Weighing in on college costs
My article last week on my personal college financing dilemma generated a maelstrom of responses. ¶ More than 100 readers e-mailed to provide everything from sage advice to hearty criticism. A few suggested that I should not have written a book on paying for college until I had experienced it myself. To that, I’ll say only that you don’t need to have a baby to deliver one, but you may need to have one to understand how it feels. ¶ By and large, the responses were warm, generous and helpful. They also indicated that there are many different “right” answers. Here are some excerpts.
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I was freaking out until somebody recommended a book called “Colleges That Change Lives” by Loren Pope. Small liberal arts colleges weren’t even on our radar, but that changed. We visited several and fell in love with them. We told Caitlin she could go to a private college if she obtained merit money to defray the cost, and we narrowed our search to schools that offered these awards to people who didn’t need financial aid. Caitlin ended up getting scholarships at five of the eight schools.
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Your daughter does not have to turn into a snob just because she goes to Georgetown, or a clothes horse either. If she has received solid values from her parents, she will understand the value of the gift of education you are giving her -- and the even more important gift of a lack of follow-on debt. If you did not teach her these things, it doesn’t matter where she goes to school; her education will be worthless.
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If money were not a concern for our family, a private school would have been the first choice. But I have doubts that it would have been the best choice. We know other young people who went to Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The jury is still out on whether their education will benefit them more than (or even as much as) a UC education might have.
Of four roommates, Kendra is the only one who left UCLA without student loans. This has given her much freedom. She spent one year teaching English in a small village in Costa Rica. She just finished a master’s degree in education at Columbia in New York and has started teaching. She does have student loans from Columbia, but they are manageable. She absolutely could not have followed her heart and become a teacher if she had undergraduate and graduate loans that could have easily exceeded $100,000.
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My wife and I paid 100% of the costs of sending our three kids to college. For one daughter, a 2001 Smith College graduate, total cost was about $120,000. Next came our son, a 2003 Ithaca College graduate. Total cost, about $135,000. Our youngest is now a junior at Northwestern; total cost will be about $185,000. (These costs are tuition, room, board and fees only.)
We did not require, or even suggest, that the kids work during the school year. My own opinion is that to be successful academically, and to be able to appreciate all that college should have to offer outside of the classroom, the additional burden of a job would be counterproductive.
But now the question: Did the kids develop the Chanel lifestyle on a Wal-Mart budget after graduation? I think not. I believe that they all have a good appreciation of the value of money, and the two graduates are hardworking young adults in their chosen fields. So my own advice would be to pay as much as you can reasonably afford.
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Just make sure she is happy and you will be.
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It’s actually even worse. Consider that getting a bachelor’s degree nowadays can often take five or even six years or more. It’s well known that college expenses rise faster than the general inflation rate, so although the increase from one year to the next may be reasonable, after five or six years you’re talking about a whole different set of numbers that can have an enormous impact on not only the annual outlay but also the cumulative debt incurred. Scary.
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I can only tell you that you need to follow your heart on your support for your child. You can afford it better than your child. The most important thing is to give them the best education you can.
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Send her to a school that “feels” right for her. Can you put a price on that? Of course! Every family has to make all the decisions you wrote of. But I support your feeling that going to the “right” school is a factor to be considered in the financial equation.
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Some private colleges give non-need-based scholarships to non-athletes. The offers generally go to students who are in the upper ranges of grade-point average and test-score statistics for that college’s acceptance pool -- an effort by the schools, I assume, to improve their statistical averages. My elder daughter received offers of nearly full-ride scholarships to her “safety” schools. If I remember correctly, Tulane’s was in response to a small extra application step (“tell us why you’re special”) and Boston U.’s was more or less out of the blue.
Unfortunately for the collective pocketbooks of her four parents/stepparents, she got into her first-choice school, Stanford, for which there were no breaks. A few years back, her older brother got unsolicited mail from Case Western offering a full-ride scholarship, if he would just apply . . . which he didn’t. At least the National Merit-based scholarship that he got took a little tiny piece off of his college costs.
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My daughter Amanda ended up applying to 16 schools and got accepted to eight. She is now at UC Berkeley as a chemistry and pre-med major. We looked at the benefits of the wonderful UC system and compared those schools with the high-priced private schools. I couldn’t really justify the costs of those schools, as you pointed out very clearly in your article. I am really happy that she chose Cal -- her other finalist was UCLA, so she was really in a no-lose situation -- as we will be able to get her through her undergraduate education with no student loans.
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I sent both my children to Georgetown, classes of ’01 and ’04. There was plenty of scholarship money available. They both also qualified for the same from such other colleges as Johns Hopkins and Northwestern. A lot of it has to do with knowing how to fill out the financial aid applications -- particularly the “special circumstances” sections. Your article appeared to miss that area of funding.
Kristof comment: Although I know I don’t qualify for federal aid, I can’t yet know whether we’ll receive need- or merit-based aid from the individual schools because Samantha hasn’t yet applied for or been offered any, so I thought such discussions premature. But merit aid is available to many good students and may make a compelling difference. I’ll let you know when we know.
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Part of your dilemma will be solved if your daughter doesn’t get into some of the schools she has on her list. If she gets into all of them, you both have some tough decisions. But bang for your buck, I still [believe] UCLA and Cal are the way to go, unless money is not part of the equation.
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One very important lesson of adulthood is that we cannot always have what we want. Going into massive debt to pay for an exclusive college is insanity. There is nothing wrong with the state colleges, and even [spending] the first two years at a junior college is preferable to debt.
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Tell your daughter I never would have taken all the risks I took if I had a heavy student loan burden.
I went for the most interesting opportunity that still paid for a middle-class life. If I had to carry $100,000 in debt and do this, I might have ended up another unhappy physicist pricing bonds on Wall Street instead of working in satellite meteorology. With the money I saved, I have been able to take a monthlong vacation abroad every other year. I am debt-free except for a home mortgage.
I am surrounded by friends who are similarly interested more in intellectual pursuits than chasing the big bucks.
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The University of California allows system inter-campus transfers and inter-school transfers. Why not take a semester at NYU or Columbia, or Oxford? Sure, it will cost you, but not that much!
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My advice is to save money during the undergraduate years by attending an in-state public university, and plan on spending (or borrowing) the big bucks for grad school. A master’s degree today is what a bachelor’s degree was 30 years ago. You need a graduate degree today to be as competitive as possible for jobs. Debt for two years of grad school will be easier to swallow than four years of undergraduate debt, especially if you have a better-paying job with a master’s degree with which to pay it off.
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You are right to have misgivings about UCLA; it is too big and anonymous -- I left after one miserable year. You are also right that the UC system is the best value in higher education in the entire nation. So how does one attend a UC but still feel a sense of community similar to that offered at schools like Georgetown? You go to UC Santa Cruz.
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You may want to put McGill University in Montreal, Canada, on your radar screen. My son applied to many of the same schools that your daughter is interested in and selected McGill. Similar size to many UC schools; excellent academic reputation; cost, interestingly, about the same as Berkeley.
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Is the Ivy League environment such a rarefied world of privilege that the pursuit of passion does not include the consideration of finances? Should a $250,000 college investment in the pursuit of “passion and meaning” be made if it takes you to a $30,000-a-year job?
In a perfect world, everyone should have access to the best possible education, but living a life in debt should be nobody’s passion.
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In order to even begin to look at the picture, here is what we did: break the expenses into fourths.
1/4 parents pay
1/4 kids pay from savings, summer work, school-year work
1/4 loans to child
1/4 scholarships, grants, etc.
One last piece of advice: The child’s portion should go toward room and board. They become responsible for living expenses and act accordingly. And it carries over -- after graduation, our kids were used to paying their own living expenses and didn’t move home.
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It doesn’t make much sense to me for you to take your daughter on an expensive trip only to then tell her that she can go to a private school only if she takes out massive loans. I personally don’t think you should have gone unless you were willing to pay most or all of the tuition. I know of parents who took their kid on a similar tour, but when they returned, in love with some Eastern school, the parents said it was too expensive.
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Kristof comment: My kids have known what I planned to pay for their college bills since they were pre-teens. The choice of college is theirs. As a parent, it’s my role to teach them how to make decisions -- not to make decisions for them. I think this is particularly important for an 18-year-old, who can drive, vote, marry and sign contracts -- without ever asking me for advice.
