Does everyone on here with kids applying to top 50 schools really have the $80K per year to spend?
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Anonymous
Agree. No shame in the Midwest going to in-state flagships. Plenty of $$ left for Fancy family vacations /summer houses etc….Family time together… |
Anonymous
I sent a college kid raised in the DMV attending a pretty diverse college to a Midwest flagship for more than 2 months for a special summer program this year. They came home with a pretty negative impression— basically, it that was very, very white and very homogenous (and they desperately wanted good Indian, sushi and Raman)— and my kid is white. I grew up in the rural south. Which was “diverse” in that half the students at Mt HS were black. But, it was the 80s, so everyone “kept to their kind”. My point is the grass is always greener and you have a very idealized view of life in the Midwest. I grew up in a town a lot like Friday Night Lights. Which Connie Britton and Coach Taylor make look pretty inviting. But is not somewhere I would raise my kids. Living in this area has drawbacks. Faster pace, high COL, traffic, competition. But there is also raising kid in a more global society, near museums and concert venues and the Kennedy Center, (good Indian food  ). And our kids push harder because their peers push harder and because they see a bigger picture of what is possible. Their dreams may be bigger than marrying/becoming the small town pediatrician.
I think that easing kids CAN be a great thing. Especially if your kid doesn’t conform to the white upper middle class homecoming Court, sports ne cheerleading, clean cut stereotype. And it’s our job as parents to guide our kids towards careers that suit them and their talents and personalities, not just expecting them to be an engineer or lawyer or Wall Street hedge fund manager. And we decide that the car magnet and cocktail party college name drop do not matter. Finding a college that is a good academic, financial and social fit is what’s important. And if that means deciding that you will make peace with the a college ranked 120 and speak about your kids college with as much pride as the Ivy parents, that’s what you do. Anyone who snipes at you isn’t worth knowing anyway. You kid learns by watching you. You live here and choose to raise them in a less competitive way, and place less emphasis on a prestige college. It is possible. Just my 2 cents. |
Anonymous
| if we knew going in that our kids would go to state schools, so much of the mental load that's taken up permanent space in my brain since my oldest was in middle school would have been wiped away. and they may end up going there anyway. it really does seem like the dumbest approach |
Anonymous
| Eh, the food you find in Providence or New Haven is the same food you find in Madison, Ann Arbor, Columbia or Minneapolis/St Paul. They have Indian in all those places. And theater. And music. I've never found this area to be especially food-rich tbh. |
Anonymous
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this: Their dreams may be bigger than marrying/becoming the small town pediatrician.
followed by this: Anyone who snipes at you isn’t worth knowing anyway. is just too rich. anyone who snipes at small town pediatricians isn't worth knowing. |
Anonymous
| We have a GI bill, 529 savings and cash |
Anonymous
+1. The quality of the Indian food here is pretty dismal actually. |
Anonymous
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Of course not.
People are still stupid enough to apply based on 2 things: A) the school will give me grant money, thefore tuition will only cost $20-30k per year (still saddles graduates with $40-80k in studentoan debt) B) Assumption they'll be making $180k+ 'in only a few years with a college degree' therefore it shouldn't take that long to pay back $60k in student loan debt. People are idiots and have been for 40 years now with tuitions skyrocketing. Thenvast majority of college grads will never sniff 6 figure incomes in their entire working lives. |
Anonymous
I've been worrying about this. |
Anonymous
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People are so, soooo dumb.
Draining their entire life savings to pay for college. Morons. Send your damn kid to the community college for 2 years then transfer to a state school with living from home arrangements for the last 2 years. You idiots wipe out your entire savings so your stupid kids can have the 'college experience' and get the same damn basic education your state and community colleges offer. A BS degree matters so sooooooooo little over the longrun. Just get the cheapest one possible. I can't believe there are still millions of really stupid people out there willing to pay over $100k for a useless BS degree. |
Anonymous
Agree, and it sounds even more absurd when you describe it like that. Did you take that path (CC), or did you have a traditional 4 year on-campus experience? |
Anonymous
| I have three kids in college at the same time. I promise them if they get into an Ivy, I/we would find a away to pay. It has been painful but we are doing what we can do. |
Anonymous
What school took 52 credits from an incoming freshman? |
Anonymous
Why do people persist in thinking that (a) all small towns are alike, and (b) the small towns they left behind 30 years ago have not changed in the interim? We left DC for many of the reasons pp suggested, and live in a small (about 20,000 population) town in the South — not even a college town — that has Indian, multiple sushi, Lebanese, ramen, Vietnamese restaurants (just to name a few). Did it 30 years ago? Of course not. In fact, the high cost of living on the coasts has led many creative restauranteurs starting businesses in small towns across America. Just as you can impart your values to your kids in a big city, you can instill bigger dreams in a kid raised in a small town. Our kids know about the successful careers we had in DC, and they have traveled & they’ve experienced a world that is much larger than the small town where they spent the final years of their childhood. Our youngest wanted to go to a big city for college, and did so, but now they’ve been away, they have told me how much living in the city makes them appreciate the “vibe” (their word) of the small town we live in. Will they move back? Probably not, but they won’t spend their lives with parochial views about what people who don’t live in urban areas are like. It drives me nuts when DC people pretend to be open minded, but then act like poverty and lack of ambition is somehow infectious. Our town is less racially diverse than DC, but it is much more diverse economically. In DC, my kid went to school with rich kids of many different ethnicities, which is hardly “diversity.” Living here has made my kid much more mature, empathetic and grateful. Could I have instiilled those values in DC? Maybe. But there is nothing like experiencing something yourself. |
Anonymous
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Lots of people in this area have a very high household income and paying $50000.00 for private elementary and high school it is a very small portion of their income and that continues paying for almost $100000.00 a year for private college.
I am one of them and I am paying all that money and I have no illusion that’s very overpriced for any school or college but the reality is still very small portion of our household income . |