But That's Not Enough Money to Send my Baby to Their Dream School!

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 solve climate change. They want to be on TV and have a YouTube channel with millions of followers.

They want to do a lot of cool things, and that's wonderful.

What is Parenting?

Part of being a parent is helping your child pursue their dreams, but they literally can't pursue every dream. (They have too many!) Part of parenting is helping them choose dreams which will actually lead to their long-term well-being and happiness.

You do your child no favor by allowing them to borrow unreasonable amounts of money to pursue an unrealistic dream. Spending $150K+ on a degree in film making, or English, or landscape architecture is simply a bad idea.

If my teen came home and told me that Tesla was willing to loan him $150K to buy a car, I would forbid it. Yes, a Tesla would make him happy - but a $150K car loan would not. He may not be old enough (or battered enough by the world) to consider the downsize to his choices. It's my role to help.

Choices

Life is full of choices. Whenever you choose one path, you implicitly do not choose all the others. That's the way the universe works.

Your child faces a choice about what to study. Some choices lead to more money than others, and that's an important consideration.

If your child really wants to make films, or write books, or do landscape architecture, remind them that talent cannot be bought. Instead of trying for some fancy certification from a name-brand school, they should be making films, writing books, or architecting landscapes.

If that's not what they want to do, then getting a degree in these topics will probably not help.

And if they do want a degree in these topics, remind them that they will have no time to perfect and practice their art, if they have to hold down two wait-staff jobs just to pay student loans.

Choosing to borrow lots of money to get the art degree is also choosing to have no time to practice the art afterwards.