From a Post which hits home with the whole truth - College is acceptable, but should be managed!
A couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter’s guidance
counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only
question that adults ask high school seniors: “What colleges are you
applying to?” When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said,
“Have you thought about going to art school?”
By that afternoon, Ella was having a full-blown crisis of faith, because yes, she had thought pretty hard about art school. When
her oil paintings started winning awards freshman year, her AP art teacher more or less told her that art school was her destiny, the only
way not to squander her prodigious talents. Ella didn’t need convincing.
She was so ready to bolt out of our small southwest Virginia town into a
big city where she could paint all day that she had basically become a
Lifetime movie cliché.
From Popular in
Human Interest
Continued:
But for months she’d been shoving down all those painterly college fantasies of art school in New York. My husband and I had told her, point-blank, we couldn’t afford it.
Let me clarify: By “couldn’t afford it,” I mean that we’re like pretty much all the other middle-class parents we know—not poor by a
long shot, but not loaded either, and chronically underinvested in our kids’ college accounts. We had not squirreled away every spare penny in a
529 account since the moment of conception the way the Suze Ormans of
the world want us to. We hadn’t even opened a 529 till Ella was in fifth grade, because we’d been trying to get through my husband’s Ph.D.
After that, we saved fairly aggressively, but you know how it goes. Two daughters. Clothes. Braces. Class trips. Like most parents, who save on average $18,000 for their kids’ education, we’d failed to sock away anything close to the $75,000 annual sticker price it would take for Ella to go to, say, Pratt in New York City. Our privilege was such that we slipped into a financial aid gap, where our daughter won’t qualify for grants, but we can’t pay cash upfront.
That left two options: Let her join the 69 percent of U.S. college graduates who take out loans to finance their schooling. Or scare the hell out of her about taking on student debt.
According to our daughter, most of her friends are completely meh about student loans. They’re applying to places like NYU ($53,310
tuition) and Boston College ($56,780 tuition). Some of them have parents who can probably bankroll that. The others see it as inevitable that,
in exchange for a nice bachelor’s degree, they’ll be working off grinding debt for the next 20 years.
On the other hand, saying no is part of my job as a parent.
Hasn’t it been my role all along to steer my kid toward smarter but seemingly less desirable choices? Carrots instead of Kit Kats, an early bedtime instead of an all-night YouTube binge?
Children naturally hate
those kinds of limits. They may temporarily hate us. But they’re too young and myopic to see how this one decision could make their lives harder for a long, long time. We can.
Eventually, our prolonged brainwashing attempts seemed to succeed with Ella. She started talking about how reluctant she was to go into debt for college like it had been her idea all along. She even
thanked us for being upfront about the financial consequences of college. This fall she applied to exactly two universities, in the Venn
diagram overlap between “schools we can pay for” and “schools where she
actually wants to go.” They’re not art schools, but both have stellar
art programs. Her guidance counselor, whose only focus is getting in and
not paying up, thinks she’s crazy to limit her options like that, but we’re thrilled that the highest tuition at either is around $16,000. Not chump change, but probably doable.
Her applications are in, and she won’t know what happens for a
while. Just one thing is certain: When Ella graduates, her future will
be her own. For that, it’s worth keeping a short leash on her present.
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