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Should Parents Be Expected To Pay For College?
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Same thing happened to me. So I wrote a sappy little letter to my college's financial aid department bemoaning my dear dead daddy and how my house got flooded and boo hoo and they said "Oh, that's terrible. Here, have some free money."
Then the free money ran out and I got a part-time job my senior year. I still ended up with a bunch of debt though.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the problem is that US financial aid assumes that any parent with the financial ability to at least help put the kid through school will do so.
So a kid whose parents make good money but won't give him a dime is worse off than a kid whose parents are broke.
And it assumes that parents have means beyond what they may in fact possess.
Based on my four parents' incomes (ahhh, remarriage), I was estimated to receive some absolutely asinine amount of help from my family. My dad had invested a ton of money in a sinking business, though, and my parents were on like, their third mortgage. So even though they looked like they had fairly decent incomes on paper, we actually were sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Yep. Then that kid either needs to take out a bunch of private loan debt, or go find something to do for 6 years and wait for the magical age 24 to roll around. Maybe they go back to college at 24, maybe they don't.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So, I really don't see where you are coming from. If a kid is intelligent and has some ambition, but requires support from his parents to make college work, it's a parents responsibility to make it work. You can't disown your kid once they hit 18.
This seems to be considered a 'norm' only in the English-speaking world, and I'm not sure why.
If parents can help, why not?
I think it's better if your parents are able to help pay, but them not paying is hardly abusive.
I pretty much see parents who could, but don't support their kids, in the same light as I see people who don't tip at restaurant. Particularly if they are still claiming the kid as a dependent.
I do think kids need to invest in their own education. Busting their ass for 4 years in order to get scholarships and what not counts toward that in my book to some degree. Earning money is a pretty good idea too, but there are more important things they should be doing.
My parents paid for half of my tuition after scholarships. It was something like $300 a year.
But I hardly feel like not paying is abusive or bad. It's just a nice thing to do if you can afford to.
If colleges start recognizing students as real people, and individuals, and granting monies based on that, then no, the onus is not on the parents.
Until then, it is if they can afford it.
If you have a degree in anything and are working at Target, you need to rethink where you choose to work.
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Err, my wireless mouse went nutso and somehow made me post before I was done typing, and I didn't even realize it. Here is my full and complete thought:
I understand what you're saying, but at the same time I don't feel that the military is an even remotely reasonable alternative. Potentially getting yourself murdered isn't exactly a winning gameplan.
Oh sure, if you WANT to enlist, so be it. But sitting down and saying "well little jimmy, if you want to go to college, guess it's combat boots for you" is wrong.
As far as saving up and going later, this is more feasible if a bit unrealistic. Life catches up with you. Good intentions etc. Every semester you don't go to college after highschool, statistically speaking, it's unlikely you WILL go back. So this method is a form of educational russian roulette at best.
Ultimately, parents should not be forced to pay for anything; however, U.S. society is set up to function in a certain way, and because of this, parents that can afford to pay, may be within their rights, but are very likely to be ethically and morally bankrupt.
If the child is a good student, and a good kid in general, and you can afford it, and your finances will affect what financial aid they can get, it is your duty both ethically and morally to pay.
It depends on what you mean by "automatically" because I feel like you're strawmanning here.
My main problem is with parents who stop supporting their kid when the said kid graduates from high school, and tell him to get a loan because "he needs to learn some financial responsibility dammit!" or some such nonsense. Most such parents I've ran across were more than capable of supporting their kid's college education, but chose not to because they thought they were doing him/her a favor. And what I was saying in the other thread was that throwing your kid into a pit full of alligators in the hopes that the kid will emerge strong - which is the exact same reasoning as telling him to take a loan so he learns financial responsibility - is not doing him a favor. It's being a dick.
I believe in unconditional giving to be an inherent part of the parent-children relationship, as long as it is not taken advantage of and/or wasted by the son or daughter. I think it is a parent's responsibility to do whatever is in their power to help their offspring become successful (however you may define success), and it is the child's responsibility to carry that on to his/her children.
This philosophy has been so central in my upbringing that I can't wrap my mind around arguments suggesting it should be otherwise.
Now, I know that things aren't so simple when there are siblings. In the last two years of my college my dad asked me to cut down my spending because my sister is about to start college and they wanted to make sure they had enough money to give her the same opportunities they gave me. And I did. Furthermore, now that I have a job I plan to help them support my sister through her college education because I believe that's the right thing to do, not only because she is my sister but also because I think it's only fair.
If I had more siblings? Then things might have been different. But then that's one of the many reasons why I respect the choices my parents made; they decided to stop at two because they realized more than two would strain their ability to provide their kids with the best opportunities.
The FAFSA considers you a dependent student until the first full calendar year in which you are at least 24 years of age. Which for some people means they're almost 25 by the time they are "independent" students.
Most people who are going to go to college in their lives already have their undergrad degree by that point. A lot of students by the age of 22 or 23 are already financially independent and are not getting assistance from the parents, because they simply don't need it.
And yet the FAFSA, which nearly every school in this country uses to determine your financial status and consequently what kind of need-based aid you get, will add three incomes together (yours, moms, dads) to determine your Expected Family Contribution until you are 24 to 25.
This is many kinds of fucked up. Those three numbers combined have to come out to under about 65k (I think, that's from about 5 years ago) in order for your EFC to fall below in-state resident tuition levels here in Colorado.
A side effect of this is that you are discouraged from working while you're a student, because every dollar you earn is another dollar the FAFSA considers an "expected contribution" to your education. Never mind that you may be living beneath the poverty level and your parents might not have any disposable income to speak of after paying bills, you and your parents are expected to pay for your own damn tuition.
So it's simple: the federal government expects your parents to pay for college. And since schools largely use the FAFSA numbers, they do too. The expectation, as they've set it, is extremely unreasonable.
Giving someone a place to stay is a great help, but I just don't know with the cost of today's tuition if that alone would be enough to help someone working a part time minimum wage job pay for tuition and books. Especially if your finances are hindering their ability to obtain grants and low interest loan.
I don't think I really disagree with you at all Quid. I just think I am seeing all of the potential pitfalls.
Myself, I was stuck in the dreaded pit of being a lower middle class kid. My family made too much money for me to qualify for special consideration and not enough to help me out. So here I sit, still paying in blood to MOHELA.
But hey. It worked out.
I feel pretty strongly about this issue because I've been raised around people who've put themselves through hell to go college because their parents kicked them out of the house at 18 and didn't help them out with college unless they were about to sink below water.
There's a line between teaching your grown kids responsibility and needlessly putting them through hell because of outdated ideas on how the economy and tuition works.
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Didn't say that. Though I did say it's not uncommon for family members in my family to give one another loans for school with no interest and no specified time to pay them back.
I'd hardly consider financial responsibility nonsense. I don't see why parents should be expected to give their kids money for college but not teach them any lessons with it.
Well then it's a good thing I never advocated any of that outside of the loan I mentioned above which, if you haven't noticed, operates significantly differently than a loan from any financial entity anywhere. Nor was it the only option available to those people.
Unfortunately our family doesn't assign a dollar value to success.
That's fine. Doesn't make ways different from yours wrong.
Kay. We don't just give money away without expectations because we think it's the right thing to do. And for the record I was raised an only child. My siblings are all half and were raised mainly with their parents and my father's side.
Whoo? Bravo for your parents. Not everyone's life works out so well.
I never said they shouldn't.
There are other ways to teach your kids financial responsibility, ways that do not involve having your kid graduate from college knee-deep in debt.
I don't know what you mean by this. Care to explain?
It depends. Like Feral says, some things cannot be defended with the cultural relativity card, especially when the actions have measurable harmful consequences. "Not doing your best to ensure your kids' success", in my opinion, is wrong.
There are always expectations, like I've stated in my post but you conveniently left out. If the kid is taking advantage of or wasting their parents' good will, that runs against those expectations. There was never a situation in my life where I told my parents I wanted/needed money and they wrote me a blank check for it or something. Every spending I made I had to justify as being a good investment towards my academic and professional success, as well as my physical and social health.
It's not about life working out well. It's about making responsible decisions.
We don't assign a dollar value to success. There's a strong view among most of us that the guy living in a trailer with his wife and three kids who are all immensely happy has, so far, succeeded immensely more than the guy with a degree on his third wife. Degree =/= success unless you can give me a specific definition of success that applies to everyone everywhere.
Kay. They're doing their best by having them earn their degree if they want it. You haven't shown how it's actually bad. You make allusions to nonexistent crippling debt and that's it.
Good for you. We have to justify to ourselves that our goal is worth the work we'd have to put in to it.
And they have.
We got married before we finished school in order to save on living expenses our senior year; that year I was taking 15 credits and working three part-time jobs to make ends meet.
In the end, we made it out with less than $10,000 in student loans between us, and a third of that was because our only car died midway through our senior year and we needed money to replace it.
Both of us look back on that time as the period that really forged our financial responsibility. Unless whatever college I'm working at then offers my children tuition as a job perk, our kids will learn to get by like we did.
Such as by working three jobs on the sideline, right?
That's fine.
They're doing their best by having them earn their degree?
Why didn't they make them earn their high school education too?
How does that work exactly? Care to give an example?
Maybe they have. I don't know your family and your specific situation so I can't pass judgment.
What I'm saying is that if you can't put your kids through college because you have too many kids to take care of, that's not responsible.
Store managers - which is what all Execs aim to become at some point - make a very substantial salary. And Target supports their General Mangers eventually moving on to District. The corporation actually pays pretty well, believe it or not, and if all you really care about is a paycheck at the end of the week, it's a lot better than what a lot of History majors do with their degrees.
Props to you for doing all that; I think it's very commendable.
But I've never agreed with the "our kids will learn to get by like we did" argument. The entire point of parenting is making sure your kids have a more comfortable time growing up than you have. The standard of living is supposed to be improving with each generation. That is your responsibility as a parent: to make sure that it does. Just because you had to work three part-time jobs during college and go to an in-state school and raise the entirety of the money yourself, how does this justify putting your kids through the same thing?
I'm sorry, the reasoning is very alien to me. I just don't get it. Maybe you can help me understand it.
I was a spoiled brat for the first 17 years of my life. Now, I don't mean to say that my parents cut me off entirely or anything; they were still there (about 5 hours away) to offer a home cooked meal and help move from one dorm to another every so often, and they wouldn't have let us go without heat in the winter if my wife and I had been unable to pay our gas bill. Still, the need to make sure that I had enough money for rent, gas, and food before buying that new video game or going to see that new movie is what finally made me take control of my appetites, rather than letting them control me.
If every American learned to say "no" to their desires once in a while, we might actually begin to approach a sustainable society.
Well then, let me ask you a question -that is admittedly a contrived hypothetical to stick you in a tough spot:
What if your kid gets into Harvard, or even a prestigious state school (Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin), and you tell him or her what you just told us. Assume that you could afford to assist the kid to the good school, but because you don't he or she decides to go to Satellite Noname U. Aren't you gonna feel tempted to give them that opportunity?
Don't get me wrong, proud graduate of SNU myself, but it seems like you can say that you wouldn't pay for school because you haven't been faced with that situation.
As another thought, and this is really the only thing I have to add to this thread, if you have kids, the day they enter 9th grade you need to have a frank conversation about what kind of support you will be giving them for college. I've seen so many kids straight up misled by their fucking naive parents who ended up cobbling together an education at the last minute it's goddamn sick.
I deeply disagree with the bolded sentence, or at least how I understand the bolded sentence. I don't think my job as a parent is to make sure that my children are comfortable, at least not if comfort just means enjoying pleasurable things.
Instead, I see my task as ensuring that my children grow up to be men and women of character, men and women who are able to set worthwhile goals for themselves and pursue them, men and women who understand the value of the human experience and thus desire to better that experience for themselves and others.
I'm not convinced that the best way to cultivate that kind of character in my children is to remove obstacles from their path; instead it is to put obstacles in their way that I know they can overcome, help them to overcome them on their own--while, of course, being there to help them up and dust them off when the fall.
I strongly believe that there is a place for pain and suffering in life; and, in our society at least, the college experience is typically the last great hurdle children face while they're still mostly under the care of their parents. The pain and suffering my wife and I went through during those years is what made us the (hopefully virtuous) human beings that we are; I would hate to deprive my children of that testing fire.
My parents have not paid for my college because they can't afford to do so, but I don't see how that makes them irresponsible for having me and my brother.
I started out on a full scholarship, which I lost after my sophomore year. It dropped to 75%. I've been working part time while in school and full time over breaks and summer to make the money to pay for tuition, books, and gas at this point, as well as my car insurance, extra expenses, and and to pay my parents a low rent fee for staying at home to help out with the bills.
My parents never, at any point, set aside money for my college expenses and they have no done so for my brother.
They did, however, save up and with my grandparents paying the other half, bought me a car for getting my scholarship so I had a way to get to school and work without needing a loan for one. They offer the same deal to my brother.
They also bought me a laptop as a highschool graduation/college acceptace present so I had my own computer to do schoolwork on and so I couldn't need to have that expense.
Had I chosen to go to a non-local university they wouldn't have been able to pay for rent or other living expenses; they might have been able to help some, but I would've still been required to work, as I do now, to pay for it. If I moved out to the dorms or apartments here or in Pensacola it would've been the same.
I recently lost my scholarship completely and make "too much" money at work to qualify for any other aid and my parents still would not and could not pay for my tuition but this doesn't make them bad or irresponsible parents. The help I did get form them was much appreciated, but I had to earn it , and I think that's incredibly fair.
I do not think they were irresponsible for having me knowing they couldn't afford to pay for my tuition.
As for the FASFA and the 'independent at 24' dickwaddery, there is a loophole, for those of you (un)lucky enough to qualify, depending on your perspective. It's called a dependency override, you get it by having your parents dead or severely estranged, not having spoken them for at least a year. I get half and half, my widowed dear old dad married a nice christian lady who had a burning desire to go indoctrinate the heathens (her words, not mine, she may or may not have been joking
That said, if you can't afford to give your kid money for college, you damn well better make sure they know well ahead of time, and help them look for financial aid or whatever the hell will get them where they wanna go.
I definitely agree with the last paragraph; for most of us (especially on this board!), the "paying for college talk" is probably at least as important as the sex talk. In general, parents need to be more frank with their children, especially their high-school aged children.
As for the Harvard vs. Directional State Technical College question, if my children have that choice (and they actually want to go to Harvard), I'd try to negotitate with them so that it'll be difficult for them to go to Harvard (for reasons I mention in a previous post), but not impossible. If that means I pick up 60% of the tab, so be it. But I'll try to make sure that, wherever they choose to go, they still have to learn a measure of sacrifice to do so.
And why don't your parents just completely dedicate their entire lives to funding your lifestyle? My family decides the cut off point for free financial support is 18. It's not some surprise at graduation. They don't pick up their diploma and turn around and see their parents with all their stuff telling them GTFO. They're approached years earlier asking what they want to do and what their plans are. Something is figured out to help them do what they want. And they aren't utterly cut off either. The phrase hand up not a hand out is quite accurate when in describing it.
My uncle was paying my way through college. I was fucking it up. I could have either kept taking his money, worked my way further into debt with him, or find an alternative since clearly college wasn't right for me at the time. No one expected me to go to college though. No one said if I didn't I wouldn't be successful.
My aunt wanted to get a degree in teaching. She couldn't afford it on her own having never worked for anyone other than family so my grandparents loaned her the money on the condition that she work it off by helping family and then paying the rest back. The important bit, though, was that she never became a teacher after getting the degree. She became a housewife. The degree was completely moot to her success and happiness in life.
My sister studied her ass off to get the grades for a scholarship because she felt that if she couldn't handle earning her degree on her own she wouldn't be able to handle a teacher either. Even then she stayed with her parents frequently.
All of us made decisions on what was best for us, not our parents.
You're assuming again that college is not only necessary, but required by the parents to pay for it to be successful.