@Creekland - Thank you. It’s good to know that I didn’t fall as short as I thought I did with DS09.
I had a recent debate with a friend over this very comment. For a 17/18 year old, it is very hard to make an informed decision if the parents are not communicating the financial realities of paying for college (or what they are willing to pay before applying to colleges). I mentioned my siblings making an informed decision and I watched my oldest make a similar one, but the key was communicating the realities of paying for college early (before high school for my kids and my siblings).
It is easier for kids to try and understand the numbers if they are shown what they mean. I will never forget showing my son in the class of 2020 what a $100,000 subsidized student loan with $5,000 in fees and 5% interest paid off in 20 years came out to (more than 60K paid in interest alone and a payment of nearly $700 a month for 240 months) when he was in 8th grade. Even then, he understood that didn’t make sense if there was a way to go to school without loans (and he realized he would be older than my wife and I were at the time of the calculation by the time he paid off such a loan). Our kids early on knew that our household was only willing to pay for a in-state school education (about 15-17K per year with Zell Miller paying tuition in GA). It never had a chance to be unpopular in our household because they have heard the parameters of going to college for a long time.
We’re full pay (but it would hurt) parents. We’ve had the many talks with our D20 about affordability. I’ve had the four year cost of all the options highlighted in her spreadsheet from the beginning. I agree with @ChangeTheGame that it’s important to start early.
We happen to live in a state with a great flagship, and it’s by the most affordable school on her list. My D20 said, “these four year costs are so huge I can’t really wrap my head around them.” So she recalculated the cost of each school as a ratio of her lowest cost option (the flagship), which she labeled as its own unit, by its name. All schools are compared to that unit. So, for example, if we lived in Georgia and she was considering Duke for engineering, she’d ask, “how many Georgia Techs does it cost to attend Duke?” Knowing that it’s 2.6 Georgia Techs to attend Duke (she could attend GT for nearly 10.5 years for the same cost as a four year degree from Duke) helps put the costs in perspective. Even if you’re looking at GT from out of state, it would be 1.5 Georgia Techs to attend Duke.
Yes, this is basically just a ratio of costs, but having the cheapest school be a baseline comparison/unit seems to help my kid envision the cost comparison. I’d recommend this to any parent.
@ChangeTheGame – As they contemplate college costs, all parents should do the same kind of calculation you did, and explain it to their child. Sadly, I think many parents don’t – because they themselves don’t know how to do it, or understand the implications of this kind of debt. Kudos to you for giving a financial literacy 101 lesson to your child early. Truly invaluable. (I so wish all high schools required a semester/quarter class on financial basics. In this capitalist society that encourages consumption and debt, it’s ESSENTIAL information!)
Wow. Somehow I had never considered the possibility that those two things were connected. Wow. How could I have never even thought about it?
But yes … it definitely must be connected as my mother, now widowed, would have had a much larger nest egg had they not put a 2nd mtg on the house in 1987 and then again to put my sister through Rice a few years later.
For us, if we were to pay for D20s dream school … it would not set us back 4 years in our retirement planning, but more like 10+ so we too would be in the same position 25 years down the road as my mom and my MIL (both widows with health problems)
I still contend that one of the toughest issues for kids and parents is when the kids are competing for merit $$ after acceptance and initial offer. I am talking about those full tuition or full COA scholarships that have a win rate of 10% or less. This isn’t usually at elite schools, but very fine schools. My D19 competed for 4 of those scholarships and if she had won one of them it would have made the school much more attractive to attend. But when we crunched the numbers we realized these were almost lottery-like scholarships. Everyone had the credentials to win, but a great essay or interview was the key.
Sometimes the student will get emotionally attached to a school, but the cost is just not feasible. You can’t blame the student because there was a chance to win one of those scholarships that would make it feasible.
Being a high achieving HS student is great because it brings more opportunities, but it is also tough because you have so many more opportunities.
The first four months of 2019 was tough because it seemed like we were always waiting on some news about acceptances or scholarships. Just not a fun time. Definitely a roller-coaster of emotions.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink.
Maybe we are outliers, but how a kid can do so well in school & on her standardized test scores, yet not be able to wrap her head around $$$.
Sometimes they want what they want & cannot be reasoned with.
I’m a little nervous about grad school & borrowing, but, you know, it’s her life.
Note that the parents laid down the cost constraints starting while the kid was in 10th grade, to prevent building up a lot of expensive dreams that have to be crushed in April of 12th grade.
Also, sometimes depending on the personality of the student, you can try to talk reason to them until you are blue in the face but they are emotionally attached and have difficulty accepting it. In the end and in real life we do not always get what we want. We are sometimes disappointed but we recover so will they.
I’m glad that worked for you, but It’s not a fallacy. There are many families caught in the “middle.” Certainly not 1 percenters…not even close! But they do not qualify for any financial need. Determining “need” and what one family can afford is arbitrary, and not based on what families can actually afford. While it works for some, there are those in the middle that the system misses.
I think I understand why the system exists, the cut off has to be somewhere. But had we qualified for aid, our student would have absolutely chosen the T10 institution. Those sticker prices for us were absolutely real, and I’m sure there were others on this thread that would say the same.
There are so many colleges to pick from and it amazes me that so many people get into deep debt for college. IMO, no student should graduate with debt of any kind. If college X is not affordable it should not be considered.
@anon519 - I agree with you and never thought about it this way.
While I can subscribe to your way of thinking, many , many years ago when I married DH I quickly found out that one persons idea of affordable and another’s can be quite different. While my idea of a budget was that “if you don’t have the money, you can’t buy it”, his idea of a budget was “while we don’t have the money now we can figure it out and make it work”. For some that making it work includes home equity, 401K etc.
Yes, there is that nasty little window between the magic cut off of 150K and some higher number (what that is not certain) where you both don’t qualify for FA and really cannot be full pay unless you have always been quite frugal and managed to get through life without nasty economic/life surprises which had you all but wiped out and starting over.
I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “college experience.” But I do recall thinking I had no idea what it meant but it sounded expensive.
I think a lot of kids (and parents) are sold on the concept. And truly believe that there is one right college/path for them. And anything less will be worse. Reality is it will be different.
@saillakeerie thanks for your post. To me, saddling your kids with debt so they can go to the “A” rated vs. the “A-” school on Niche (or some other arbitrary site) just doesn’t make sense to me.
We’ve made it pretty simple for my D, and I’m happy with the choice. Mom and dad have saved $X of dollars. Ultimately, you can apply to whatever school you want, but we won’t fund anything above and beyond what we’ve saved.
We’ve been pretty good about saving, so it’s not like she doesn’t have options.
It feels like excellent option to start to teach our kids a bit about budgeting. I fully believe that they will both thank you and have a greater appreciation of their college experience.
I completed undergrad with $10K in debt. While I don’t regret it, finishing school at 22 years old and facing student loans essentially when you’re just starting out was ROUGH. I cannot imagine those that have $35K+ and are trying to make it work as a young twenty-something just starting their career (and probably NOT making a ton of $$$).
It’s a gift to guide your kid(s) to understand the peril of student debt and help them to avoid it as much as possible.
Back in my poker playing days, that was called “betting on the come”. Later as I was watching my son play chess it was called playing “hope chess” (where you make a suspicious move and “hope” your opponent doesn’t see it as such). In both poker and chess the results were rarely positive. 
This is an extreme case and not the typical scenario often seen on CC. More likely that the kid hits high school and the parents are “oh crap” we need to think about savings for college and its too late for these donut hole families. Sometimes you will even hear parents rationalize their decision by saying “I knew my child would be NMF (since preschool!)” so I never saved a dime. This is a real example btw…
Your example of “life surprises” is exactly why some families realize its critical to save early and often for college in anticipation of these rough patches, if or when they happen.
So when I see threads like this I can’t help think that there are very few families that have made this “tough decision” because the expensive T25-50 college was never really an option as they just cannot or did not anticipate the real cost of attendance. The 'unpopular decision" was the only hand they have to play.
I also do agree with a few here who said that they managed their child’s expectations of what they can afford and what they won’t afford. For example, D20 applied to a popular private college (Tulane) where we straight up told D that she cannot apply ED or EDII and if she doesn’t get significant merit in EA she will not attend and D knew the rules and was comfortable with this before she applied.
The bottom line is early communication with your student is key.
I also do agree with a few here who said that they managed their child’s expectations of what they can afford and what they won’t afford. For example, D20 applied to a popular private college (Tulane) where we straight up told D that she cannot apply ED or EDII and if she doesn’t get significant merit in EA she will not attend and D knew the rules and was comfortable with this before she applied.
The bottom line is early communication with your student is key.
[/quote]
Though we have discussed this for some time with DD20, visited every school on her list, even a few fly-ins and she felt that she could be happy at any of them, somehow the table turned when she formed an ‘emotional’ connection with The front runners. Then all of a sudden she told me that she does not have an “emotional connection “ to others. I informed her that honestly, while I want her to be happy, this is not solely an emotional decision. We even discussed the possibility of her moving in with her brother in NYC and commuting to one of these schools in order to meet our budget and cut costs if necessary. She wants to stay on a campus so there she has made another decision.
I suppose it all depends upon what you call deep debt. Where I work/live (where < 20@ of the students have college educated parents and roughly half are on free/reduced lunch), if there were no option for debt many academically intelligent kids would have no options for college related career paths. Of course many could get a free education at some Top X Us, but they need to get in and the vast, vast majority won’t even if they had the stats to be competitive. Very few have the stats. Most go to state schools and they need access to loans. Good stats often bring equal costs at private Us, not free college.
My own personal anecdote includes both H and I graduating with some debt - his in the 5 figures. We paid those off within 5 years and have been reaping the benefits ever since. Life would not be better if he had to follow his father into the tobacco fields or similar jobs.