The tactic that my parents took with me and my sister worked well for both of us. My parents told us the following:
- we'll help you pay for 4 years of college
- in turn, you are expected to work hard and get decent grades
- if you flunk out, then you're expected to find full time employment & support yourself
- we are only paying for 4 years of college. If you need a 5th year in order to finish, then you better figure out how you're going to pay for year #5.
- the money train stops the day after your college graduation, so you better have a job lined up where you can pay your bills and put a roof over your head.
And my parents were ready to back up those terms & conditions. Let me tell you…there is nothing more motivating as a young college student than realizing that if you don’t get your act together and bear down and work hard, that you could end up homeless & unemployed!
In my opinion, families who plan to impose this restriction need to discuss its implications in detail with their students long before their senior year in college.
Many graduate programs (including Ph.D. programs where the student receives a stipend and is self-supporting) don’t start until the fall. Students who are taking this route would need to realize that they have to find a summer job–and a place to live away from the family home–during the summer between college and graduate school.
Also, many jobs that students obtain through on-campus recruiting start several weeks or months after graduation. If the wait is long, a summer job and temporary place to live may be a reasonable choice. But a student who has a shorter wait (for example, one of my kids had to wait six weeks for a job to start) would have a more difficult challenge. Finding a temporary job for such a short period may not be possible, and short-term housing for that period could be very expensive. The student might need to have considerable savings from previous jobs to get through this interim period.
Alternatively, you might want to do what a lot of families do if their college graduate has a job or graduate program lined up but has a gap of weeks or months before it starts, which is to allow the young person to live with you one last time, at your expense, for the interim period. This is not aiding and abetting failure to launch. The kids I’m talking about are launching just fine but have to kill a little time first.
You get what you incentivize for. If you incentivize for young people being self-supporting and living on their own IMMEDIATELY after graduation, you may inadvertently push them into selecting jobs based primarily on their starting dates, rather than other aspects of their suitability. And you may discourage kids from going to graduate school at all.
And speaking as a corporate employer- we can’t accommodate every new employee’s desired start date, even though we try. We’ve got locations across the country (and sometimes overseas) and kids often think that whatever date they pick after graduation is going to work.
We’ve had young grads who needed to wait for a late September start- even if they were available earlier- based on logistics, popularity of different training programs, etc. We are processing a large number of new hires over a period of a few months-- which includes kids who graduate in August-- and not every date is going to be available. The two most popular dates in the US are the Tuesday after July 4th weekend and the Tuesday after Labor Day… we just can’t slot every single hire into one of those days!!!
“the money train stops the day after your college graduation, so you better have a job lined up where you can pay your bills and put a roof over your head.”
My son started his job with a very nice starting income the week after graduation. However, just to get him set up in his new city it cost us $8k. I think expecting one’s child to be able to to pay for all expenses relating to moving to and setting up living arrangements before they even have a paycheck (and my S even got a relocation package) is a bit much. And our money didn’t do to setting him up in the lap of luxury either.
I understand that it can be unaffordable for some parents to help their kids with those types of expenses and I’m sure a lot of kids realize their parents won’t be able to help but as an incentive it seems just mean to me.
The father of one of my daughter’s college friends not only subsidized his son’s transition expenses (the kinds of things @emilybee was talking about), he also gave up all of his own paid time off for the year to help his son with his after-college move.
The son had gotten his dream job–but the starting date was appallingly soon after graduation, and the job was located in a totally unfamiliar community on the other side of the country. It took a two-person team to accomplish all the tasks needed to set the young man up there–with an apartment, furniture, utilities, Internet, a new car, a new driver’s license, a doctor for ongoing medical issues, etc.–during the short time that was available. The father was willing to be the second member of the team even though it meant giving up his own vacation that year.
It would be nice to be a member of this kind of family, wouldn’t it?
Re: #61, #62, #63, #64
Note that this is another situation where having supportive wealthy parents still helps, even as one reaches college graduation. The soon-to-graduate student from a poor family who cannot provide such support may be forced by money pressures to take the job offer that is most financially feasable in the short term, even if it is not the best offer for future career development.
@ucbalumnus – Absolutely, and we haven’t even gotten into the issue of co-signing a lease.
Yes, it does help if the parents can be supportive in that way - but the use of the term “stopping money train” suggests to me that the parents could help and are only using that as the incentive.
I think kids who come from families that can not afford to help out after they graduate dont need to be told that at all. They are well aware beforehand there will not be help after graduating.
My parents (and to some extent me with my kids) had “the money train stops” attitude. But my parents were flexible if we had work lined up but not started, or wanted to spend a month or so at home before striking out to a new city. My D1 had a job starting in August lined up before graduation, and she came home for a couple months, which was fine. Our goal is to get them launched as adults fairly quickly and independently – it isn’t punitive.
In many instances parents with limited resources are very willing to allow their grown children to live with them after graduation. In that way, they provide important help to the young person who’s making the college-to-independent living transition (although it comes with the catch that the young person needs to find a job nearby in order to take advantage of the help).
The “stop the money train” people don’t allow their kids to live at home. That’s a very different situation.
I think there are variations in that. My kids are told they have to be self supporting once they graduate, but it can mean giving them a short time to use home as a launching place before the new job starts. More than a short time, and they will have to get some kind of job and either pay rent or move out, though. I have seen very few posters out here who are so hard line that they won’t let their kids come home for a couple months til a job starts. Unless they downsized away any space for the kid.
But a kid might not have any other choice but to come home after graduating and give up a more lucrative job offer if the “money train” ends the day after graduation. It’s simply very short sighted of parents who otherwise could have helped with the setting up costs.
@inparent, what would you do if your kid got a great offer in some city 1000 miles from your home and the job started the week after graduation?
Coming home wouldn’t have done my kid a lick of good as his job is in Boston and we live 2 1/2 hours away.
And let’s get into the issue of co-signing leases. I’ve waited long enough to bring it up.
Both of my kids had the good fortune to inherit some money before they graduated from college – not a huge amount, but enough so that they could deal with the immediate transition expenses after graduation.
However, one of them needed a different kind of help. She got a job in a city where almost all landlords require young people with no past employment or credit history to have a guarantor co-sign their leases. If a family member with a good credit history had not been willing to sign as guarantor, she could not have taken a job in that city.
A family that tells kids that they’re on their own the moment they graduate is incentivizing avoiding certain cities where guarantors are needed. Is this what parents really want?
We had to cosign, too including the summer sublet he had to rent since in Boston leases rent from Sept-Sept because of all the students. You also have to pay finders fees in a lot of these cities. S’s company paid $1000 of that but we split the other $1000 with his roommate. So, $500 for that - then 1st/last month for sublet and 1st/last month rent, plus security deposit for permanent place. To register his car in Mass - which you must do to get a parking permit in Boston - to pass MA inspection it was $1500 or so for new catalytic converter. We had to pay for all of these things within a two week span.
To summarize the last few posts:
If you insist that your child must be completely independent from the day of college graduation, if you are unwilling to give or lend the child any money to cover the initial expenses of moving to his/her own place, and/or if you are unwilling to act as guarantor on a lease, you are limiting your child’s employment choices.
Even if you tell your child about these restrictions years in advance and allow the child to hang on to any money earned at summer or part-time jobs so that the money will be available for this transition period, the child might not be able to save enough to take advantage of some job opportunities. And no amount of savings from summer employment will eliminate the need for a co-signer in Boston, Washington, New York, or certain other cities.
So if you’re thinking of requiring immediate financial independence, make sure you recognize what you’re incentivizing for. It may indeed be more important to your family for your child to be independent immediately than for the child to be able to take an excellent career-oriented position that happens to be in Boston or happens to start in September. But if you want your child to be able to take that excellent job, don’t set up conditions that would prevent it.
"Also, @MiamiDAP’s one perfect child did not go to a college notorious for workload or grade deflation. " - That is why many valedictorians got derailed in the first Bio class, right? Because the class was way too easy? Interesting concept! And Medical schools are also very easy and that was the reason why they had to study sometime up to 14 hours a day, day after day for several weeks. I never said that my D. is perfect. I said that she is not a genius, she just did her homework at her “easy” HS - and that was the reason why she was the only one with GPA 4.0uw and then at her easy college where many who graduated at the top of their HS class, got derailed from their initial track in the very first semester of the freshman year and also at her exceptionally easy medical school. You can believe in whatever you want, your right, we are in free country…
^^You’re missing the point @MiamiDAP . Just “doing the homework” does not ensure a 4.0. There are so many other things in play. Generally speaking, kids with 4.0s do work hard, but they also have a certain amount of giftedness in areas of traditional schooling. And there is a little bit of luck too. What about the kid who works hard but has a physical or mental illness that takes him out of school a few weeks. He may be able to scrape by with a B in a class or two, derailing his 4.0 chances.
A student might also do all her homework and still get “only” an 85 or 89 in the class. Evaluating students by GPA is not the only way to see who has learned and grown the most as a student anyway.
Well said @surfcity!
Talent, hard work, and luck…
My H has students that have to work their tail off just to get the B…
My daughter does all her homework, works hard, is a ‘delight to have in class’ and still doesn’t get all A’s. I’d be happy with half A’s. She was born at 24 weeks, had a brain bleed, and I think does very well for a person with her beginnings. Her ‘homework’ in K was not doing math worksheets or spelling words, but learning to hold a pencil and actually use it to make marks on a paper. She’s right brain dominant, and it is as if the left side of her brain isn’t working at all. No math, science, reasoning skills at all. She’s left handed and not ‘sort of’ left handed either; I have never seen her pick up a pencil or fork with her right hand. Never And she’s a wonderful artist (that homework paid off and she’s great at drawing), writer, actress. She can discuss art, history, religion, anything Disney. She’s never going to be a doctor or lawyer or teacher no matter how much homework she does.
I feel sorry for MiamiDAP’s daughter. Her mother thinks she is just average, that anyone can do what she did. She is probably very talented person, very gifted and hard working, and did a lot more than ‘just her homework.’ She’s also been lucky in that she had all her parents’ attention and money. She never had to have a job while attending high school or even college. She got to take part in lots of ECs. Lucky and talented.
DAP, there aren’t the same grading policies or premed weeding at all colleges. Nor are all k-12 schools alike. Some are challenging, some not so much. You know that, right? It’s good to allow for the differences others experienced.