Won’t anyone mention assortative mating?
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Wasn’t relevant for us. I had no interest in my kids pairing off so young, based on the unhappy “we didn’t really know what we wanted at that age” couples I knew!!!
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It can depend on which kind of full-pay families. The full-pay families with plutocrat wealth for whom $400k is pocket change may have a different view compared to the “barely full-pay” families, those who are full-pay because their divorced parents are not cooperating, or those divorced parents who are funding the college funds of their divorce lawyers’ kids instead of their own kids.
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Or the full pay families who started saving when the kid was in utero, took minimal parental leave, maximized income by agreeing to the transfers, travel, inconvenient postings that colleagues who prioritized “work life balance” would not agree to, etc. $400K is not pocket change to them, but it represents something they’ve planned for over almost 2 decades and have prioritized college savings over many other “consumables”.
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You don’t live in my part of the country. 
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And there is assortive mating 
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Same here! I know a wealthy family whose kids both went to state schools. They toured the schools, the kids liked them, they were a great fit, and that’s where the kids went. They also toured expensive schools and the kids didn’t like them as much.
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Not a polite topic of conversation by most modern standards, but obviously still a real effect for some kids, and possibly still on the mind of some parents.
As always, there is more than one way for that to work, and in fact many flagships and such have ways for kids from . . . compatible? does that work? . . . families to find each other. But sure, for some families, a Wake Forest, say, may be considered even more favorable than UNC from this perspective.
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Yeah, when I told my S24 he could pick wherever he wanted as long as he could articulate a reasonable motive, I also made a point of telling him that could include our in-state publics, colleges offering him merit, and so on. And that we would make sure to pass on the savings to him.
Now, did he basically roll his eyes the entire time? Maybe. But at least he knew we really did value his autonomy.
At the most prestigious boarding schools as well as universities, a decreasing percentage of students are full-pay domestic applicants. I think probably a majority of domestic matriculants get financial aid, while maybe 40% (even higher at the boarding schools) of the full-pay students are foreigners, who face a “need-aware” admissions decision as opposed to “need-blind.”
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Isn’t “passing the savings onto” your child implicit anyway via eventual inheritance?
Most families I know aren’t likely to suddenly step up their lifestyles just because they spent $200k instead of $400k on their kid’s college experience.
I don’t think so, anyway.
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Yeah, that was part of why S24 rolled his eyes. He knows enough about our family finances to understand we’re not actually going to spend on ourselves whatever he doesn’t spend on college. He also knows I am already talking about increasing family giving if we get through their educations (I also have a D30) and things are looking good.
So he is not rationally going to deprive himself of a better experience for four years to try to increase how much he inherits someday. Even if that worked with all the moving pieces between now and then, the marginal benefits by then are unlikely to make up for artificially depriving himself now.
But I do believe he would have chosen a less expensive college if he actually preferred the experience opportunites.
In my circles, a lot of people just use the “4% rule” to quickly assess these decisions. So, $200K more in retirement savings would translate into $8K annually in increased spending (pre-tax).
That of course would mean a lot to some families, but full pay families? Not necessarily enough of a difference to deter them. Particularly if they can, say, delay retirement for like a year and make it right back up.
Or maybe their 529s already did that for them . . . .
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Parental age is also relevant (plus number of children and their ages).
If your kid is going to college– an only child- and you are 49 years old and about to hit your peak earning years in your career, your ability to make up your retirement savings is significantly different than a 62 year old who is weighing college costs for child number 3 with number 4 still in HS.
Many posters assume that everyone is facing the same calculus that they are.
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Some parents may have a nearer term view on this, such as making the savings from lower cost undergraduate available for professional school afterward.
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Are you kidding? Because our kid chose a service academy, the 529 funds came back to us penalty-free thanks to the Military Family Tax Relief Act. We retired a few years early! When we die, he gets that dollar we haven’t spent. 
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Your comment made me think there are vastly different philosophies to how much we should leave behind to our children, after college and grad school costs. And that’s okay.
I’m thinking of leaving a decent amount (i.e., not spending it all) because of the new world of AI introduces so much uncertainty into what our children can earn over a ‘career’. They might need more of our support than you realize.
I’m glad I’m closer to the end of my career than kids just starting out in their 20’s.
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Per my recent post on the bragging thread, our son will far outearn us in his AI career. Perhaps we should consider him part of our retirement plan.
It’s clear on the retirement threads that we all have different views on our financial legacies. We always told our son that we didn’t work hard all our lives to make him rich. Instead, we provided him with the best education he could consume and taught him early how to build his own wealth. He’s doing quite well with that on his own. He’s an only child so, of course, he inherits everything when we pass, but we plan to die with just that dollar I posted above.
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Also factoring in that “how much we should leave behind to our children” is for sure a “Man Plans, God Laughs” situation.
I know someone who died right after the market meltdown. The “comfortable nest egg” turned out to a portfolio of Lehman Bros stock, a home worth 25% less than it had been a month earlier, and that’s after several years with round the clock homecare for a spouse. Helpful busy-bodies kept exclaiming “you get the step up on the basis” which of course would have been a nice step up if only most of the inheritance wasn’t under water. The other busy bodies kept telling the kids “you should wait it out on selling the house”. Which is great advice except that owning an empty house costs a lot more than anyone thinks. It needs to be insured, snow needs to be shoveled, grass needs to be cut, leaks in the roof need to be repaired, and property taxes don’t get put on hold because the heirs don’t want to sell the house just yet.
It would be great if we could all put a thumbtack in our estate plans and say “here it is”. But economies don’t work that way. People’s portfolios go up and down. Real estate goes up and down. Health care costs are unpredictable– some folks are healthy and drop dead in the grocery store, others spend a decade with aides or in institutional care.
If I had a choice of leaving my kids a maybe/kinda/sorta investment portfolio, or their educations- well, I made my choice.
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We’re about to start paying full tuition for two (twins). We can afford it without sacrifices or loans. Are the schools going to provide significantly better education than those that offered them merit aid? I doubt it. Is it still worth it? The kids and we certainly think so. For my daughter, she just loved the school the most when she visited, and having the decision by early December (she applied ED) was priceless for her mental health (anxious kid who does not deal with uncertainty well). For my son, he had a choice of a full-pay school in Boston vs. significant merit in Cleveland. He would’ve gotten the difference. I don’t think there was any amount of money that would’ve made him pick four years in Ohio in this scenario. So in our case, and for many other full-pay families, it is absolutely worth it for reasons that are not directly related to the quality of education.
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For most people the decision to pay 100k per year for an undergrad education would NOT make sense but there are also plenty of people for whom this would make sense in specific contexts.
Affordability is a very helpful tool for self discipline in this regard because dollars are a hard constraint. This starts breaking down though when parents start stretching beyond their financial comfort zone by rationalizing it as “the kids want it”. Bad things happen when kids and parents talk themselves into terrible financial decisions.
All that said, I also don’t buy the “school doesn’t matter” argument wholesale. Lots of high entry barrier roles exist where the school and the connections have an outsized impact on- high finance, quant, ai labs being a few examples.
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