I was the second person in my generation of Minnesota cousins (14 of us) to attend college. The other cousin had a full ride athletic scholarship. While it was presumed I would go to college, my parents weren’t able to pay for it all. They agreed to fund as much as they could, with the agreement I would live at home (saving $3-4k on housing expenses). This was back when the private four-year college, without housing costs, ran about $12-16k/year.
Sidenote: I applied for both St Olaf and Carlton, along with my lesser choice colleges. When my parents saw that St. Olaf ran $20k/year and Carlton ran over $23k/year (in 1987), and that I would have no choice but to live on campus, they point blank told me I better hope I was not accepted. Carlton laughed at me. I had to turn down St. Olaf for Augsburg.
I left with about $16k in loans, my parents paid about $18k, and the rest of my five years worth of tuition was taken care of through grants and scholarships. I know it put a burden on them, but they never said a word.
When it came time for my child to decide what she wanted to be when she grew up, she didn’t want to continue her education. I pushed her to do something - if she went to school, she could live at home rent free. If she didn’t, she’d have to pay rent. She decided to go to Le Cordon Bleu, which (in retrospect) was a mistake. I’m still paying on PLUS loans and she’s been deferring her loan for the past 7 years. However, going to LCB has given her a small leg up in various jobs and personal pursuits.
One of her best friends, a valedictorian in high school, IB program, extremely intelligent, is currently dealing with somehow having to pay $700/mo on her over $100k in student loans. Her mother pushed her to continue her education, but refused to support her. Unfortunately, the friend still has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. She switched colleges three times over five years. Began at least five different programs. Graduated with a degree in marketing / social media, which is not being used in any way - she’s currently an administrative assistant and barista. She still talks about going back to school, but every time it’s for something else. She will never be out of debt.
I don’t see how you can blame government guaranteed student loans for the explosion in college costs. The maximum annual amount you can get in subsidized loans is $7,500 and that’s only past the first two years and even then, the total limit is, I think, $23,000 (again for subsidized loans only). That’s only ten percent of the total cost of attendance at some schools.
I think you are missing another, reciprocal issue: American parents ARE expected to cover their own retirement, and often to help their kids out in emergencies. Furthermore, kids are NOT generally expected to help finance other family member–siblings or cousins.
In other cultures, it’s absolutely expected that parents may cover their complete education, but once they start their working life, they will help their parents and siblings out with substantial sums. and once their parents retire, they will largely support them. In the US, it would be shameful to get a monthly check from your kids–but in other places, that’s just respect. So while American parents may not feel the same obligation extending through the early 20s, it’s more or less balanced out by the fact that the end of obligations goes both ways.
And, honestly, you say “I would rather be poor than see my kids with crushing debt”, well, sure. But you know damn well your kids would rather suffer than watch you live in poverty in your old age. So if you are extravagant in your help of them now, at the cost of future security, you’re putting the same obligation on them, later.
Finally, $20k-ish of student debt is utterly reasonable. That’s under $200/month for 10 years, or $350 for 5 years. That’s a reasonable about for a college graduate to cover.
You are asking the wrong question. Who has the greater earning potential over the rest of their lives a 50 year old parent or a 18 year old college student?
Telling a kid they were responsible for their own college costs was a lot more reasonable a few decades ago when the cost was relatively lower. Back then, a kid could spend 4 years discovering themselves in college camp and then pay off their loans with pretty much any reasonable job they could find. Now that’s not the case. A kid now can easily end up with $50-100k in debt and struggle to pay it back. Theoretically a kid can make wise choices in HS to greatly reduce the cost, but the reality is that most 14-18 year olds aren’t mature enough to comprehend and implement what needs to be done. But a properly motivated kid can do a lot in HS to greatly reduce the cost of college, and in some cases have it be free.
One reason parents should help ensure the kid doesn’t get swamped with debt is that the debt will severely limit their success early on. If the kid is spending every penny on paying back their loans, they are not doing things like saving for the future, buying a house, or enjoying life. It will affect them financially and emotionally and may have long-lasting effects.
I don’t get it either. I mean, I get that some parents don’t make enough money to afford college for their kids and won’t be able to pay for the loans, they are dependent on the kid getting through college and getting a higher paying job than they have in order to pay for it…but what I REALLY don’t get is upper middle class families - who drive new model cars and take vacations and just redid the kitchen because you need subway tile in your kitchen now who make their kids responsible for their loans. Or people who have two parents, and one of them doesn’t hold a job - but isn’t needed at home to care for young kids. That these parents would send their children out into the world with student debt is mind boggling to me. Also mind boggling, two professional income families who manage to get through eighteen years of being a parent and then are SHOCKED by the cost of college and scarcity of free money to pay for it.
If you had the disposable income to lease your cars while your kids were growing up, you have the disposable income to put your kid through college - you just decided that new model cars was more important.
(I will never forget the parents of the kid who graduated with my daughter who drove a new BMW into the parking lot of school right after his sixteenth birthday complaining about the cost of college)
You also have a lot of parents, whether or not they went to college, who don’t really understand themselves. So they don’t know how to guide their kid to do the right things in HS to reduce the cost of college. It’s just a very different game than 20 years ago.
I agree with this. FASFA (and related) expect relatively high earning families to have been saving. I tell Freshman parents this now: so many seem to think that “expected family contribution” should be a number they can handle out of current income, no more than a car payment. But the reality is, they expect you to have been saving a “car payment” a month for the last 10 years.
There are tough situations–special needs kids, parents who need help with their own retirement, people who suddenly have higher incomes but spent most of their child’s childhood on the other side of the income bell curve–but lord. Having someone with a household income of over $200k explaining to you how “Middle class families like us really get screwed in this process” and realizing that they are so leveraged they can’t contribute much, if anything, to their kids’ education is a bit of a head scratcher. Especially when they have been pushing that kid for 12 years to go to MIT or Harvard or Stanford. Like, you made your kid work so hard for this, and now you can’t help fund it? Was this just for shits and giggles for you?
Its a not true that undergraduate major can meaningfully predict future income.
That medieval studies major may end up in law school. The music major may also be taking pre-med requirements or pre-occupational therapy requirements and end up a healthcare professional enjoying their music as a hobby (or looking more attractive to med school admissions boards). I personally know many STEM majors who ended up “permanent post-docs”, who never landed a major research or faculty position, making modest incomes.
Linking loans to potential future earnings also adds perverse incentive to pursue those majors, thrusting kids into fields they hate and will not be successful in. I see it already- forcing kids to choose based on their (or their parents) naive ideas of what will be a ticket to success, and ending up in professional degrees they are miserable in.
Students also wisely change majors- should they lose their loans if they switch from business to art? My own daughter graduated in 2020with a BFA, is supporting herself and in graduate school. Should she not have received loans? My son, who has a BS in information technology and comp sci is building a business in the arts and not directly using his degree. Should he have been given preferred loan opportunities?
These are government backed loans with the idea that an educated populace is in itself better for society. We don’t want kids defaulting on loans or overburdened, but the idea that an 18 year old has to choose between locking them into a career path that they don’t want because of some algorithm that predicts future earnings would end up being a tremendous barrier for the poor to use education to life themselves out of poverty.
Merely having any Associates or Bachelor’s degree automatically statistically improves earning potential and quality of life, in general. That is a societal good, that the government should be encouraging.
If I were in charge of the school, there would be a yearly parent “future” meeting starting in kindergarten. This is what is coming up…next year, in five years, in ten years. If your goal is to send your kid to college, this is what it takes, financially. This is what it takes grade and activity wise to get them into these types of schools. These are college options. These are non-college options. This is what the math progression looks like. These are your options next year for enrichment…these will be what your options look like in five years if you take advantage of these opportunities now…but this is prerequisite for that. This is where you get help with remedial work or executive processing problems. Not the sudden Junior year “oh, I suppose we should talk about college now” that my own kids got. Obviously, you don’t tell parents of kindergartners the same thing you tell high school Juniors - but you should be telling parents of kindergartners “hey, when you go to apply for college, the government is going to assume you’ve been saving to get your kid there starting from the cradle, so you might want to open that 529 now if you haven’t.”
From what I’ve heard/read, a major factor in whether a student has a good shot at paying back their loan is whether or not they actually graduate with a degree. The ones who are really in trouble are those who drop out, with loan debt and no degree.
This is accurate. It’s why we are required to track 5 year graduation rates. Any college that has poor 5 year graduation rates is at risk of losing the right to give out federal financial aid, for exactly that reason.
ETA: This is where the “for profits” cause trouble. They allowed their students to take out huge loan debts, with no real meaningful path to graduation- stringing kids along in programs they would have failed out of anywhere else, and pushing loan after loan on them to pay tuition. The kids never graduate and are stuck with huge debt, and the “colleges” raked it in.
I use 4 and 6 year graduation rates to advise kids all the time. Almost no one looks them up, not students, parents, or even most counselors. They vary tremendously: UT Arlington (local regional) has a 17% 4-year rate and like a 40% 6-year rate. That’s appalling. That’s a structural problem. But almost no one knows this. No one looks.
The other one people don’t get is merit scholarships are often GPA dependent…and we all want to think our kid will have no issues maintaining a 3.2 GPA, but college can be tough - especially Freshman adjustment - a bad first semester can mean losing scholarship if a high GPA is required - and Freshmen aren’t in a position to know that you absolutely do NOT take Calc from Professor Miller, take it from Professor McKay - Miller gives half the students Cs - and 10% don’t get that. Know what that number is and if you need the scholarship to keep the kid in that school.
Agreed- I’m trying to remember if we had to post them on our website (maybe state regulations).
The only caution about grad rates is if you are looking at community colleges. Community colleges are tricky to judge. By design they are open access and provide opportunities to everyone with a GED or HS diploma. That will end up with low graduation rates because everyone is given a chance to both succeed and to fail.
Digging deeper into those numbers is important- how many students progress through “developmental” English and math? What are the graduation rates of students who get through year 1? The biggest issue that transferring to a 4 year college prior to graduation is a positive outcome, but goes against graduation rates.
Some regionals operate almost like CC, with entrance standards so low they are virtually open access. Its critical to look at those- and often there are real problems, but sometimes its just reflective of a mission to give everyone as much a chance as possible.
@MandaJo (some reason the reply marker didn’t link to your post)
My mother never went to college or university and was never a high earner. She scrimped and saved up about $3,000 in a tax-advantaged account for me, which was less than one year of tuition. I got some scholarships, etc, but again, not enough to pay for everything. I worked in the summer but that was still not enough. So I took out student loans. Thanks to my education I now have a middle class job and I have paid back my loans.
In the US (and Canada), there is no expectation that parents support adult children. They can choose to support them, if they’re able, but there’s no requirement in most cases. (In fact some parents go overboard with this kind of support.) I understand that in the US parents have some expectation to educationally support adult children up to age 25 (and up to age 26 for health insurance), but even that is hazardous if the parent is abusive.
I don’t think CC and regional state schools should be let off the hook so easy: if most kids are flunking out and leaving with a pile of debt, you can’t just wash your hands and say “oh well, we take a bunch of lazy slackers, what can you do?”. I’ve seen absolutely appalling things–kids with no guidance, no support, no nothing. Often resources are technically available but not really announced, and they often are not as cool as advertised (like a writing center where you just get yelled at by sarcastic grad students who are all appalled at your mistakes, or a Student Services department that hands you a copy-from-a-mimeograph about resumes and tells you to use the internet to find internships) You talk about remedial classes: one of the biggest problems is CC shoving everyone into remedial, no credit classes “just in case”, which tends to drive kids away.
We can do better by kids who want to go to college.
Even worse than the community colleges and regional state schools are the for-profit schools, some of which seem designed only to extract federal student loans from students without any expectation that the students will learn anything or even graduate. I think the Obama administration cracked down on them and then the De Vos education department relaxed the restrictions.