Reply to No financial aid for middle class at public college???

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We have freshman twins and did our first college tour.  The twins are excited to go to school together at the same school, and are willing to go wherever we can afford.  They are very bright with great grades at public high school so they can likely get in many schools but we are only letting them go to public colleges that we can afford.

Even at public colleges, tuition plus expenses (room/board) will be about $25k each year at the cheapest options and we are not considering schools more than $10k tuition/year due to our finances.  How can DH and I afford the $50k/year for the twins?  We won't qualify for help with FAFSA.  We make $200k together and and all that money goes to the mortgage that won't be paid off for another 29 years (we couldn't afford a house until we paid off our college debts). We've been saving in our 529 but will only have about $50k total, after scraping by.

We would be willing to sell our house but we have a younger child who will only be in 6th grade when they start college so we need to stay here meanwhile.  Then we will sell our house and rent a small apartment to pay these debts.

How have other families managed?  Did you take loans against your house?  Did you rent out rooms in house when they were at college?  Did you have your kids sign up for ROTC/join army?  Other ideas?  Did you take jobs you hated for more money?  We are worried and don't know how to tell our twins that they may need to work for many years before they can go to college.
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Better private schools may give you much better need-based aid than public universities.

Weaker private’s may provide decent merit aid.

For bright, academically inclined kids: I think starting at any accredited four-year school with a dorm and transferring is usually better than community college, unless the community college clearly has a great faculty and a terrific, straightforward pipeline between it and a four-year school.

I think you can see here that most of the people talking about the community college-to-university route think of college as a barrier between the kid and good jobs. They don’t think of the education itself as having any value. And they have a terrible time actually getting bachelor’s degrees. Some great, education-minded kids may end up at community colleges, anyway, because the aid situation is so chaotic, but I think you should think of that as an emergency backup option, not a first choice.

I think the big thing is to be open and honest with your kids about what you can spend, then go from there. [/quote]

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