)
I don’t understand this statement. Why wouldn’t you be grateful for financial aid?
Typo, we are SUPER grateful.