Setting a "spending money" budget for college -- realistic guidance

Thinking of what @Lindagaf wrote and stepping back a bit, I think a lot of this also has to do with what we, and our children, think of as success (and where our opinions differ). What are our visions of a good life? Where do we each see value in struggle, versus a potential waste of time? What are the lessons one child has learned that another child still needs to learn? How much of a safety net does one person have? How does a lack of safety net impact the choices and decisions of another?

I have had jobs that were super helpful and I learned a lot, and jobs that were literally just a paycheck. I don’t count the soft skills learned from dealing with terrible bosses/entitled customers as a value add of my “really need a paycheck to pay my bills” jobs. Because in the moment of those jobs, I didn’t have the time to reflect on those soft skills as add-ons, they were what I had to do to survive.

I think a lot of how we look at this comes from the intersectionality of our experiences and immutable personal factors. And it can be hard for us to see beyond our own experiences and perspectives and imagine the decisions of someone who makes entirely different choices are completely rational/logical based on theirs.

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(Just a note again, how much I enjoy reading your posts. Always some wisdom and wit to appreciate.)

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If you mean a job you deem unworthy, I respectfully disagree. All jobs are valid. Even super boring, unskilled, or seemingly worthless jobs, have value to someone in some way.

The campus tour guide doesn’t have a more important job than the kid clearing tables in the dining hall. Maybe dining hall workers get satisfaction not only from the paycheck but also from keeping things clean, talking with a variety of students and adults, and getting first choice of the best food items. At the very least, they are learning how to be efficient in a given setting, seeing how a large scale dining operation runs, how to communicate with supervisors and other employees, and so forth… And at the very, very least, they are learning that maybe they hate that particular environment and never want that kind of job again.

Edit: I’m primarily referring to college jobs in the context of college students who presumably are not yet launching careers.

If your child wants to work in the dining hall, will you tell them not to? Would you have valid reasons for doing so? I’m genuinely curious.

@Izzy74 I also said “* Parents who grew up wealthy and had no financial constraints may or may not be willing to fund their child’s spending money.”
I was simply giving examples of various parental backgrounds.

Put it this way, if my child wanted to work and had a choice of different jobs, it would easily be possible to rank order those jobs from most to least desirable. Factors making a job more desirable would include relevance and adjacency to professional goals; then probably social goals; then at the bottom would be fiscal compensation (assuming all jobs fell within an expected range of “normal college kid, part-time compensation”)

If you’re hypothesizing a job with zero professional adjacency, I would want to explore with her the reasons for wanting to take the job, and the relative pros and cons. (There will always be some pros and cons.) If there were tangible reasons like “its a fun environment to work in”, “I need structure to force me to start my day early”, “it’s right next to the gym and I plan to workout right after my shifts when I otherwise might not be exercising”… some sort of articulable non-financial benefit, then sure – it could be worth discussing.

Assuming both zero professional adjacency and zero qualitative personal benefits, and in fact the job was tedious, repetitive, isolated, or otherwise unrewarding work – and the principal benefit was of a financial nature only – then I would assess the value of the work in terms of teaching the life skill of personal financial management.

I don’t think that the idea of working in a dining hall to “get satisfaction from keeping things clean” or “talking with people” is worth that much.

I can see how “understanding work environments”, “dealing with difficult bosses or co-workers”, “learning to be on time and reliable” might be soft skills one acquires through even the least rewarding jobs. But I also dont think that bussing trays is necessarily the most efficient way to learn those lessons.

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Sometimes the flexibility for unpaid internships etc can provide experiences that can really help with both experience for a resume and clarity on whether a career path is a good fit. Kids fill hours many different ways with and without a paying job.

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When I was in college, I had tons of guilt everytime I wanted to spend money on a meal outside the dorm. On Sundays there was no meal service so Id sneak breakfast cereal and had that for dinner.

My parents were great but I didnt want to be a financial burden on them because they owned a small business.

It wasnt a big deal but I vowed that when I had kids, if we were financially independent, they could spend money and understand that it really is ok and just focus on their studies and enjoy everything college has to offer.

So yes, personal experience often dictates how people make money decisions.

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This is extremely clear to me. By the time my daughter graduates from college, my wife and I will have spent in all likelihood nearly $1mm in after tax money for her education since kindergarten. (This assumes we do not pay for a graduate school.)

We could just as easily have taken a large sum of money, invested it into the S&P500 on the date of her birth in some kind of a tax-deferred structure like an insurance wrapper, and it would be worth roughly 5.5x more. Instead of pushing private primary and higher education, we could just hand her that sum of money today.

We did not do so. Why? One argument is because we believe the future value of her lifetime earnings will exceed the future value of the lump sum we could have given her at high school graduation. For some kids that will be true. For most, it will be a lot closer.

Another reason to pay for education is because it provides self-actualization – the ability for our daughter to get 22 years of life experience, figure out what she likes to do, and what she is good at, and pursue a career that gives the satisfaction of mastery and accomplishment.

Another reason to pay for education is because of the value of assortive mating – the idea that the higher your child’s education, and in particular the more “elite” it is, the greater cognitive and social class titration that occurs. The end result of this titration is that your child, from the years of 18-22, swims in a fishbowl of highly selected potential mates. Spousal selection is probably the single most important decision any person makes for life happiness, and the greater the compatibility of intellectual, background, and aspirations between spouses, the greater the likelihood of a successful marriage.

All of this is a complicated way of saying that we believe that pursuing this path yields the greatest likelihood that our daughter will land on an optimal combination of financial earning power, professional job satisfaction, and long term marital compatibility. Those factors seem most likely to lead to “happiness”, which is a pretty good proxy for what I define as “the good life”.

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I honestly think there can also be value in simply having a regular “lowly” job, both for the experience itself and for the line item on a young person’s resume… especially if your kid has been attending expensive private schools all her life and ends up going to an elite university. I believe your kid is interested in engineering? If so, she’s going to be working with folks who were educated at all kinds of regular state universities. She’s going to need to get along with them and respect them.

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But what if she WANTS to? You would forbid her from doing it? I am genuinely curious. Is it your decision to make? If you aren’t telling her how to spend her college budget, then I assume you won’t tell her what job she can and can’t take. Isn’t making a decision about something like this part of her maturation process?

[Lindagaf]

“But what if she WANTS to? You would forbid her from doing it? I am genuinely curious. Is it your decision to make? If you aren’t telling her how to spend her college budget, then I assume you won’t tell her what job she can and can’t take. Isn’t making a decision about something like this part of her maturation process?”

:nerd_face:Chiming in bc this happened to us.

Our oldest son unbeknownst to us got a PT job his second year of college. We were visiting for parents weekend and he said he had smthg to show us….paycheck stubs.

We weren’t thrilled but clearly it was his choice. So we said okay, fine but please, if it interferes with your school demands and yes, social and extracurriculars for his busy double majors (city of DC) then quit. He agreed to do so.

He continued working there for another 9 months. But later when he did quit bc of a FT summer federal internship, he said he was glad to be done with it but had no regrets.

So that’s our little story.

ETA: I have no idea how to quote others. Sorry! :upside_down_face:

If you are a believer in assortive mating, I’m going to assume that most of your friend’s kids are not yet at the marrying stage. Because- especially with a daughter- you’ll be surprised by the men that many women in their 20’s and 30’s- products of the right schools and the right activities and the right neighborhoods- end up bringing home to meet the parents.

It’s a tired comedy trope for sure. But it’s a trope for a reason.

I think investing in your D’s human capital is a worthy and noble idea. Expecting her to bring home Mr. Right-- the guy she met while buying books senior year at the college bookstore- may be a bridge too far.

You have NO friends who grind their teeth at their son-in-law who they believe is their daughter’s inferior on virtually every single quality? Except he’s often very good looking. There’s that.

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Totally agree with this. You need to constantly countersteer cultural influences in these elite hothouses. I’ve had to do it for years. And agree also with your point about needing to get along with and respect everyone.

To some extent, your question brings me back to my original question, which was what is a reasonable budget to set for spending money, so my kid has to live within the same financial constraints as other kids?

Asking that question brought me to the idea of work, which introduced me to the (now obvious) idea that I should use college as a period of time to bridge to adulthood and get off the Bank of Dad. (My wife remains skeptical.)

Now we’re one level deeper. OK work teaches good lessons about money, but is all work created equal? I can see your point about taking a “lowly” job just to walk a mile in those shoes, but ask yourself this – would you rather your kid bus trays, or work a job with strong networking or academic application?

Embedded in your question is the idea of social class. Here’s where I land: Social class exists. Social class distinctions exist. Some social class distinctions are negative and some are positive, because they exhibit characteristic values and behavior that are positive or negative. I value what I think of as “upper middle class” values.

What does that mean? Valuing hard work, honesty, obedience to rules and social norms, and education. It also mean detesting overt classism, cheaters, liars, and thieves. There are some cuspy values around ideas like meritocracy, sex positivity, etc. that I think the upper middle class divides. I have views here, but they arent relevant to the discussion at hand.

Maybe I misunderstand you, are you saying the whole point of going to “elite” college is just to meet your future partner there? Hopefully this is not what my D29 is thinking. She has been working so hard in middle school, sleeping late to study, getting all A+, ASB leadership and color guard … Hopefully she is doing all this for herself, not to meet some guy from an “elite” college. Good Luck.

My wife and I have been working this angle all my daughter’s life. I’ve tried to model what a good husband looks like. I’m not expecting her to meet her husband in college. Maybe she will, maybe she wont. Up here, in the Northern states, women marry later. My friends from the south mostly have larger families and kids who have already graduated from college.

She does not have much experience dating, and she is not fully formed as an adult. She needs to have some life experience before settling down, definitely I get that. But we’ve also made the point that the Carrie Bradshaws of the world end up with alone and surrounded with cats. (Thanks JD Vance, I actually agree.)

Online dating aside, most people end up marrying a person they meet from their social networks. Adult social networks, including work networks, often derive from school.
So putting your kids in an environment where they are most likely to develop a marriage compatible social network is not a terrible idea.

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You do misunderstand me. Obviously there are many reasons to attend college including academics, etc. However building social networks is also something that happens in college. A reason to attend Yale Law is because you will be classmates with the future Vice President of the United States.

Everyone recognizes the value to professional networking. Social networks also drive marital prospects. Maybe you dont marry your classmates, but those assortively selected classmates have friends, and those friends of friends become people you do summer house shares with, etc.

A huge benefit to elite education is to form elite social networks, including marital networks. That’s just a fact.

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Let’s say I’m an engineering hiring manager who worked their way through San Jose State, and I’m looking at a resume for a kid who goes to Stanford. Do you think it might be a positive thing for me if they have a regular job on their resume, vs. just “research assistant”? I don’t want to end up hiring a person who is going to look down on others at their job who didn’t attend elite universities. (and believe me, I have run into some people like this at work…)

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Yes it’s surprising to me how much things have changed in 30 years. We know quite a few of my kids’ peers deliberately broke up with their long time college BFs/GFs after graduation because they didn’t want to be tied down. Back when I was in college you would usually at least have tried to make it work, either by compromising on location or living apart for a while but acknowledging that was only temporary.

That (breaking up) was particularly true at elite schools. Much less so at other lower ranking schools in non-coastal areas where early marriage isn’t regarded as “settling”.

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I’m not an engineering hiring manager, so I dont know. I think there’s likely a great deal of pre employment screening on things like educational pedigree, courses, and technical problem tests.

But let’s say you get past all of that and both candidates are equal. I suspect the qualitative decision criteria is less about “who worked through college” vs “who had research jobs”, and more about basic interpersonal skills. Your evaluation of who will “look down on others” is probably pretty qualitative.

I think there are strong exceptions to this. If somebody is a military veteran, particularly who had a notable MOS like special operations, that sort of stuff stands out and is highly prized at certain employers. I’m not sure that “worked 5 hours a week in the cafeteria throughout college” is quite as strong a signal.

Wow, this thread took a turn I did not see coming! :flushed::smiley_cat:

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My D is on the hiring team at her company and has been doing interviews for a few years now. She reports that there are a shocking number of very bright engineers who are not only missing the soft skills that are necessary to be successful in a work situation, but also so many that can’t relate to their co-workers or the people who report to them. New engineers need to be able to interact with a wide swath of society without making people feel “less than”. (And those students without those soft skills, no matter how bright or how elite their school, are not getting hired).

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