Trim Your Costs
Families need to ask why Junior or Missy is going to school in the first place. After all, for $200,000, you could buy the kid a dry-cleaning franchise, and over a few years learn accounting, management, marketing, some psychology, a touch of chemistry, and a lot of finance, all while bringing money through the front door, too. Big Ideas do not need to be ignored. Shelves of them are free at the public library. Besides, if the dry cleaning franchise succeeds, it can be sold for a profit and college will still be waiting.
So the wise family makes a distinction between Education and Vocational Training. If you want a school that offers both, expect to pay for one-stop shopping options. Comprehensive institutions that seem like a safe haven for Junior’s or Missy’s happiness should the kid decide to switch from Philosophy to Biology are expensive. Excellence in multiple academic fields costs plenty.
Set some parameters. If your kid is attending higher education to “get a good job,” remember that colleges can only teach your kid how to work for someone else. If good job means highly compensated, you are in the tricky business of trying to predict the return on investment of a learned set of skills for post-graduate years. The more narrow the skill set, the less flexible that skill set will be in the job market.
Suppose your kid wants to work with computers and so you send your kid to school to become a software engineer: would anyone care to predict the job market for that set of skills in five years? How about 10? Will your kid’s skills be outsourced to south Asia? If your kid wants to study something a little squishier than engineering to become a teacher or counselor … will local schools be hiring guidance counselors in five years, or will they be laying them off? Is the nursing market saturated? Gee, if the stock market tanks, Finance majors may be selling apples on street corners.
My crystal ball is dark; how’s yours?
OK, narrow vocational training has risks, but a broad Liberal Arts Education is a crapshoot of a different sort. It’s pleasant to plan four years of reading Thoreau and shooting the shit late at night in the dorm room about Big Ideas, a feast for the spirit and mind, but unless your kid is planning on being a Jeopardy! contestant or leading a nonviolent revolution, what do you do with that? Sure, there is always post-grad professional school—law, medicine and the like—but that means ever more debt. Besides, when was the last time you saw an ad that read, Executive-track entry-level generalist wanted. Will train.
Decide early in the process if your family wants to send your kids to school for a few years of country-club living—the health club, the maid service, the three meals per day, the tickets to basketball, football and track meets, the half year in Europe, the summers at the archeology dig—or for narrow vocational purposes. If you can afford it, by all means choose a school based on lifestyle and forget about outcomes, but if you can’t, ask where it is written that your kid can’t delay entry a year or two or three before committing to what will be next. A few years of delay doesn’t have to mean seeking a guru in the Himalayas. It can mean flipping burgers, brewing coffee, waiting tables—those jobs that traditionally are hard enough to have persuade people that higher education will take them to a better life.
Once your student enrolls, a few recent years of having been micromanaged and working split shifts can do wonders to focus a student’s mind.
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Cost Cutters
With no iron-clad guarantee that the cost of studies will be matched by a reasonable return on investment, the smartest thing a family can do is to limit costs. Don’t compromise on education; just go for the biggest bang for every available buck.
- Choose a school that matches your kid’s educational purposes and promise of future earnings. Avoid the notion that you are buying prestige that will open doors: that may be true of a very few schools, but if your kid is not getting into Yale or its equivalent, Big State U at half the price may do just as well, perhaps better, than any Almost-Ivy Private College. Sure, the brochure tells you they have dedicated, attentive teachers: what school doesn’t? And, generally, forget that Nobel Prize–winning professor. The guy was bagged so his smiling face could be prominently placed on the brochure cover: they lured him to join the faculty with a six-figure salary and a promise he could do research. He rarely stands before a class. His graduate students teach, lecturing 50 or 200 undergraduates at a time. But the Prize-winner? Get real.
- If you live near an appropriate school, let your kid commute. Sweeten the deal with a new car while you pocket the cost of four years’ worth of room and board. Sure, commuting doesn’t feel like the full college experience, and wisdom says your growing young adult and you will have to renegotiate some house rules about curfews, overnight guests, and weekends away, but these days the full college experience produces a lot of broke, jobless boomerang kids. If the first stop after four years away is going to be back home to reclaim that closet, why not let the kid commute, pocket the dough, and spot the kid to some seed money after graduation? Long term, you’ll keep more, or at least borrow less.
- Summers, your kid should enroll at the local community college. Encourage your kid to attend day, night, or both, for as many courses as possible. Community colleges charge a fraction of what four-year institutions do. They are near free, by comparison, and in addition to vocational courses in HVAC or automobile mechanics they also offer those introductory classes that can be transferred for credit to your student’s main four-year institution. Bio 101 and Psych 101 and English 101 and Soc 101 and Art 101 are pretty much the same everywhere. Follow this plan for three summers, get those required classes out of the way, and three summers at County CC will earn enough academic credit to save a half-year’s tuition at a Big State. Check Big State’s policies on transfer credits, though, to be sure. The summers-only plan can come to a 12.5 percent discount in a standard eight-semester education plan, maybe as much as $4,000 to 15,000. That ain’t pocket change.
- Get crazy. Think carefully about the community college route for the whole ticket, too. Look for this under-appreciated alternative to rise in prestige and popularity as traditional four-year schools become more and more financially unreachable. In most states, County CC is a portal to Big State U. By legislative requirement, many community colleges offer express plans that move a student on to larger institutions for further study. Your kid’s final diploma will still read “Big State.” The savings? Nearly 50 percent.
Cha-ching!
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(Photos via Larry Miller/Flickr)
I could not agree more with WellOKthen.
The buyer’s market in professors has much improved the quality of faculty in community colleges: people once too proud to consider such a job are now eager for it, and students are the beneficiaries.
I’d also say “Yea” to wait on college if a kid is not emotionally–or financially!–ready. Chances are higher education is not closing any time soon, so showing up with a little worldly experience and perhaps with a clear motivation to succeed makes a lot of sense
As someone who’s taught at a community college and at a 4-year state university, I would second the suggestion that people look into community colleges. (My school is already over-enrolled. I’m not trying to boost my numbers here.) The quality of the faculty at c.c.’s is still somewhat varied, but it’s getting much better than it used to be. I remember growing up that the local community college was nicknamed “high school with ash trays,” but the courses are generally at a much higher level than they have been in the past. Almost every new full-time faculty member has a… Read more »
Good and true advice for those of you who have children of college age or are thinking of going back to school as adults. We might like to think that education is the golden key to productivity, happiness and security, but in this day and age, sadly it’s not necessarily so.