I’m guessing 3/4 of the way through the 20th century?
I graduated from high school in 1966, and it was by no means a given that my parents would pay my college tuition. At that time, it wasn’t even assumed that college was automatically the next step for a high school grad. There were still “vocational schools,” where kids learned trades. Even my Catholic girls high school was divided into an A level (college-bound) and B level (probably destined to be SAHMs).
My college classmates had some kind of financial assistance, partial scholarships, and/or work/study jobs of some kind. And college tuition wasn’t anywhere near the level it is today! My 4-year full scholarship had a total cash value of $2,800. That was at a private Catholic university. I’m not kidding. Tuition was $35/hour. The most expensive university in town cost $60/hour. Of course, minimum wage was ~$1.10 and the median annual income in the US was ~$3,000. Now, 4 years of college cost as much as a mansion and more than a heart transplant. And yet now parents are expected to find the money (if they didn’t have the foresight to start saving when the child was in the womb.)
When did college tuition become the parents’ responsibility?
My oldest is off to university in September and I was looking for some budgeting ideas for current expenses and one site claimed that 2/3 of kids do not get parental support.
For the record, we are paying for her university expenses.
Seriously? I’m surprised. Is this a public school?
I don’t have kids, but listening to my friends (skewed sample, for sure), the procedure seems to be let the kid pick the college/university no matter where or how expensive and then it’s up to the parents to find the money, even if it means mortgaging the home or dipping into their retirement savings. I never hear people say, “We told Johnny he’s going to have to start at the community college and/or find someplace cheaper.” Yes skewed sample, for sure. I’m an outsider to this process, so I appreciate hearing from those in the trenches, as it were.
Other way around I think - until the 20th century college was for people with rich parents, with a small number of people who managed to get there on their own, and most of those on scholarships or with wealthy non-parental patrons
When I graduated from high school in 1970 I was lucky (and smart) enough to qualify for a four-year state scholarship which paid for my college tuition (a whopping $1200.00!). However, since I had chosen a college in another town I still had to pay for the costs of the dorm and cafeteria, plus of course books and other incidentals. As the oldest of five kids my parents couldn’t afford to foot the bill for all that, so I had to apply for financial assistance. This involved having my parents fill out a lengthy financial statement, on the assumption that they would be contributing to my bills. Essentially, the amount of any student loan I would qualify for depended on them having to prove that they couldn’t afford to pay my bills.
Yeah, you have a skewed sample. About half of all college graduates attended a community college at some point in the relatively recent past; when you factor in the ones who attend but don’t graduate, it’s likely well over half. Attending a four-year school starting at age 18 and having your parents contribute a significant percentage of the costs is really only the norm in circles where the parents are themselves college-educated professionals.
It depends on what you’re taking as the denominator. In the past, most parents didn’t pay for college, because most kids didn’t go to college. But I imagine it’s always been the case that most college students have their education funded by their parents.
In the late 1970’s, my father told me that he was able to pay his college expenses in the late 1950’s with the money he earned over the summer plus a college job. He said he and my mother were aware that wages hadn’t kept up with the cost of college. The deal was that I would take out, and pay back, student loans, work during the academic year, and work summers. My parents would pay the rest. If I took a break from attending college, I would be responsible for paying back the loans that came due during that time, as well as for my living expenses. I had a small amount of stock as a birth present that I cashed in, and in my senior year received a small scholarship. My senior year job was as a resident assistant, which paid my tuition and left room and board to be covered.
My sister started college a few years later, and tuition was significantly higher. Our parents then said that they would pay back our loans because they didn’t want us to start post-college life with significant debt hanging over us. My loan amounts would now not cover even 1/10th of a unsubsidized year.
My friends who went to college were all a least helped by their parents. Some were required to attend community college or the state college.
This was a non-school site, but can’t remember which. I have no idea if this was a scientific survey or pulled out of their ass.
My daughter isn’t even eligible for the provincial grants or loans because we make too much money. I believe there is process for reconsideration if you are estranged from your parents, but otherwise they are expected to kick in.
Here’s a couple of websites that indicate how much the proportion of people who are able to read at all, who graduate from high school, and who graduate from college has increased (in the U.S. since 1870):
In 1870, only 80% of the population could even read, only 2% graduated from high school, and only 1.7% even started college. These proportions steadily went up to about 1990. Since then they have risen somewhat, but not as fast. Things that we would have expected to require a college degree only started requiring one within the past century. I remember a teacher talking about how she started teaching with just one year of college (or probably of “normal school”, as it was called then) sometime in the 1920s. After a few years the requirement changed to two years and she quit for a year to do the second year. After a few more years the requirement changed to four years and she quit for two years to do the remaining two years.
The world has changed over the past 150 years. The jobs requiring extensive education have risen in proportion. The amount of colleges has risen (proportionate to the population). It thus is necessary for either larger amounts of taxes to be given to the colleges or for the students (and their parents) to pay more money either while they are students or afterwards from loans they took out.
They don’t talk about it much, but I’'ve heard of friends of my kids who got into Expensive High-Ranked University, weren’t offered any scholarships or financial aid, and ended up at Lower-Ranked University where they were offered scholarships.
When my kids were applying to schools, they had one constraint: they had to apply to schools where scholarship aid was available, or where tuition was relatively affordable like state universities.
And as for community college students, I’ve heard of some who were getting no parental support at all and in fact were working double shifts to help pay rent and support parents who’d been laid off.
It’s different in Canada, where university tuition is not the same burden it often is in the US. But at the university I work at, 60% of the students work during the school term, ranging from10-30 hours/week. The big cost in universities in Toronto, Vancouver, etc. is rent. My niece and 2 roommates were paying $2,000/month for a basement “suite” that had the washer and dryer shared with the landlord in the “living room.”
In my own (also skewed) sample of my own kids’ cohort, high school grad years between 2007 and 2011, it was not at all a given that parents would pay. We told our kids that we would cover costs for our own state university, which is an easy bus commute from our own home, or the equivalent for an out of state school, but otherwise they needed to come up with scholarships for the rest. Our state has a scholarship for in-state high school graduates who attend public universities, so our portion wouldn’t have been very high and we’d have been able to cover it with the college fund money we’d saved with their grandparents’ help. Of their friends, only a very few had parents who paid for all their costs. Our son-in-law went to his state school and I believe his parents, both college-educated professionals, kicked in some money, but between his undergrad and masters degrees, he racked up a breathtaking amount of debt. Our own daughters, through a combination of luck, hard work, and calculated scrimping, paid for almost all their schooling with scholarships. I’m now encouraging our younger one to get a graduate degree just so we can use up the money that’s still in their 529 plan.
I graduated high school in 1984 and college in 1988. As I remember, when I was attending college then, the “total cost of attendance” was about $15-17,000. I used government student loans for my portion of the cost. (These programs were called Guaranteed Student Loans and National Direct Student Loans.) I borrowed the maximum allowed under these programs and therefore was borrowing about $5000 annually. So I graduated with about $20,000 in student debt, which I had no problem repaying over the course of ten years, though I was only getting a mediocre salary at a crappy engineering company.
I received about $5,000 annually in school scholarships. The remaining $5,000 of the cost was borne by my parents. I thought it was neat that I paid a third, my parents paid a third and the school paid a third.
From what I’ve heard, the maximum amount you can get in government subsidized loans today is still only $5-7,000 annually. For some schools, that would cover only ten percent of the total cost of attendance but when I was in school, it covered a third of the cost.
My daughter is off to McGill. If you’re a Quebec resident, tuition is just over CAD$5,000. It’s $11K if you are not from Quebec and $25K for international. Add another $18K for residence and food plan.
Both went to in state universities. Undergrad only. Not the prestigious ones either. i co-signed private loans to cover what their federal loans and small scholarships did not. Their Summer jobs helped pay for spending money for the year.
I co signed because our credit worthiness secured low interest loans. In the beginning a variable interest was 1.9%. It sickens me that now it’s up to 9.3% Right now I pay about $700 a month in their loans. End in sight 2028. They have not repaid any federal loans because of the pause. They each owe about 30k? In federal loans? One was eligible for a federal grant Perkins? Stafford irc. I think the interest rate when they took out there fed loans was about 4%.
None of the loans paid for anything but tuition and books/required supplies. Bare necessities.
We told our oldest that we’d pay for two years of community college, contingent upon him taking a full course load and passing, and anything beyond that would be based on his obtaining grants/scholarships and where he was planning on going. We’d be willing to help pay for classes if he picked a university he could commute to but, if he wanted to move out and live at school, he’d be footing the bill for that stuff.
Yup. Canadian universities are often forbidden by their provincial governments to raise tuition fees, for political reasons, and so charge “differential fees” and lots for residence and food plans and parking and rec fees and student union building fees and…
My parents only paid for my older sister’s tuition, but she (and I) lived at home while at UCLA, so we didn’t have any room and board to pay for. Although, I was working the whole time and paid for a lot of my own meals (like breakfast/lunch on campus for cheap and occasional dinners out with friends). I worked 15-20 hours a week while I was attending classes and as close to fulltime over the summers as I could get.
Oh, I did get a $500 scholarship from my high school PTSA upon graduation.
But. Per quarter “fees” (they didn’t call it tuition at the UCs) during my first year were $106.50.
You obviously haven’t read my posts about my daughter who made this journey of her own volition. She was accepted to ‘prestige’ colleges like Fordham and Rutgers, decided on St John’s, spent 1 semester there before deciding that SJU wasn’t worth 1/10 of what she was paying. She dropped out of school, adulted in NYC for 2 years, and now has her Associates from a CUNY (City of New York) school and is looking to get a bachelor’s at a more name school like the Fashion Institute of Technology or, perhaps, Columbia.
Total student debt so far: $0. She was, in fact, receiving a $800/mth COLA subsidy from the State of NY for being a student… $800/mth which she uses to pay for her tuition and books.
She has a lot of friends who were more traditional in their path and are leaving school with $20k, $50k of debt. Not Sophia.