"Outside of financial constraints: the kid should fully decide w/out parental influence"
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Anonymous
Does Harvard even have that major ? |
Anonymous
Or to work one year post-Harvard and then retire as a SAHM. |
Anonymous
Yeah the question OP is asking is crazy to me. It's okay for a parent to be a parent and also have some views on where their $ is going. |
Anonymous
Seriously, this forum is going to the dogs. |
Anonymous
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you people are so out of touch here!
the chance that your kid even has harvard as an option is very small anyway. we are UMC. we told our kids the budget. kids picked schools based on that. if a school was over budget, then kids needed to get scholarships for it to still be on the list. ultimately, it was kids' decisions, but not without parental input. that's dumb. 18 year old kids (most of them) don't have the experience to make a big decision like this on their own. |
Anonymous
+1. We were heavily involved with the initial list and based the budget on what was needed without taking out parent loans, cutting retirement etc. Since all the schools on the list were a good fit on paper to some degree and either were within budget or had previously discussed caveats regarding aid needed, we were fine turning over the decision to our kid to decide. In terms of stretching budget we never put it out there as an option to our kids but behind the scenes DH and I discussed among ourselves if it would be worth it for the no merit/no FA OOS school that was our child’s top choice. For many reasons we decided against even making the offer - it was a spring admission, it would have been at least 15K/yr difference with costs only increasing each year, we felt we couldn’t up our budget for one without being willing to do so for the younger one so it would be a 120K decision to do so for both kids not including the impact on retirement. We also thought - what if we do all this and our kid doesn’t so well at that college. In the end we didn’t offer to go beyond what we agreed for the budget and our kid ended up at a very good school that gave them merit and was maybe a half step down in prestige from the spring admissions school. |
Anonymous
I'm saying that if parents have plenty of money, the impact of where the child goes, financially, are not as (proportionally) big. Obviously 100K is 100K, but it may be much bigger of a sacrifice for some parents than others. And yeah, some parents seem to think that the child is 100% in control. Some parents seem to think they are 100% in control. |
Anonymous
Any parent can choose to influence their kid's college choice. However, IMO, your job as a parent is to let your kid know by 10th/early 11th grade what the financial outlook is for college. That way you can help them pick a good list of colleges, and most importantly colleges that will be affordable (or most will be) for you. Don't let your kid apply to all $80K+ schools that don't give much merit if you wont' get FA and are only able to pay $40K/year. If you can afford 80K/year but will only pay that for Specific schools, then let your kid know that. Basically, don't let them apply to schools you cannot afford, or at least make sure they know the 2-3 expensive schools they apply to in hopes of getting merit are not really affordable, and make sure they have plenty that will be. we let our kids pick their own schools, but we helped guide them thru discussions of what would be better schools (based on academics, fit, location, etc). Kid even realized on their own that large OOS schools that don't offer merit are probably not worth $65-70K/year when they got into 3 excellent (similarly ranked) private schools that would only cost us $40K/year after merit wards. So on their own, they realized the advantages of the smaller schools, advantages of smaller classes and better career centers and recognized that it was a much better financial deal---even though initially all the schools costs about the same (pre merit). Basically my kid who wanted football, big school spirit, recognized that OOS for a school ranked 50-100 is probably not worth it vs private schools ranked 50-100. Had they not figured that out, we would have guided them, because while UColorado, CSU, and Michigan State U are all good schools, they are not really worth OOS tuition. |
Anonymous
Mine better. I'm putting a LOT of research into the college admissions process, my kids is putting in zero. I can't even get here to study for the SAT's. |
Anonymous
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LOL.
No Indian-American parent believes this kind of sheet! |
Anonymous
That's funny. Our kid likes us so much, she's prefer to be CLOSER to home. That means she prefers JMU and GMU over VT. |
Anonymous
Why are you being mean to that person and implying her kid doesn't like her? It's un-useful and unkind, and likely even untrue: I liked my parents a lot and I was at a developmental stage where being a couple hours away was too close |