How do middle class families afford Georgetown?

Gudmom
Tue, 30 Oct 2018 12:07:25 +0000

My son had to turn down USC because the $160k we had saved for him wouldn’t even get him half way. They advertise a lot of merit scholarships, but many are nominal. He took a merit scholarship and is happy at UMiami.

My daughter had to turn down Cornell engineering, which was sad, but she is at Virginia Tech, which is a happy place. I have no worries about her; the rankings are so close for engineering, she already has internship offers in her first semester.
I worry about my son’s first job; he is math/econ/ data analytics, which sounds great, but he is having trouble nailing down an internship at a financial firm or sports related internship, even with a 4.0 and taking graduate level classes at as a junior. We have no strings to pull, none of the “connections” that are supposed to come along with our upper middle income, at least not in HIS field. I felt like he “deserved “ a better school, but he only wanted a certain type of school - big D1 football/basketball school in an urban setting, no farther north than VA and skipping the whole middle of the country. Honestly ? Once he has his first job, I will relax. In the meantime, the only one “missing out” on anything is me, when Moms of younger kids ask where my kids go. I DO notice that they say “Oh” instead of “GOOD SCHOOL!”
But I laugh to (at?) myself, because having been thru the process, I have had to let my own dreams (and ego) go. I won’t be watching the regatta on the Charles river, or sitting in the stands in a sweater and scarf pretending to care about Ivy League football. My kids are happy, and I’m sure they will be fine.

The thing is, we paid for preschool. We only had half day kindergarten. I didn’t work because my youngest is a full-time job. Her medical expenses are astronomical, with our lovely High Deductible plan. So we thought we were doing pretty well, had saved more than a quarter of a million dollars for the two really smart kids…we thought that with that AND merit, they would have their choice. It DOES stink that we pay -a lot- for things that politicians are falling over themselves to promise other people for free, and then the schools do the same.

I grew up very poor too, like so poor that I grew an inch when I got to college on a meal plan…and I was one of only two of 9 sibs to get a scholarship and get out of there. I have seen the struggles of my less gifted siblings to work their way thru college, sometimes not getting a degree until their 30s. I understand. It just seems like, at some point, there is NO point to trying to save money. I feel like we should have taken more and better vacations when my kids were little. But I do agree, poor is not better. My kids don’t eat eggs 6 nights a week. A whole chicken is one meal and a lunch for Dad, not dinner for 11. No one has to feel like a bad person because they had a growth spurt right after they got new sneakers, or wear jeans that are 3” too short or a hand-me-down blazer to graduation from a much larger brother. Being poor sucks.