Anonymous wrote:You have to remember that whatever parents are *able* to contribute is considered in calculating the student's financial aid (unless you want to go to the trouble of having the student declared independent). So if the parents are able to contribute, and choose not to, then they are actively choosing to burden their child with student loan debt.

This is what happened to me. I wish I'd known then what I know now about emancipation/independence, etc.

Agree if you are high income earners or have money. DH slightly agrees but he seems to blind to how much college costs have risen. He doesn't think it was very hard to pay off his grad school loans but he married a wife who paid for the house downpayment and paid off 20K of his loans. IMO paying for your child's undergraduate tuition is a better investment than a vacation home, renovating the kitchen, building a master bathroom big enough to entertain, expensive cars or other luxuries. If you are in a good public school system, I prioritize saving for college over private K-12. If we were in a crappy public school system I would swap the priorities. I would not prioritize college over retirement as its a bigger burden to expect your children to support you.

Anonymous wrote:Not everyone is supposed to go to college. I am not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a crappy degree at a mediocre university. I would pay for UVA tuition or top 25 university tuition but only if DD takes my advice on what to major in. If she wants to study what she wants to study where she wants to study it, then she will need to pay for it. As they say, there is no free lunch.

Just out of curiosity, are you going to pay for her wedding?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We could afford to pay for the whole thing, but won't. I think it is important for the kids to have some skin in the game. If they work hard we will help them out with paying off the loans in the years after college.

Hopefully this approach will help steer them away from liberal arts bullsh!t.

Thank heavens you were not my parent!

I would have whipped you into shape in no time, Missy, and you would now be doing something productive with your time rather than trawling the interwebs preening yourself on your precious book-learning.

Anonymous wrote:We could afford to pay for the whole thing, but won't. I think it is important for the kids to have some skin in the game. If they work hard we will help them out with paying off the loans in the years after college.

Hopefully this approach will help steer them away from liberal arts bullsh!t.

There is so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin.

You would rather pay interest on the sum you can pay for upfront? Brilliant! Kids either have "skin in the game" or they don't. Burdening them up with loans could potentially turn them away from school. Many liberal arts English majors go on to become lawyers because they are good writers.

Not everyone is supposed to go to college. I am not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a crappy degree at a mediocre university. I would pay for UVA tuition or top 25 university tuition but only if DD takes my advice on what to major in. If she wants to study what she wants to study where she wants to study it, then she will need to pay for it. As they say, there is no free lunch.

Often the support depends on marital status.
My good friend was always told she could go and even pressured to, but then her father descided to keep the money instead and her mom was struggling to just get by.
Her parents fought even about paying for contact lenses, and so her boyfriends family offered to pay for that.
A very messy situation. There really is not much support when the parents refuse.

Anonymous wrote:We could afford to pay for the whole thing, but won't. I think it is important for the kids to have some skin in the game. If they work hard we will help them out with paying off the loans in the years after college.

Hopefully this approach will help steer them away from liberal arts bullsh!t.

Thank heavens you were not my parent!

I will offer my child what was provided to me - the equivalent of 4 years room & board at an in-state university. Anything extra (private school/grad school) will be a bonus if we can afford it.

We could afford to pay for the whole thing, but won't. I think it is important for the kids to have some skin in the game. If they work hard we will help them out with paying off the loans in the years after college.

Hopefully this approach will help steer them away from liberal arts bullsh!t.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My parents couldn't afford to pay my tuition for college. My dad did pay my rent and covered the cost of books, which were a good $800 at least a semester. Rent was $380 a month for my share of our apartment's rent. (Three roommates.) The deal was, he would cover that if I got a part time job to cover miscellaneous expenses (in other words, alcohol). The thing is, I'm from Georgia, where they have the HOPE scholarship, and when I entered college, if you had a 3.0 GPA, the state would pay for your tuition, and would continue to pay it for 4 years as long as you maintained a 3.0. Really, it was a great deal. I lost HOPE 2 years in (partied too much; after being on Dean's List my first 2 years, I dropped to a 2.97 and lost HOPE by 3/10ths of a GPA point, like an idiot) and the agreement after that was, I would take out student loans. I felt and still feel that was fair. I blew a free ride, so I had to pay. I took out student loans totaling about $18,000 for the remainder of my time in college, and started paying those back after graduating. It's not the end of the world. DH and I will probably do something similar for our kids when they go to college, but am I going to kill myself to make sure I have $250,000 saved up by the time they're 17 so they can graduate debt free? Nope. I don't think contributing to your own college education is a bad thing at all.

Note to self: move kids to GA before HS graduation.

HOPE scholarship is funded fully by lottery. I lived in GA for many years and this is one of the most brilliant thing i have seen. Someone at some point figured out that investing in education is a great thing.

Good question!

I'm going to assume that OP is talking about people that do have the financial means to put aside money, because yes, obviously that's not an option for some.

Even some parent that have the means do not do this. I had a boyfriend whose father paid a ridiculous amount of money for his kids to go to expensive private schools for high school, then gave them $0 for college. I know other parents who bought larger houses or spent money in other ways, but didn't set aside anything for their kids for college.

I feel so strongly about this that I actually had a discussion about it with my husband before having children. For me, since I am fortunate enough to lead a solidly middle-class lifestyle, I decided that to have kids meant making a commitment to pay for undergraduate college.

We aren't talking Ivy League here, just a good solid state school, because that's what we can afford. Children are welcome to attend elsewhere, and offset additional cost with scholarships and loans.
There are trade offs we have made, things we have gone without, so that we can sock away money each month, but I've run all the numbers and the research and we will be able to pay for undergrad, barring some catastrophe. (knock wood)
Again, this is NOT me bashing lower income people who can't do this! It's just that I know how very, VERY grateful I am to my parents for paying for my undergraduate tuition (again, state school)

I did go on to get a masters, but also got a fellowship, so only ended up having to take out a relatively small loan, which I was able to pay off in 3 years with small payments. With all the news about recent grads drowning in debt, I repeat I am so grateful that I did not have that burden, but was still able to get a good education, which set me up for a career and a good life.
So yes, I agree. Parents should pay for undergrad tuition.

I'll go one step further. I know people who, had they stopped at 2 kids, they could have paid for college for their kids. They instead have 4 kids (no multiples, no oops kids--they made a deliberate decision to have each one) and therefore no kid is getting help for college. One of the parents of these kids had college paid for, while the other had to work their tail off to make it through school due to lack of parent assistance (parents had money, just didn't offer support). I find it frustrating these parents, who value and benefit themselves from their own college education, made a deliberate choice to have more kids, when had they stopped at 2, they could have helped with college.

I now await the attacks to my admittedly judgmental stance on this issue.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My parents couldn't afford to pay my tuition for college. My dad did pay my rent and covered the cost of books, which were a good $800 at least a semester. Rent was $380 a month for my share of our apartment's rent. (Three roommates.) The deal was, he would cover that if I got a part time job to cover miscellaneous expenses (in other words, alcohol). The thing is, I'm from Georgia, where they have the HOPE scholarship, and when I entered college, if you had a 3.0 GPA, the state would pay for your tuition, and would continue to pay it for 4 years as long as you maintained a 3.0. Really, it was a great deal. I lost HOPE 2 years in (partied too much; after being on Dean's List my first 2 years, I dropped to a 2.97 and lost HOPE by 3/10ths of a GPA point, like an idiot) and the agreement after that was, I would take out student loans. I felt and still feel that was fair. I blew a free ride, so I had to pay. I took out student loans totaling about $18,000 for the remainder of my time in college, and started paying those back after graduating. It's not the end of the world. DH and I will probably do something similar for our kids when they go to college, but am I going to kill myself to make sure I have $250,000 saved up by the time they're 17 so they can graduate debt free? Nope. I don't think contributing to your own college education is a bad thing at all.

But what if your kids are more responsible and mature than you were?

Then I assume they'll have accrued a good amount of scholarships on their own and will be fine! It was my responsibility to figure out how to pay tuition. Either keep my scholarship, or take out a loan. Why would that be a terrible thing to ask of my own kids? If you don't want loans, work extra hard for scholarships. Or, take out the federal loans if you don't want to work hard enough to earn and maintain scholarships. I'm not saying I won't contribute at all- as I said, my DH and I will probably do something similar to what my dad did for me. But I do not think taking on student loan debt is necessarily the worst thing in the world for kids. In fact, they might be motivated to give more of a shit about their education if they have to pay for a chunk of it.

Anonymous wrote:My parents couldn't afford to pay my tuition for college. My dad did pay my rent and covered the cost of books, which were a good $800 at least a semester. Rent was $380 a month for my share of our apartment's rent. (Three roommates.) The deal was, he would cover that if I got a part time job to cover miscellaneous expenses (in other words, alcohol). The thing is, I'm from Georgia, where they have the HOPE scholarship, and when I entered college, if you had a 3.0 GPA, the state would pay for your tuition, and would continue to pay it for 4 years as long as you maintained a 3.0. Really, it was a great deal. I lost HOPE 2 years in (partied too much; after being on Dean's List my first 2 years, I dropped to a 2.97 and lost HOPE by 3/10ths of a GPA point, like an idiot) and the agreement after that was, I would take out student loans. I felt and still feel that was fair. I blew a free ride, so I had to pay. I took out student loans totaling about $18,000 for the remainder of my time in college, and started paying those back after graduating. It's not the end of the world. DH and I will probably do something similar for our kids when they go to college, but am I going to kill myself to make sure I have $250,000 saved up by the time they're 17 so they can graduate debt free? Nope. I don't think contributing to your own college education is a bad thing at all.

But you were lucky enough to be in Georgia (where the state sees the value of graduating students with no debt, which you clearly do not. And BTW you still blew it and had to take out loans). What if your kids have to pay off student loans for the rest of their lives and graduate with 4.0, and you chose to take vacations instead of putting them through school. Pretty selfish in my opinion.

Anonymous wrote:I think if parents can, they should pay as long as it is still a sound investment. Your kid doesn't need to go to a private school at 50k a year to screw around for five years and eventually major in Spanish, and also live in a penthouse apartment throughout college.

If you are going to pay for college, you should still make sure your kid is contributing (even if that means working over the summer to contribute to school-year rent costs) and that it is not going to be a waste of your money.

I majored in Spanish Literature at a small liberal arts college. I have two graduate degrees and a high HHI.

Nothing wrong with majoring in foreign languages at all. My kids can major in whatever they like.