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<p>I totally agree with this. What are we suppose to do; say you are 18/you have finished high school now figure everything else out on your own? Of course not.</p>
<p>I think that we now have more resources in order to make informed choices as consumers of higher education. As others have stated $250-300k is a lot of money no matter how you slice it; whether you are full paying, whether your child is a beneficiary of the generosity of other parents/alums through need based financial aid or if your child is receiving merit money.</p>
<p>I know for me and mine as a person of color, access to equal opportunities in education has not always been freely given. Most of my siblings are older than Brown v. Board of Education. For many people of color we are only 2 to 3 generations removed from higher education. </p>
<p>Yes, I think that it is big that my parents who went to school in a one room classroom and had to leave school to work in the fields in the south and live with Jim Crow laws, have a grandchild that graduated from an Ivy league school (I only wished that they had lived to see it). But still, they did the best that they knew how. At that time, CUNY was free, so that is where we went. They did not know anything about need based aid. Being one of 10 kids, I was eligible for SEEK/College Discovery but it was not mentioned by the GC and I attended one of the big 3 NYC Specialized high schools.</p>
<p>Fast forward 2012, there are still many kids who have to work this process out for themselves by themselves. I think that being on CC can give us a skewed vision in thinking that every family tackles the college process the way that we do. If being an active participant in working with your child and their school to help your child go on to the next phase of his/her life is obsessive, what I would not give to have some obsessed parents on my caseload.</p>