It stops when you decide to stop it. You are a grown up adult, or you would not have college age kids. So grow up. Make a decision about how much support you are going to provide. Communicate that decision. Implement that decision. It’s what grown-ups do.
You’ll see on CC that some parents can and will be full pay for private school and sometimes even professional school. Some can’t or won’t pay for much beyond Community College. Many budgets and parenting styles are acceptable and have led to fully functioning offspring. Sometimes those same styles lead to broken lives, it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t. But you be you.
You said you wanted posters to have fun with this. If you like to sit around complaint-bragging about how much your ungrateful kids are costing you, carry on. I’ll move on to the next conversation group.
@cobrat A very good friend of mine is finishing his PHD and has self supported thru out the program. He worked for a number of years, managed to buy a very nice home and saved for his retirement prior to his PHD.
I don’t really care what Buffet did with his kids. He is not a model for me of anything.
My kids are grown. They are successful and financially responsible. We are beyond these worries for them. We are just plain lucky in that regard.
OTOH, we are currently making long term plans to take care of siblings who never became financially responsible, so this isn’t all that funny to me at the moment.
Your friend is not typical of most folks applying to do PhDs.
Out of curiosity, was it a professionally oriented PhD program which could be leveraged into a promotion/higher pay in a non-academic career field or was he doing it for personal edification reasons like a member of a prominent political family was doing on a full-pay basis at an elite PhD program I know of?
Neighbor got her doctorate while working as full time faculty at a university…not the one where she was getting her doctorate. No funding. And she was immediately hired by a different university once she got her PhD.
YMMV depending on your program, and school. This isn’t a one size fits all issue.
One woman I went to law school with is Department Chair of the Paralegal program at the local community college. As a job perk because she was on faculty, she got discounted or free courses, so she went back to the flagship U and got her PhD in educational curriculum or similar. It was “unfunded,” but she was working full-time as on faculty and got waived or reduced tuition, so I believe had no debt when she graduated. She was also putting her 2 kids through private school and private college at the same time. Her divorced H fought to pay as little as possible toward everything, even tho the court kept ordering him to step up and he out-earned her by many times.
She figures it will be useful for her to have the PhD and give her a wider skill set so she can be picky when she decides to look for new jobs, possibly in new locations to be nearer her kids and her family.
PhDs in pre-professional field like accounting which are usually offered through the college’s business school are different and treated in practice more like professional grad programs like MBAs/JDs or standalone Masters where students are usually expected to self-fund.
Apples and jackfruits. Not remotely the same thing…
phunt01810 your friends background is NOT “typical” of MOST PhD students.
Most PhD students start their programs directly after receiving their UG degrees.
This highly depends on the field. I only know a handful of people who went straight to a PhD program. Most at least had a masters or a few years of other experience under their belt. (My experience is in a broad range of humanities and SS fields but in a limited number of institutions.)
Unless he was doing that PhD for personal edification, he’s made same tradeoff students made when they apply and accept admission to pre-professional grad programs for MBA, JD, etc. Doing so has the possibility of leveraging them for a crack at a higher paying and/or more different more interesting to them non-academic job than what they had before.
There aren’t many PhD applicants who have worked a high paying job for several years before doing a PhD with the exception of some pre-professional programs where prior working experience such as an MBA or some pre-professional doctoral programs is a prereq.
Your friend’s PhD program is a pre-professional oriented program…not remotely like an academic PhD program. And they are as different as apples and jackfruits…especially within most confines of academia and among their respective graduate students.
Not believing this story about a west costs school professor pressuring a student to stop rock climbing. Many people are into healthy outdoor activities on the west coast. Hard to imagine anyone, academic or not, frowning upon an outdoor activity, regardless of how “risky” it was.
Some fields like my cousin’s engineering PhD at a top 10 institution required one to complete a separate masters before continuing on to PhD at the same/separate institutions.
In other fields, especially the humanities/social science fields I’m familiar with, the optimal/ideal path is to get admitted directly into a topflight PhD program in one’s field/subfield with full funding & stipend.
A separate Masters is not mandatory, but is used by many PhD aspirants to build skills(foreign languages), a means to gain more Prof recommendations, and/or to bolster one’s undergrad record to be more competitive for PhD admissions, especially at the elite levels.
However, it’s a much more costly option as most standalone Masters programs are usually expect the student to self-fund.
That particular Prof wasn’t forcing that grad student to make a choice between dropping the rock climbing or leave the PhD program for risk factors.
Instead, it was due to that adviser’s feeling that if that grad student had enough free time to devote to rock climbing, that was time/concentration taken away from work the student could have devoted to research for the student’s own thesis and the Prof’s pet research projects. He was of the mind the only good PhD/grad students were ones who dedicated practically every waking moment to the program and his pet research projects.
Considering that Prof’s mindset, that grad student made the right decision to leave that program and adviser far behind.