No is also a complete answer
I subsidized D1 the first year out of college even though she was making relatively high salary, but after rent and utilities there wasn’t much for entertainment. I gave her $500/mon until she got her bonus. I haven’t given her any money since then. I still pay for her room and board when we go on vacation, but soon I am going to wean her off on it.
D2 will probably take 2 years off before she goes off to law school. She will be working NYC and living at home. I told her she needs to pay me rent while living at home. I will save it and give it back to her when she goes off to law school.
No one can take advantage of you unless you give permission and continue to do so. Lots of good suggestions and different ways folks handle things. Do what you and W think best.
@Himom: Amen! There’s no one size fits all answer.
No doubt the OP would be horrified by the choices that dh & I have made regarding money and our adult kids, especially in the last year. The important thing was that dh & I were in complete agreement.
H and I have done many things with our money that my sibs never would, and vice versa. I’m glad H and I reach agreement and are happy with the choices we make.
Yesterday at 8:02 pm
Seems my rising senior thinks that there is no end to my financial support.
please have fun with this:)
Lets not take ourselves too serious here …“please have fun with this”
That was the Thumper grandparent plan. My dad charged me rent from the day I graduated from college. It wasn’t a lot…but I had to pay him every month. I lived there for 6 months after college. I had a job waiting tables at a good restaurant until I started my first real job.
Nice surprise. My dad gave me every penny back…but made me promise not to tell my younger sisters. He did the same for them…but he wanted it to be a surprise.
We did not pay for tuition after undergrad…but we did help with living expenses. ds had an assistantship with a small stipend. And he also worked…which helped. DD is in school but not in a position to work at all. We are paying her living expenses. She is paying her tuition.
." She is paying her tuition." YES to that.
D was surprised at how many MM students did not bother to hustle for available grants or small scholarships. She told me that their attitude was “mom and dad are paying–why bother.” In fact most of her tuition ended up being paid for by a conglomeration grants that were under $3000. Frequently-- you do not value what you don’t pay for. She even got her U to pay for summer program trips to Germany
Tell the kids if you pay their phone bill they have to use it to call ! Now why didn’t I think of that? They seem to think it’s predominantly a texting apparatus, and t hat the voicemail serves no useful purpose (so they don’t listen to it).
For me, the biggest concern I have in helping out my kid is that I may be robbing her of the satisfaction she would get in supporting herself even if it means ramen noodles 24/7.
Depends on the graduate programs/departments.
If we’re talking academic PhD programs, barring employment relevant to the program such as being a RA/TA, many academic departments take a dim view of their grad students working outside the program/school as they tend to feel PhD students should be devoting practically every waking moment on relevant coursework/skillsets(like applicable foreign languages or quant/tech skills), preparation for comps, doing RA/TA work, and the process of proposing a research topic and if approved…doing research on the topic so a dissertation is completed in what the department/adviser feels is a reasonable amount of time.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to work while doing a PhD. However, most grad students who do work a job outside the department/school while in a PhD program are of the mind it’s wise to keep it on the “down-low” from their department and especially their adviser and senior Profs within.
That’s simply not true. Why would a program look down on a student for working in part to pay their bills? They want their students to stay in their programs and graduate. Not drop out because they can’t afford to stay. Phd Programs are not 24/7 programs. As long as you attend class/labs/clinics/ do your work, write your papers, write and submit your theses/dissertations pass your quals/comps etc etc. They do not care how you spend your time outside of academia. When I was in grad school most of us worked in differing capacities- some related to our trading, some not. Of the many grad students that have worked for me over the past several decades, they did so to get the experience… And the pay.
Cobrat-Of course it depends. All of work D got in her MM program (both inside and outside of the department) was directly through the department. None of it was on the “down low”. And every field is going to be different. And every student is different. She was highly proactive in asking the faculty for opportunities. Other students, not so much.
Maybe not in your program, but that is the case with many academic PhD programs I know of or heard about…especially ones which provide full fellowships and stipends to defray most/all basic living expenses precisely to minimize the possibility of their students needing to work outside the department/school to pay their bills.
For instance, the math department at Princeton in the '80s had that policy which meant a friend who needed more than 5 years to complete his PhD and ended up having his fellowship cut off for exceeding the department’s 5-year fellowship limit had to spend the last 4.5 years of his PhD program living with the fear that if word of his moonlighting as a busboy to “pay the bills” got back to his adviser/department, he will be immediately dismissed as the department and adviser had a policy banning their grad students from working outside the department/school.
Also, not all PhD programs are run with the intention of encouraging all their grad students to stay in their programs and graduate.
Some are quite ok with having some PhD students drop out voluntarily. Some departments/advisers even quite ok with pushing PhD students they feel aren’t “cutting the mustard” in their view…including those they feel aren’t sufficiently serious/dedicated enough to the field by treating the PhD program more like a full-time job rather than a 24/7 passion.
Not too long ago, someone else even posted here on another thread about how in the past one humanities PhD program at Columbia was structured to admit many more PhD students than they could comfortably support and dealt with it by finding reasons to “weed out” many of those admits within the first few years.
I attended a program that was one where they said the “look to the right/look to the left- one of you wont be here to graduate”. That doesn’t mean they weren’t desirous of students to successfully complete the program. It meant that those who couldn’t handle it shouldn’t complete it and enter the profession. Some dropped out. Some were not permitted to progress. Some never completed an internship or dissertation. But those who needed to worked, worked. That was almost all of us.
But of course a friend’s classmate’s cousin’s uncle’s neighbor’s supposed anecdotal report of someone’s experience trumps everything. It must be fact.
^ ^
That may have been your program. However, many other PhD programs, departments, or adviser do have policies which strongly discourage or even forbid working outside the department/school with serious consequences including immediate dismissal upon discovery.
Anecdotal stories with no firsthand experience. It’s irrelevant to this thread’s discussion, which is about a parent working on financial management issues with their college kid.
Just for what it’s worth, my fellowship program only allows 10 hours of outside work a week. Of course, there is no actual way for them to prove this if you’re not working for the U but they do monitor U hours strictly.
http://www.rackham.umich.edu/funding/rmf
This includes summers if we’re getting Rackham funding.
It is an extremely rare day that I will agree with cobrat but on this one I do. I don’t know anyone receiving funding at any place who is allowed to work more than a few hours without risking their funding. Those who do work do it on the DL.
If one is getting funding that covers their expenses- no need for outside work! Congrats on getting a fellowship with stipend. Not all are so fortunate. When I was in grad school and was awarded a Public Health Service traineeship, a classmate groused that she should have gotten it because her funds were very tight and she’d have to go on food stamps.
Fast forward to a school break, where I happened to be visiting my ill parent on Cape Cod. She happened to be going there as well and invited me to lunch at her father’s MASSIVE compound. Acres and acres of land and a HUGE house. Guess he didn’t help her with grad school expenses. Neither did my parents.
Very true, jym.
I should qualify that with I don’t know any PhD students who don’t receive funding so there’s my blind spot.