Parents Guide to College Education

But That's Not Enough Money to Send my Baby to Their Dream School! Probably you can't send your baby to their dream school, unless they have very reasonably priced dreams. How do teens select their dream school? By detailed research and serious consideration? Or do most teens select a school based on the emotional response they had during a visit? What did the campus look like? Were the people encountered nice and good looking? Was it a day with nice weather? Did the people dress and talk in a way that is attractive to the teen? These are trivial reasons to spend (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars. What do Teens Want? My teens would like to drive Teslas. They would like to live and travel in Japan, Denmark, South America, or whatever other place they have seen in movies and looks nice. They also want to learn to be jet pilots and helicopter pilots and scuba divers. They want to join the peace corps; they want to be scientists that cure cancer or solv...

Introduction If financial aid works for you, great. But like many parents I fall into the middle-class trap. I earn too much to get significant financial aid, and (far) too little to be able to send my kids anywhere, without worrying about cost. What About Financial Aid? By all means, explore and take financial aid. But be advised that if you "qualify" for financial aid, they are messing with your head. By setting the price arbitrarily high, and then moving it down to the maximum amount (they judge) that you can pay, the Universities have a pretty sweet deal. And parents and students get to brag about how much student aid they got, instead of focusing on how much money they are paying. If a school charges me $70K per year, and offers to give me $40K in student aid, I still pay $30K. That is not exactly chump change. Then I go around a brag to the other parents that my kid got $40K in aid. Well, the University controls both the price and the aid, so they can set th...

Do We Really Need to Send 17 Year-Old's 1500 Miles Away? On the East Coast kids want to go to school in California. On the West Coast they want to go to schools in Colorado, and in Colorado they want to go to the East Coast. I'm not sure why this is, other than the common teen desire to get as FAR away from parents as possible. But it is expensive and kind of silly. A Miss is as Good as a Mile As I tell my kids, a mile is as good as 1000 when getting away from Mom and Dad. As soon as you are living on your own, you are living on your own. Mom and Dad are just people you see sometimes. Students with lots of cash to burn should of course blow it wildly on travel and exotic places. I can think of few better ways to squander money. But those who are trying to get a degree at a reasonable price should look at schools closer to home. After graduation, degree in hand, and 4 years older and wiser, students will be well-positioned to travel and make the most of all that tra...

How Does Money Impact College Choices? The role of money in a university education is twofold: Is the student studying something that can lead to a paying job? How much money is the degree costing? Both of these roles are very important and neither should be ignored. But the most popular choice in America seems to be to ignore both of these at the same time, and take a very expensive degree that has no hope whatsoever in generating any kind of income. What Does the Major Pay? Different majors have different earnings. So what does the major pay? It's not hard to get average figure for various markets. Another way to get information is to look at job sites and see what jobs are being advertised in that fields. Sometimes the jobs will include a pay range, and that will be useful information. I am certainly not saying that everyone should automatically pick the highest-paying profession and major in that. I am simply saying that potential students need to make informed ...