The trouble with that idea is that then there are HUGE incentives for families to lie about whether they are providing support. I already had one friend in undergrad who lied and said he had no contact with his father, when in fact his father was giving him thousands of dollars a year for his education. If I had found this out earlier than I did (right before we both graduated), I don’t know that I would have maintained the friendship, because essentially he was screwing other students who needed the money far worse than he did.
I don’t believe it is/should be a legal or moral requirement objectively…
But since becoming a parent, it is my moral requirement should my child as an adult, ever need the help.
I don’t think it should be required of anyone, although I do know certain states to apply child support the way you can insure your dependant child through college…
I’m old enough that it was still possible to play this game fairly quickly out of college. You basically had to be “on your own” for a year. So a LOT of middle class parents who could have afforded to help, moved their kid into an apartment, gave him just enough cash to get by, stopped claiming him as a dependent on their taxes - and next year - financial aid! So it meant the kid was five years out of college.
As in most situations, we screwed ourselves by abusing the rules.
Moral, perhaps. Legal? Oh HELL no.
I’m sure that the vast majority of parents whose kids aren’t perpetual fuckups would do everything within their power to help them out. My parents did, and I do too.
But my favorite piece of parenting advice is that the goal of parenting is not to create perfectly happy children, it’s to create reasonably competent adults. This applies to 4 year olds tying their own shoes, and to 10 year olds doing their own laundry, and to 16 year olds learning that XBoxes require jobs, and to 18 year olds finding their own sources of college funding (maybe not all of it, but help me out here kid, this is for YOU, after all).
Absent some mental or physical shortcoming, if your kid can’t figure out some way to make it without you at 18, you have failed.
Wow, seriously? That is just crazy talk.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get financial aid, keep enough units and a GPA that will maintain that financial aid, all while working at least part time to be able to pay rent and other expenses AND doing the homework required to stay in school? My kid is doing all of that and still needs assistance from me to make the ends meet.
Do you have any idea how hard it would be to make a life without a degree? Why would you want to set your kid up for such a hard life if you could do otherwise?
You do know that there are occupations where people support themselves comfortably that don’t require college degrees, right?
I have ideas about all those things. More than ideas, actually. I made it work. I’m no delicate flower, and I didn’t raise any.
Read my post again. I didn’t advocate NOT doing for your children. I’m saying that it shouldn’t be a legal responsibility, because making it a legal responsibility makes them *perpetual *children.
I think the same thing. We should have one universal age for everything. I’d also raise the driving age to 18, and the age of consent too.
There are too many exceptions for a legal obligation, though as I expressed in another thread on a completely different topic earlier today the financial aid requirements for students who are over 18 and NOT receiving aid from home can be ridiculous. Many colleges and lenders require that you be married or at least 24 before you can apply for financial aid packages in your own name and while you’d think getting declared independent when you can prove you have no support from family would be a simple form or other quick matter, you’d be wrong.
If the kid is a responsible kid (I’m not talking a monk/nun or a Doogie Howser but just a decent person who can be trusted when it’s important) and the family has the financial means to help, I think it’s a MORAL responsibility. All sorts of things can negate either of those, though.
Ditto to both. Not only does UCE demonstrably devalue college degrees, it makes things all the harder for people who don’t have one and frankly not everybody should go to college or will benefit professionally from going. This is not an elitist statement: many intelligent people would be better served by trade school or OTJ training in their fields, but when even jobs like grocery store manager and car salesman require college degrees it’s hard for them to get a leg up; I’ve even seen jobs for bank tellers (an honest and respectable occupation and one that requires some intelligence and decorum but NOT one that you can make a halfway decent living at) or front desk managers at hotels for $20k per year that require college degrees. It’s ridiculous.
Of course while I realize it’s infeasible, I think most people should wait until they’re *at least *20 to start college. You need a break between high school and college to work a full time job and to experience some of the “real world” (not saying that high school is a cakewalk by any means, but it’s different from the full-time job/financial responsibilities world), plus your brain isn’t even finished forming until you’re in your early 20s, and I just think that non-trads, for all the frustration of balancing classes and full time employment can be, get a lot more out of college than most 18 year olds get and have better ideas as to what they want to be when they grow up.
I did it all pretty effortlessly. Maintaining the GPA was the easiest part.
My math genius friend couldn’t hack it - this is a guy who flunked out of AP Calculus because he couldn’t show his work on exams, because he did it in his head. His parents had essentially kicked him out of the house in his senior year of high school, and he went off to the U. of Illinois, having declared himself independent (which he was - his parents weren’t giving him money, though they could easily afford to).
Then his parents claimed him as a dependent on their taxes, and his financial aid package was retroactively revoked. He tried working a night janitor job to cover tuition, but he couldn’t hack the FT job and FT school and ended up dropping out. He never did finish his degree.
And this is a guy who is literally a genius. What is the normal, good, solid student but non-genius supposed to do?
I’m not sure undergraduate degrees could BE much more devalued.
I think this is a perfect example of the devaluation. You can get a bank teller or hotel clerk job with a BA/BS. But I used to work at an investment management company where we had administrative assistants with MBAs. Nobody cared about your undergrad degree.
I entirely agree. 18 year olds who have some vague idea of what they want to spend the rest of their life doing (other than being rock stars) are rather vanishingly rare.
There’s a world of difference between not giving your kid money, and not giving your kid money and then both screwing your kid and defrauding the government by saying you did.
Your friends parents are asses, but that hardly proves that people should have a legal obligation to support their children once they’re no longer children.
I managed with no sweat at all. Full time class load, work study, two or three other jobs besides that, and I earned extra lettuce by tutoring. I lived off campus with my wife (then girlfriend) and always made the rent. I did get some financial aid (which I’m still paying off), but I managed on my own, and it wasn’t all that difficult.
It sounds like your friend’s parents boned him out of his financial aid, and that’s the problem with making parents responsible. If you get the financial aid for tutition and books, the rest is just basic maintenance. The actual school work is pretty easy.
I haven’t said anywhere that parents should have a legal obligation to put their kids through college, unless they’ve agreed to it (as in a divorce settlement). But I am repulsed at the idea that parents who can afford to help their high-achieving children with educational expenses would refuse to do so, especially when their own parents did so for them. This was not a case of a kid who was going to drink and party his way through school, and he was a National Merit finalist with a perfect math SAT who had already aced college-level courses. (And had placed out of other ones by examination.)
It’s just wrong. I can’t contemplate doing something like that to my own (admittedly entirely hypothetical) child.
Now my sister, who did drink and party through school until she flunked out…I can entirely understand why my dad didn’t want to shell out any more cash for her. But then she never really wanted to go to college to begin with - Mom just basically forced her into it, because the divorce decree said Dad only had to contribute if she went right after high school.
If your friend was such a genius, why couldn’t he get a scholarship?
Scholarships are based on the university’s determination of financial need. Some unversities are more flexible about how they do that than others, which is why, for example, I got a full-tuition grant at NYU although my dad made enough that he could have afforded to shell out $10k or something a year according to the U. of C., which did base its determination on his income. NYU in its discretion decided they would only consider my mother’s income, which was MUCH lower, because she was my custodial parent, and decided Dad’s contribution was whatever pittance he had been paying in child support. Private universities are pretty flexible with endowment money; state ones, not so much.
Also, it’s tough to apply for scholarships in the middle of the school year - aid is generally already allocated by then.
(Plus he tanked some of his classes senior year because of MAJOR family difficulties, which culminated in his parents admitting him to the psych ward against his will, causing him to miss the better part of a semester.)
Ah, the parents who kick their kids out of the house on their 18th birthday because they are now “adults” and the parents don’t want to pay for them any more. I bet every high school counselor has a story about a Kid who gets booted in the middle of their senior year, long before graduation, and has to find a job that will pay enough for rent, or move in with a sympathetic friend’s family, and whose grades then slip as they try to work and go to school. Sure makes a kid feel like his whole life has been a lie. Yeah, it makes them grow up quick…and hard, and angry, and poor. Not all of them make it to graduation. Not all of them manage to continue on to college. And many of them end up in deadend jobs, trying to pay for rent and dental care and everything else in a world where all their peers get to go on to college with their parent’s help and insurance coverage.
Notice I said “help”.
I had to pay my tuition and books for college, my parents paid room and board. Now of course, in my day, you weren’t legally an adult until 21…so kids rarely got kicked to the curb at 18 unless they were really bad. All of my friends worked summer jobs to help with college expenses. Some even worked during the school year. But all of our parents helped pay for college, and expected that our first job would be studying, not partying. We all knew how tight college made the budget, and none of my friends blew off college as a free anything.
Neither of my kids went on to college for various reasons, though my daughter at 28 would love to go now. My divorce decree said that my ex would contribute to college expenses. I think he purposely screwed my kids up so they wouldn’t go, just so he wouldn’t have to stay sober and get a job to pay any portion of college fees. If it had been within my means to help them, I would not have hesitated. As it was, my daughter moved out on her own at 18 (not the day of, mind you) and has paid her own way ever since. But it has been a horrible price to pay, and I grieve for what her life could have been like if we’d been able to afford college, and if she hadn’t gotten so screwed up. Now that she has grown up, I wish I could pay for college for her. I think part of her getting so screwed up was that she knew it wasn’t in the cards, so she just gave up for a while. And I don’t know a single one of her friends who, finding themselves out in the world alone at 18, is in a great place financially and socially today. The gap between those two parts of one generation is startling to see close up…the differences in the lives of the kids whose parents supported them in more ways than one through college, and the ones whose parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
name three, that are currently hiring and actually pay a living wage.
well, no, you said if your kid can’t make it without you by the age of 18 you failed. That doesn’t have anything to do with legal vs. moral obligations.
Now read my post again, I said nothing about perpetual financial support at all.