<p>And how would another depression affect our kids? Lack of loans seem to be the only thing I hear about. If there are no loans, you’d lose a lot of students. Would schools become more specialized, only offering a handful of majors? Would most schools be forced to close?</p>
<p>I’ve wondered this myself. I don’t dare speculate how it would affect “our kids” as in overall society. But for <em>my kids</em> I do have a couple of things in mind. </p>
<p>Mainly, they’d be attending in-state public colleges. We’ve got enough saved to pay for that without borrowing. If we both remain employed, we could probably cash flow the cost if the 529s tank. </p>
<p>Worst case scenario (job loss AND 529s tank) it will be community college then in-state public. </p>
<p>The kids are a HS junior and freshman now. So, we’re fortunate to have at least a year to watch and see how the situation unfolds. By this time next year, when Son is completing apps, we should know what kind of strategy to use.</p>
<p>My dad was in high school when the Great Depression hit. His adviser recommended that he shift to an academic track because he wouldn’t get a job anyway when he got out. He went on to attend CCNY (which was free) for two years until the economy improved enough for him to start working. So, ironically, the Depression enabled him to go to college for two years, whereas if the economy had been better, he would have gone to work right after high school. </p>
<p>I think that even though he never finished college, I think that those two years made a huge difference in his life. He had an understanding about politics, economics and world events that the average blue-collar person back then didn’t have. </p>
<p>If I had to make a prediction about what will happen if the economy heads south, I would say that state universities will be bursting at the seams, and the local city college and community college options will be very appealing. Will college costs decrease? Possibly. It depends on whether colleges will spend down their endowments to attract students.</p>
<p>Also, I think some private colleges, those ranking maybe No. 50 to 100 on USNWR, especially those that compete directly with strong state universities, will be hard hit.</p>
<p>Many fraternity/sorority chapters went bust. Enrollment dropped, and the students who stayed in school didn’t have enough income for social organizations.</p>
<p>My grandmother had to turn down a full scholarship to college because her income was needed at home. My grandfather was on an athletic scholarship at Marquette and was able to stay in school, though he worked summers to help support his mother and younger brothers.</p>
<p>Wow. Amazing to hear so far. My mom and my dad grew up in big families and both families nearly starved. One grandpa got a WPA job. The other family was helped out by an uncle in insurance who was the only one in the family who had a job. Even years after, the povery continued. The sons were encouraged to quit school at 16 to join the military.</p>
<p>My mother’s family came to this country at the end of this period, but they had nothing when they immigrated. They lived with family members who sponsored them. They did not speak English, but learned how to speak English here. Their D (my mother) went to CUNY in NY for free, and their son started working at 16. Both made their own way without any help from parents. My grandparents were eventually able to rent a “rent controlled” apartment and they rented out two bedrooms to help pay rent. They turned the living room/dining area into a bedroom for their children. My grandmother knew how to make a meal from virtually nothing! She knew how to darn socks, etc.</p>
<p>My HS Latin teacher was in graduate school during the depression. I remember her telling us stories of how she had all of these classes where she was the only student, and that she’d spent hours reading Latin poetry out loud with her professors because there was nothing else for them to do.</p>
<p>My father, born in 1908, graduated from college in June of 1929. He was never unemployed, married in 1930, had two kids, in 1931 and 1933. (That was his first wife; my mother was wife #3.) People who are terrified by talk of the Great Depression forget that 75% of the country was employed. </p>
<p>My mother, born in 1916, was in high school during the depression and graduated from college in 1937. Her father was a professor at Ohio State (a position he took after losing his engineering job when Pierce-Arrow failed) and she always told me gleefully about the witchy girl at her high school who went from owning a piano store and living in luxury to living over the piano store, surrounded by unsold pianos. </p>
<p>Both my parents felt that there was always work for the well-educated and the hard-working.</p>
<p>My granddad was a college professor. My mom used to tell me stories about how her parents basically opened their house to students who couldn’t pay for housing. My mom and her sisters, who’d had their own rooms, moved into one room together, and the other bedrooms became ersatz dorms. The students did what they could to help out. On the wall of my office is a portrait of my mom as a little girl, sketched by an art student who lived with them rent-free throughout his college years.</p>
<p>Studs Terkel’s book, “Hard Times” includes interviews about college life in the Great Depression. If you are looking to hear about Depression in general, I would also recommend it.</p>
<p>Obviously, things were much different then. My father-in-law attended medical school during the depression. He was poor as a church mouse and hitched rides home during holidays (several hundred miles each way). He worked two jobs and went to school. </p>
<p>Can you imagine working two jobs and attending medical school today? Can you imagine PAYING for medical school by working two low-level jobs (along with some scholarship money from the school)? We won’t being going back to those days. </p>
<p>They weren’t exactly the good old days, however. He got the idea to join the reserves in the 30’s (for some financial security), and you can guess how that turned out. 7 years active service bracketing WWII, including the occupation army in Japan. His journals reveal that he imagined he might be fighting for a decade or more.</p>
<p>I really don’t know. But what I know is that colleges visits for my D are cancelled as well as anything else that is not strictly necesary. Our accounts are in the red and keep going down hill as the day goes. Maybe we are super conservatives related to $$ …We’re preparing for a hard and loooong landing</p>
<p>My mother had to leave college following her junior year, late in the Depression due to lack of funds. She had been an Engish major. My uncle, her brother, also had to leave college and come home to run the family farm which was nearly lost to back taxes during the Depression. </p>
<p>My father, who was a freshman in 1929, had to leave college after his first year. He held a variety of other jobs for the next ten years, and went back to engineering school graduating as an aeronautical engineer just before WW2.</p>
<p>I was going to start a separate thread on this with regard to todays collapse but my take is that State Universities are going to be much more competitive this year and top schools, even ones with excellent financial aid will see a drop in yield.</p>
<p>My father was born in 1918 in southern LA and finished high school in 1932. He was cajun and his first language was French. His family was always poor. He started working at age 10 to help contribute to the family finances. The depression didn’t affect them that much because they didn’t have much to lose. When my dad was a senior in high school, his principal submitted his name to Tulane for a scholarship. He was awarded full tuition. He got a room over a restaraunt where he washed dishes in exchange for food and a place to sleep. He worked in the summer to earn any money for books and school supplies. He majored in engineering and went into the military in 1938. He was in active service until 1946 when he enter the reserves. He retired from the reserves as a Lt. Colonel. </p>
<p>Who would have ever thought a poor cajun boy from LA would be able to accomplish what he did. College wasn’t on his radar screen, but his principal saw his potential. He was not a great student but he graduated and had a very successful career at Westinghouse. Our family was changed inexoribly because of one college scholarship, which at the time amounted to $500 a year.</p>
<p>These are amazing stories…</p>
<p>I’m a senior now; the depression hit when my grandfather was in middle-school/early high school years, so several years younger than I am. He was the oldest boy of four children in a poor family. One day his father went out for groceries and never came back.</p>
<p>Don’t know how he went to college, but he did. Majored in theology, I think-? he ended up being Archbishop of the episcopal South Dakota diocese. </p>
<p>Good guy. Miss him a lot.</p>
<p>My dad was a toddler in the early '30’s but the depression was the main factor in his background. As teens we would laugh when he mentioned “the poor-house” - we didn’t realize it was a real place where lots of people ended up. (Now in Portland, featured as a fancy hotel and brew-pub)
He was the first to go to college. In fact, dididn’t gradute from hs - at 18 you were presumed to be on your own so he joined the Navy like his brothers. Thank God for the GI bill still being in effect and friends who steered hiim into the college track.
They are now crossing fingers, toes and everything else that their retirement won’t be ravaged by the greed of the i-bankers who made 6mil last year.
So many times they have noticed how lucky they have been - too young to lose money in the great depression, too young to fight in WWII, young enough to get benifits from the GI bill, young enough to still be in an industry that had a set pension plan… let’s just hope that doesn’t end in a crash.</p>
<p>As a result of the Depression, both my parents went to work straight out of high school and neither went to college until after WWII, when my dad went to Rutgers on the GI Bill. They both grew up in NYC and it was hard to find jobs, but both did find work through relatives employed at the same place (the dept store W.T. Grants.) </p>
<p>My father’s father had lost his business and ended up working as a chauffeur for rich people on Long Island. His mother sewed costumes for the theaters on Broadway. Mom’s dad was a factory mechanic and had to leave the city for months at a time to go wherever the work was offered. There were no luxuries, but they didn’t go hungry either. Everyone back then seemed to live in multi-family houses, with aunts and uncles occupying different levels of the house with their kids. One bathroom. My uncle slept on the couch in the living room. </p>
<p>It’s sometimes astonishing to me how much has changed in a single generation in terms of frugality and what’s expected as an average middle-class lifestyle. (Many bathrooms.)</p>