Reply to Why pay all of kids' college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't get this new expectation that the average middle class person is supposed to save to pay for 100 percent of their kid's college. Growing up, everyone had loans, I knew of almost no one who didn't have loans to pay off. Some incurred additional debt from grad school. They've all done just fine.
Discuss.[/quote]

When I was in high school (50 years ago) a recruiter from MIT told me that my parents would have to make some sacrifices if they wanted to send me there, they might need to eat out less often and my mother might have to give up her fur coat. This is flawed in several ways:

1. My mother did not and never had a fur coat, and I could not remember the last time they ate out. He just assumed that because we lived in a nice suburb we were rich.

2. My parents did not want to send me to MIT, I wanted to go there. I don't understand where the expectation came from that parents should pay for their kids to go to college. The only reason some parents want their kids in an elite school is for the bragging rights, not because the student actually wants to go there. Other parents think that if they are paying the tuition they should choose their student's major and course schedule. On the whole the elite schools end up admitting students for the wrong reasons and end up perpetuating the privilege of the wealthy class instead of admitting the scholars who want to study hard and learn.

Needless to say, I never went to MIT, I attended a local school within driving distance. My parents let me live at home for free and drive their old car to class but that didn't actually cost them anything. I paid my way through graduate school by working as a teaching assistant and choosing a grad school in a flyover state with a comparably lower cost of living. The TA gig did not come with health insurance and that caused some problems when I started to develop medical issues, but that is another story.

Five decades later I have worked with people who did attend MIT and other elite schools and they were no better than me. We both ended up in the same type of jobs and careers. [/quote]

[b]Totally agree. Well said. [/b][/quote]

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