Reply to Looking back, do you wish your child attended the least expensive college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's pretty cringy when people throw around Cost of Attendance to exaggerate costs. Unless you're super rich you're not paying $85,000 a year for UChicago, nor are middle class people taking out "six figures" of loans for their child's undergrad. Most financial aid students at flagship state schools leave with $30k or so in loans. That's frankly not a big deal -- unless your kid flunks out. I believe the starting median salary for a bachelor's is now around $60k (?), so an average kid can easily pay off $30k in loans living at home for a year after graduation. Or even faster if they get an engineering degree or any other path that leads to a six-figure starting salary ex. nursing, tech, finance, or consulting.[/quote]

There are such things as Parent Plus and private loans that allow you to take out more than that, and plenty families do.[/quote]

Define plenty. I don't think it's that common for parents to take out loans, is it? For undergrad. When schools and College Scorecard report median loan sums of graduates, wouldn't the Parent Plus loans be factored in that as well? So the median is still about $30k for public U, right?[/quote]
Looking at it, parent plus loan averages are about 30k and fed sub and unsub for public is 30k. Now the PP loans are split between private and public I guess, but I would say loans coming from school are reasonably higher than 30k [/quote]

For UNDERGRAD is zero chance there are just as many parent borrowers with $30k as students with $30k. Last I looked only a small % of parents borrow on their name for undergrad. Only a fraction of the student borrowers. [/quote]
How does 30k in student loans pay for 90k worth of tuition and living expenses?[/quote]

Okay, $90k - $30k is $60k.

Does a parent contribute literally $0 towards that $60k? Does the kid contribute literally $0 of that $60k? A low impact work study gig alone is $5K each school year, so we're down to $40k. A college educated kid can make easily $5k freshman summer and $10k plus each summer after. If the kid is a CS or engineering major, internships can be more like $20k to $30k each summer.[/quote]
While that is possible, that can be a fairly extraordinary. I would applaud anyone who does that for college, but this doesn’t change the fact that college tuition has exploded at an obscene rate. I wouldn’t encourage my child to work their butts off like that for a religious studies degree. [/quote]

I didn't describe anything extraordinary. $5k school year work study is literally nothing. And working full time in the summer is normal. It's not like work study gigs are slaving away at Burger King for 40 hours a week. [/quote]

Pick the right work study gig, you can get $10+/hr and be able to study half the time.  [/quote]

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