It can be a sticky issue. Honestly, I justify it because I have three VERY different kids in terms of academic ability and goals, and all three were/are looking for something different in a college experience.
We agreed to fund college for all of them – they just needed to focus on getting in somewhere they’d be happy to attend. That price tag just happens to look different based on the schools they are attending/considering. But all three will get college degrees, and we have not/will not outright tell any of them “no” for a reasonably thought-out choice.
Our kids actually have brought up the topic. Our D26 asked us if she chose a school that offered a full-ride scholarship, would we transfer the funds in her 529 to her?
We had to think about that for a bit. Especially since we’d already transferred some of the funds in our S25’s account to our oldest kid’s account to finish paying for her crazy expensive school. D26 hasn’t asked again (she was half joking), but I think all the kids realize that we will do everything we can in order to start them out in life – but what they each need doesn’t cost the same amount.
I suppose one of these days S25 is going to think about the fact that his college costs a tiny fraction of what we’ve spent for D22. It’s possible he’ll ask for the difference in funds jokingly, much like his sister did. At that point do we tell him that we spent many times that amount in all of his many, many therapies throughout his life? (PT, OT, speech, hippotherapy, myofunctional therapy, HBOT, sooo many others.) Probably not.
I feel this. We did not put a price cap on our first two kids – but we have had many comments that D26 (who plans to pursue a BSN) should go to the cheapest option because where you get your degree doesn’t matter for nursing and nurses “don’t make a lot” of money. My response is always to jokingly say that we will probably all be living with D26 because she will be the only one with a job, given the nursing shortage. But, in all seriousness, we have decided to apply the same rules to her as her older siblings. We have the money saved to do so. And college is about so much more than just getting a degree and a job. We want her to have an experience that she is excited about.
On the issue of private vs public – my D’s most expensive option right now is an OOS public (Pitt, with a small $5k/year scholarship) – and her cheapest options are mostly private with Creighton (offering a $37k/year scholarship) as the least expensive.
My oldest has heard much the same as she applies to grad programs in speech-language pathology.
In that circumstance, it’s a little bit true – but pursuing a grad degree to get a license to work in a particular field is SO different than the four years of undergrad, where it’s so much more about the experience and growing as a human (provided you have the luxury to afford it).
These kind of comments are valid but also make me a bit angsty, given the number of students who change their majors once they’re in college. It’s one of the reasons that I didn’t want C26 looking at art/design schools for architecture, because if they change major it’s likely to be in a STEM direction rather than a design one.
Two of the schools on their list currently are also a bit of a tug of war there - the architecture department at one seems better than the other, but the second one is a better college overall and if they were to change major would be better to be at. This may also all become moot if they get more options at the end of Jan though so I’m trying (not very successfully) to not sit here trying to map out all the possibilities lol.
D was similar to this as well. Her biggest request was that she wanted to go far south – like Florida. We live in NY. Keep in mind this is a kid who had severe separation anxiety. Then we were able to reason with her and gave a boundary of NC, and she was planning on applying to a few schools there and in VA for a while, up until a couple months ago. We ultimately ended up compromising on “Nowhere (generally) north of Syracuse”. Thankfully she ended up falling in love with a few schools in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic!
You should go ahead and map because I’m sitting here doing the same. What are we even going to do after there are no more college possibilities to obsess about?
We feel the same way. I lament all of the ROI of a college talk, because going away to college was never designed to be a job training program. It is a time for development, exploring who you want to be in the world, engaging in learning you are interested in, and having meaningful social experiences that are harder to come by in other stages of life. Becoming employable is just part of the mix of what one should get out of college if they have the luxury to go away to school (same is true for living at home to an extent, but there may be more constraints on some of it in that situation).
Few of the people I work with, including my bosses, went to schools as fancy and expensive as mine. But I wouldn’t trade my undergrad experience because I could have made the same amount, in the same work, if I had gone somewhere less expensive. So much of what I got out of those four years has nothing to do with my career beyond how I learned to think, be flexible, and explore issues.
I agree with you 100% – but at the same time, I just saw an article on Forbes entitled 15 Top Colleges For Launching Your Career, and I wasn’t sad that D26 was considering two of them.
This is so true but when the cost of college has gone from 20k to 100k the focus will inevitably be on ROI. All the rest is stripped out when you have to factor in 400k for a college degree. At that point it’s hard to fault people when they no longer consider the above.
And while I changed my major and minor multiple times and had the chance to take all sorts of classes I have since learned that’s an American thing. If you go to school in the UK or France you are going to graduate for whatever subject you went in with.
Our French friends thought it crazy that someone could go study English but work in marketing or politics. If you want to study Chemistry then you apply for that not Biology and then transfer. Changing majors meant reapplying to the school with the new major and starting over again.
In the Phoenix area, there’s a new Indian drive-thru restaurant, started by a guy who dropped out of college (software engineering major) to do it. His parents thought he was crazy. But it’s gonna be a huge hit.
I have a few thoughts on this. Very few of us actually pay full freight for the colleges, but I get your point. More importantly, the problem with this way of thinking about American colleges is that people are measuring against something that american colleges are not designed to be. If they were just career training they should be structured completely differently. And frankly, I do not want American universities to turn into career training programs.
I also like the fact that kids in the US system (mostly) don’t have to pick what they want to do with the rest of their life as a 17 year old like some other systems. I think it is a strength of how we do things in terms of human development. And, we already struggle as a society to keep work in perspective with the rest of life.
Yes! I know one student was accepted the next day for UMinn Twin Cities and another accepted after a week. It’s tough when it’s inconsistent and people around you are hearing back.
Well not to disagree with the universe of know-it-alls who’ve never actually looked deeper than their own navel for information - but BSN plus advanced certification (which takes time i thru experience plus the certifications can be more lucrative than a lot of other options - and BSN have will continue to have almost a locked guarantee of an array of career/job options going forward…
My cousins first wife was a decent student, but nothing special, did reasonably well in college first two years and switch to a BSN track. Did three years work experience and then entered the Nurse Anesthesiologist certification track for about 3-4 years. Before thirty(early 2000s) she started at a Cosmetic Surgeons practice at around $ 125k. She’s now in charge of their nursing staff / anesthesia department -with two anesthesiologists and 10-12 nurses… she says she’s making over $ 300k / year now.
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Or lawyer or engineer!