Would you do college differently for your kids? The hindsight thread

Parent Cafe
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I found a couple of posts in the retirement thread on this issue particularly poignant and thought I’d start a separate post, thinking maybe parents of HS kids today might benefit. I hope those posters will c&p their posts here.

I’m going to say that I don’t regret the way we paid for college for my kids, even if it came at somewhat of a personal cost to me. I had been the main breadwinner for my family for years, including when dh went back to school to become a public elementary teacher. As ds1 was approaching middle school, I wanted to be a SAHM. That wasn’t really the plan, that I would STAY a SAHM, but when he was a HS sophomore I found cc and realized that he and his brother would qualify for FA if I didn’t go back to work and that if I did go back to work our income would be artificially inflated and college would think that we should have a lot more than we did when in reality we had several really lean years, living on a teacher’s salary.

So, I never went back to full-time work, and the gamble paid off in terms of college. Both kids got great educations at faraway excellent private schools (including one I’d never heard of before joining cc) that gave us a lot of financial aid. Cc taught me that my kids had what a lot of these schools were seeking – between the two boys, we had a student-body president, four-year varsity athlete, great scores on standardized tests, tons of APs, worked for years, Eagle Scout, interned for our congressman. They were minority males willing to move. One was even featured in his college’s recruiting brochure as they were trying to increase their presence in our state.

I would joke that the year they were both in college I “made” in the six figures, because my staying home meant they got tons of financial aid. We had one state 529 for both kids (as in they had to share). One used it to go to grad school debt free, while the other took the cash. Both are great kids, fully launched. I don’t regret getting them there.

But now having been out of full-time work for more than 20 years, I lack the confidence to try to pursue something else. My former industry is dying, and it feels like too late to start over.

Anyway, I hope that others will share their stories and that no one will pass judgment on them.

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I would have been less helicopter during the run up. For some, wanting to do all the necessary steps is too much pressure. Looking for that great name is too much pressure. They’ll still find a great home. Not everyone wants to be that high stressed, high pressured kid.

Cost wise, I’d have done nothing differently.

Set a budget.

Have assured choices to make the budget.

Don’t apply anywhere that could not make the budget.

One thing that helped was having our 2% Fidelity credit card funneled into the 529 for many years. So even at our budget, had we spent that much (we didn’t), in reality it’d be much less because our credit card rewards made up much of the contribution.

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My biggest regret is not pushing hard for my daughter to take a gap year during covid- incidentally also her biggest regret. We all underestimated how that freshman year under covid would go. Financially, we had set aside more than enough and have zero regrets with being full pay for a private school.

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I’m a pretty free range parent, I wish I was more involved with the college application process instead of letting them do it all themselves. I’ve never seen an application, never had any dealings with college board, they were in charge of everything (sometimes I did sign them up for tests, hired a tutor). Although some applied to many schools, I think there are many colleges they didn’t even know about that would’ve been good fits. But it all worked out, they’ve landed very well, made lifetime friends, loved their college experiences, so maybe not.

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I like to think I could have pushed back more vocally against some of the criticism and lack of regard D received for her college choice (though in reality I’m probably too polite).

She didn’t receive as much recognition as she should have done in HS, because she was overshadowed by her twin brother (who was class president and very involved in school life) and her main activity (dance) was outside school. That was particularly annoying when it came to prize giving when her brother won half a dozen awards, and she didn’t get anything (despite having an identical academic record).

But we also got a lot of comments from other parents about how she should be doing engineering or CS in college because she was smart, and how we shouldn’t allow her to major in ballet. Sometimes it was even implied that smart girls shouldn’t aspire to traditionally female activities like ballet and should be doing more prestigious (ie traditionally male) jobs instead. That’s what the other four top girls in her HS class did (all majored in engineering, CS or math).

Then when she went to a top college for ballet (on a named full ride academic merit scholarship, although that wasn’t widely known, because unlike some other major scholarships it wasn’t announced by her HS at prize giving), we got criticized for her going to college in a red state along with explicit or implicit assumptions that she must have been rejected by better schools (when in fact she turned down UCB and UCLA as well as Regents scholarships at other UCs because they were just her academic backups in case she didn’t get into a top dance program).

However one small measure of compensation was hearing many of those parents complain that August about how they were shocked by the cost of their first college bill.

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Both of my kids were able to attend the school they wanted to. One went to an out of state public college and the other was able to attend a private university on some need based financial aid.

We sacrificed a lot for a decade, first to afford our contributions and then to pay for the loans they qualified for that we took over. We were committed to them being debt free. No vacations, no extra spending, the last of the debt was paid for with stimulus money during the pandemic. We wrecked a car and used that money to pay one kids loans while we took a loan for a new car. It was a very lean decade.

Both have great jobs and both are well settled.

Regrets? Both live far away, both married.

I wish in hindsight that it meant that they would settle far away, would find coming to visit us difficult. We will be getting older ourselves and my husband doesn’t care to travel to see them all the time. He’s happier if they don’t want to visit than me and to not put the burden on us going there all the time. I am struggling mightily with feeling equally guilty not going there and being a good partner who doesn’t want to travel there much.

I also struggle with now sacrificing paying for college and wondering if the children are truly grateful or just expected that this is how it works.

The whole marriage thing. One child married someone whose socioeconomic status is very similar. Paid for the wedding they could afford.

The other married someone whose socioeconomic status is much higher than ours. Their partner seemed to expect an expensive wedding and contributions from parents. The problem with weddings is that it’s apparently not an agreement between the parents and their child but the other family and their expectations and their agreements.

I guess I feel a bit annoyed for someone to expect you to pay for their wedding for them to go on very expensive vacations, buy a house that far exceeds yours and then feel as if you should always come to them.

If I had known this, I could have had my kid to pay for their college and I would have paid for the wedding of their partner’s dream.

I really really don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. I have a great life and would rather no one hit the hug emoji. I’m trying to be real and to put my regrets out there. My husband is less so. He knows having the kids be debt free was important and was what his parents did for him. Pay it forward.

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My parents lived in our town, but my sister and family lived a 2+ hour flight away. It was important to my mom to have a close relationship with all of her grandkids, my dad wasn’t much of a traveler (and to be fair, my sister found my mom to be very helpful, and my dad the opposite). She flew out there at least 6 times a year, and my sister and family flew here once or twice a year (to drop the kids off and go to Europe). My SIL lives in DC, she flies to Seattle and Atlanta frequently to see her daughters, BIL stays home a lot of the time.

I’m sure you miss them.

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I really drank the kool aid about fit and dream schools, and although I would not have admitted it to myself at the time, I felt the college application process was some kind of referendum on my parenting, the culmination of 17 years of effort. We weren’t Ivy-or-bust tiger parents exactly, but we had very snobbish beliefs about higher education that we paid dearly for (in the literal sense). I spoke in the retirement thread about my dawning awareness that we spent more on college than we prudently should have, and now I’m facing the reality that I will have to work longer than I’d like because of it. I did not apply the same skepticism and budget-mindedness to that part of our financial life that I’ve applied to everything else (real estate, vehicles, etc.). It was really a quasi-religious faith in the supreme importance of higher ed in one’s life, a faith that I have largely lost at this point. My daughter has a fine life and she got a lot out of her education, but I think she probably would have been similarly fine if we had sent her to a less selective or prestigious school that cost us much less. She got some very good merit offers at some perfectly nice places, and we did not encourage her to pursue them.

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We’re still in the thick of it. I’ve got one child who is a junior in college, and one who is a HS senior, deciding on a college. In general, I’m happy with how we tackled the process. Some of older son’s decision making was based on places where he could pursue his D3 sport - that helped initially build his list. He participated in his sport freshman year than stopped. So I sometimes think well, what if that hadn’t been a driver, would he have been able to have some of the things he had to let go that would’ve made a better experience? But then I remember that he had some truly amazing experiences in the year that he did his sport, and I don’t think he’d choose against that.

The one thing that makes me a bit sad is how far away my guys will be. One kid is going to school 8.5 hours north, the other is looking at schools that are either 4.5 or 8.5 hours south. Both have suggested they will ideally stay either North or South for their careers. I understand why they don’t want to come back to where we are, but I know it will frustrate me and make me sad to not be able to see them easily. I get that that’s a part of growing up and getting launched, but I don’t think it really came home until now what that would mean for future visits.

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I definitely would not have pushed my son to go to college. He was a poor student in high school and definitely only interested in the “fun” aspects of college. He dropped out after 3 semesters - dropped out before he was kicked out.
D was offered a full ride at Pitt with an invitation to apply for their direct admit to medical school program. I wish I would have pushed harder for that. We went for a visit where she attended a Chemistry class she found “basic” (her words), was turned off by the guides they had and just didn’t think it was a good fit. She was offered a large scholarship at UMich but didn’t want to borrow a lot of money, and it would have been a lot. I think it would have been a great opportunity for her. She was waitlisted at Harvard. She ended up attending UVA (her safety - I can’t believe I’m saying that), veered completely away from her intent to attend medical school, and still had to borrow in spite of a small scholarship.
Did it make a difference for us in terms of our finances? Nope. We didn’t have any money to save for retirement so we certainly didn’t have it for college expenses. It’s been a long strange trip.
I think about D’s wedding - we spent a fortune (things had improved financially) and she’s now divorced. I wish I’d had that money for Michigan. I wish I’d pushed harder for Pitt. Ah well. It’s her life, not mine.

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No regrets here at all about college for our kids…and even grad schools (we helped with living expenses). When we had children, we fully expected to fund their educations through college…if that was their choice. So we did…because we could and we wanted to.

We have two amazingly appreciative kids in very opposite professions. And we are proud of them both, and are happy financially we were able to help them achieve their goals.

We were always a two parent income household, by choice also. As I’ve posted before, for 7 years, 100% of my income funded college (expensive private ones) while DHs income paid the rest of our living expenses.

We feel fortunate we were able to give this gift of higher education to our kids. No regrets at all.

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Lots of kids from lots of different ideals apply to a variety of colleges.

And we supported that with our own kids.

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In theory that sounds great, logistically is much more difficult.

I have 3 people I should visit, 2 kids and my mother. All of whom live in the same direction, east, but all at least a 100 miles from each other.

The kids both work during the week, so I would have to visit on consecutive weekends. My mother lives 100 miles west from one of the kids. One of the kids lives in downtown Philadelphia which is a nightmare to drive to. I don’t know if I could take the train from my mom’s to the kid in Philly. Then there’s how to get to the train station because my mom wouldn’t be able to.

And then there is a time where all 3 are free, I have been able to get 2 schedules lined up but there’s been a snag with the 3rd.

One kid doesn’t want to travel to the other, so the other kid is annoyed and doesn’t want to travel to them. Neither wants to travel to my mom’s.

So who do I visit and when? How much is this going to cost me? I don’t know if I can drive to all 3 anymore, especially to downtown Philadelphia. And then there is getting home, 800 miles.

It’s so exhausting to even think about. I feel like it’s a Solomon’s baby dilemma.

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I asked dh this question – did he have any regrets about how we handled the kids and college? – and the only thing that he could come up with was their distance from us. Ds1 came home after college for three years but then returned to work at his alma mater more than 1,000 miles away. Ds2 didn’t stay in his college town, but he moved for his first job and is still there, about 850 miles away.

We don’t see either nearly as much as we’d like. They come here or we go there three or four times a year in a good year. And the guys try to time visits so that we are all together at least once or twice a year. Ds1’s life would have been so different if he’d chosen the in-state option. I like who he is so I can’t imagine pushing him to stay in state, but, boy, it would be nice to maybe still have one relatively close. sigh

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All our college $$ for 3 kids went to small privates colleges in Ohio - all 3 kids at a different one!

Our lifestyle has always been pretty “middle”. There was never the expectation nor the ability to think that we could pay for all of their college - unless perhaps they went local or to larger state schools. H and I both had deals with our parents when we went (we were also raised pretty “middle”) where they paid for some things (like housing), we paid for other things (like tuition which back then was so much more reasonable). So because of that we expected our kids to also have skin in the game for college.

But all three were also really high ranking students in their high schools. And they desired to stay within a couple hours of home so Ohio privates fit the bill of letting them make some choices and get some decent financial aid. But they all still graduated with some loans - nothing too scary but nothing that was paid off in a year or two.

I always worked at least part time. I admit to feeling a bit jaded by the fact that some figured out they could be a stay at home parent and make out well in fin aid. That just didn’t seem a fair balance of people making work/home choices. This is not a diss of anyone, just admit that that is an “ouch” for me.

My regrets? That H and I didn’t start earlier to save for their college - but it’s not like there was loads of extra dollars and we weren’t spenders in any area of life besides paying for Catholic education PreK-8 - I don’t regret that and it again was not a huge amount of $ but with our “middle ness” it was still an effort.

The only other regret would be that I think my son could have enjoyed a Big Ten college experience. He was so busy with sports and school and activities (he graduated Val) that he largely let me drive the train of schools to put on the roster and I think it was too overwhelming to think too big. Small seemed to work. But I think he might have loved that big sports school experience.

In the end all graduated, graduated in 4 years and have jobs they are happy with.

So I think it’s also important to remember that there is a difference in “not regretting that we paid full freight” - when you could afford it and still pay your other bills - but the simple fact is that many (most) families don’t have that option.

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I try to remind myself that we can be emotionally close without being physically close. I mean, I live less than 10 minutes from my mom, but probably only see her every two months. When i was younger it was more often, and she sees my sister and her kids much more often (my sister’s kids have more fun sports to watch - it’s more fun to drive to watch a whole soccer or basketball game that your grandchild is playing in (my nieces) then it is to drive to sit waiting for potentially hours to watch a 40 second sprint that your grandchild is running (my son)). So although I’m close, I don’t see her that much. But I do talk with her almost every day. TBH, I think the everyday is a bit much, but if my guys call me once or twice a week then I think we can still have the relationship I want.

DH and I are still working - we’re relatively young (49 and 58) and plan to work another 7-8 years. By then, hopefully our kids will be launched and living on their own, somewhere. I’m hoping it’s driving distance, even if that drive is a long day, or needs an overnight. But we’ll see. Someday, I hope to have grandkids, and I’d love to be able to be part of their lives. Of course, there’s no reason to stay in the house we’re in now, and I wouldn’t mind moving to be closer to my kids, but that only works if they are in the same general direction, and I really think they’ll be on opposite ends of the East Coast.

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The topic of this thread is what would you do differently in hindsight. It is not the place to make judgements on others’ choices. Thank you for your understanding.

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I felt things were better when there weren’t spouses and now grandchildren in the mix. I felt like my children came to our home at least once a year and we went to where they are once a year. Also tried to coordinate the holidays.

Now it feels a thousand times more difficult. I don’t think it actually bothers anyone but me.

I guess I have lots of regrets personally that I was open to my children going to college so far away. If I wasn’t, I’d be able to be the grandparent that I imagined.

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Hey guys, I think I’m going off topic which I thought was the point. To articulate the regrets and the consequences of that.

Since that isn’t the case, I’m out :v:

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