<p>My folks met at OOS U as did one of my sibs. The other 5 of us all married people who did NOT attend our Us. All of us are very happily married and have not had any deadbeats, addicts, drug, no purpose in life or other issues, thank you. Your world view is pretty alarming to me, and very sad.</p>
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<p>Some of them may have worked their way through college during a time when the state university tuition was very low, and it was easy to find a part time job as a high school graduate that paid living expenses (living on one’s own) along with state university tuition and books, even without any financial aid whatsoever.</p>
<p>These days, doing so would be more difficult unless the parents subsidize the student living at home (food, utilities, transportation) and there is a low cost state university nearby (not all states’ state universities are low enough cost). But the parents may not be that aware of the increased costs of college and the decreased earning power of a high school graduate trying to work his/her way through college, relative to when they went to college.</p>
<p>P.S. some folks might think YOU have “undesirable qualities”. Being a snob is very undesirable in my book.</p>
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<p>Ok, so the instance you mention in post #237 is an outlier case of a family who could certainly well afford to contribute to the kids’ college costs without needing a loan, but chose to take a loan for liquidity management and financial planning purposes.</p>
<p>That is not the common case of parents facing the question of a large amount of parent loans, where the parents just do not have the money to begin with. If the family is high income, perhaps this is due to poor choices in spending habits and financial planning, but it is far too late to remedy the problem by the time the kid is a high school senior looking at colleges. Regardless of what you think of such choices on the part of the parents, the kid has to play the hand that s/he is dealt; expecting parents who don’t have the money to take out (or even qualify for) large loans is unrealistic.</p>
<p>Lack of gratitude is also right up there in mine, thumper.</p>
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<p>If you want to reduce the risk of your kid becoming a heavy or binge drinker, you may want to look for the following characteristics:</p>
<ul>
<li>Historically black schools, or schools with high black and/or Asian student populations.</li>
<li>Women’s schools.</li>
<li>Schools without fraternities or sororities, or where they are as small a presence as possible.</li>
<li>Low percentage of students in athletics, and general de-emphasis on athletics.</li>
<li>Two year schools (i.e. start at community college, then transfer to a four year school).</li>
<li>School that student commutes to while living at home.</li>
<li>Large schools.</li>
<li>Schools not in the northeast or north central regions of the US.</li>
</ul>
<p>[Binge</a> drinking, dangers of alcohol at College Drinking](<a href=“http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/supportingresearch/journal/presley.aspx]Binge”>http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/supportingresearch/journal/presley.aspx)</p>
<p>The above characteristics associated with lower alcohol consumption do not match up well with the high prestige schools that you are promoting.</p>
<p>If I had been paying off a college 80k loan for 12 years and wasn’t half done, I’d be going nuts. </p>
<p>I don’t know what #237 clarifies- current PP loans are 6.41%, the default/standard payoff is 10 years and accumulated interest is bad enough for that period. Run the loans out longer, pay more. </p>
<p>As for social connections- you’re grabbing at straws other threads have, over time. Imo, it comes across very superficial, as posts from parents of younger hs kids sometimes do- before they get started, they have the idea of the gloss, without any of the research into what truly makes “that” college a better choice for that kid. Specifics. As opposed to simply your name recognition, an external ranking of top colleges and some pie-in-the-sky ideas like better resources, better peers, a better marriage match. Or suggesting non-elites are packed with undesirables. </p>
<p>I think you do not know.</p>
<p>Don’t ask us to research this through for you. Or for friends. We can give opinions, but the family has to do the research. You should know the rate isn’t 3.15 and loans started 12 years ago for a family with substantial assets are not an informed way for other families to make the decision.</p>
<p>When the kid applies to an elite, he has to know why this college is a good match- and the reasons need to suit the adcoms. Do the homework. Nearly every parent on CC who has a success story did their homework.</p>
<p>Or are you toying with us?</p>
<p>More “moral behavior” at elite private colleges than at state schools? “Undesirable elements”? OYYY. I’m speechless.</p>
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<p>You can’t expect us to take you seriously about money issues when your loan examples make no sense.</p>
<p>Where are you getting this 3.15% fixed rate figure? According to the historical numbers on finaid.org
[FinAid</a> | Loans | Historical Interest Rates](<a href=“http://www.finaid.org/loans/historicalrates.phtml]FinAid”>http://www.finaid.org/loans/historicalrates.phtml)
PLUS loans have never been that low. And did they really have 30 year PLUS loans 12 years ago?</p>
<p>But even if you’re right, $80,000 at 3.15% for 30 years is about $343.79/month, not $280.</p>
<p>As for spending all that money to expose your kids to moral behavior and a good value system, I thought that’s what parents were supposed to do at home! I had a nice chat with a young woman at the customer service desk of my local Target store the other night–she said she worked 32 hours a week and was a full-time student at community college. Her work ethic seemed just fine to me.</p>
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<p>I think if I said to my kids - we can afford to have you go anywhere, but I’d rather you commute to a local college / community college and have you live at home because I don’t want you to become an alcoholic – they would indeed start drinking heavily.</p>
<p>Some people are “wired” to have alcohol problems, others aren’t. We have 99 problems in our family (as does every family) but alcohol ain’t one of them. I would find it stupid to prohibit or discourage a particular school over “fear” that they would become alcoholics. It doesn’t run in our family and we don’t have that particular addictive tendency. We have others, including College Confidential :-)</p>
<p>collegehelp, if I remember correctly, you were the poster who was trying to compare the out-of-stateness of Stanford to Harvard, and you kept noting that the % of Stanford students who were from California was greater than the % of Harvard students who were from Massachusetts and trying to draw conclusions from that. </p>
<p>It was explained to you a thousand and one times that such a comparison is silly because the size and % of the entire population from California is several times greater than the % of the population from Massachusetts. Stanford had a bigger pool of people who qualify as “in-state” simply because the state is larger – a kid who grows up 300 miles from Stanford in southern California still counts as in-state, but a kid who grows up 300 miles from Harvard is out of state. Despite repeated explanations, you just didn’t get it. At all. So that tells me worlds about your logic skills, or lack thereof.</p>
<p>“Better moral behavior” at elite universities? No drugs / alcohol? Are you kidding me?
Hey, I won’t deny that there is merit in the idea that going to an elite school gives you a slightly different social and potential marriage pool, but to pretend that people at elite schools are “more moral” or better people or less likely to have drug / alcohol issues is just complete stupidity. They’re book-smarter on average. That’s really the biggest conclusion you can draw. Plenty of hard-working, ethical people at East Directional Podunk U, who are working several jobs and saving every penny to advance themselves.</p>
<p>Is there a “like” button for post 247?</p>
<p>Please tell ME where I can get a Plus Loan for 3% NOW. That is exceedingly OLD NEWS.</p>
<p>Collegehelp…make your own decisions about elite schools and costs for your family. Stop extrapolating inaccurate information from old news for others.</p>
<p>As for marriage…YOU married your HS sweetheart. Sure hope she went to some elite college. If she didn’t, are you having regrets?</p>
<p>As I wrote previously, I don’t agree with collegehelp that the reason to borrow money would be to attend a higher ranked college, but I would borrow money for my kids to attend ANY college. </p>
<p>But I am with Kluge (we are in a minority on this thread), that borrowing money is something I would do in order for my kids to get the best educational opportunities they can have that fit them. And I think some of this is due to my cultural heritage. It is really part of my upbringing that parents provide education for their kids as a top priority over most everything else and that the kids don’t pay for it themselves. That is why my parents even left money for my kids to put toward education. It may be a financial hardship to take these loans and provide a college and graduate school education for my kids, but it still comes before anything else for me. I am not saying that other parents don’t also care about providing an education for their kids, but I’m just saying this is my top priority when it comes to expenses and if other things suffer for it, I’m OK with that. </p>
<p>I think that a lot of people who say that they would not take out loans to fund their kids’ higher education are OK with supporting their young adult children post college and that is where I differ. I have given my kids their education as a gift, but they are on their own to support themselves after they graduate. </p>
<p>And like Kluge, I also think that people borrow money for all sorts of things like cars and houses and since college is so expensive, I don’t see what the big deal is borrowing for that when people seem OK with mortgages and car loans, etc.</p>
<p>A 3 % PLUS loan with a 30 year repayment? </p>
<p>Yeah. Not happening. </p>
<p>Try closer to $1000 a month for $80k for 10 years at 8.5%.</p>
<p>Thumper, I went back and looked at more of his post history and agree with you and PG that he’s just shooting from the hip. Which adds up to a big waste of time. </p>
<p>There’ this beaut’-</p>
<p>I think the name of your college matters a lot. For every successful person from a no-name college there are a hundred successful people who went to a prestigious college. Nobody has mentioned the great self-affirming affects of a prestigious school. It boosts self confidence and self esteem for the rest of your life. It will also give your children confidence that they can accomplish great things because of your example. Attending a prestigious college has a ripple effect through generations.
Waste of time, because we can’t inform him and he doesn’t inform others.</p>
<p>Trolls do sometimes pop up in these parts. </p>
<p>Nothing you can do. They believe in fantastical things that bear little resemblance to the truth. They sometimes are ignorant, and other times simply trying to be intentionally mischievous to bug others. </p>
<p>It is hard to tell sometimes, which category they fall into.</p>
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<p>However, those parents who are committed to providing for their kids’ college education likely started saving up early, so they are less likely to need unaffordable loans by the time the kids are high school seniors looking at colleges.</p>
<p>If we wanted to, we could never afford the full cost of education for the schools my kids attended. We saved to the best of our ability, and fortunately all three had some academic scholarships to supplement our estimated family costs. </p>
<p>It was a priority for our family, but not a reality. When my kids were babies, the cost of tuition at USC was around $12,000 a year, before room and board. A full year at USC worth room and board runs around $60k. In 20 years, the cost has more than doubled. This has clearly outpaced cost of inflation, alone.</p>
<p>Sooz, for me, the problem isn’t someone suggesting loans. We took PP and then worked to get them paid down, fast. There were some legit reasons we couldn’t stash a big sum away, for college- including the (carefully considered) decision to send them to private hs. </p>
<p>The problem to me is when others minimize what it takes to make a wise decision, what it really means to engage in this debt, at different income/asset levels. And, when it’s suggested that the gift of education overrides all others. I don’t think our sacrifices equate to love. To me, they are just one part of the story. </p>
<p>Gotta be holistic.</p>
<p>Completely. And I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important it is in some families to have the kids relatively close to home for college (which in many cases means “only” paying for a less-expensive school). I was talking to a friend last night who has one far away (like I do) and one an hour and a half away. The one who’s closer was the kid who was never home in high school–always doing his thing with friends, his theater groups, etc. Now the parents can see him pretty much any weekend. They can spontaneously meet him for dinner, attend sporting events in the city where his college is, and see all his plays. In some ways they are building a closer relationship with him WHILE he is in college–which is hard to do when the kid is a thousand miles away. The dad is thrilled with the $20K/year education his younger son is getting and speaks wistfully about how he wishes he hadn’t agreed to send his older child to a $60K/year college, even though they can afford it and he is also doing well.</p>
<p>Then there are all the sad reasons kids stay close to home and choose (or are “made”) to attend less-desirable and less-expensive schools–like when a parent dies unexpectedly during their senior year of high school. Unfortunately that happens all too often.</p>