If you’re of/in a certain stage/mindset/class, you’re thinking about where your kids are going to go to college. More likely, you’re lying awake at night wondering how you’re going to pay for it, perhaps tinged with a nagging feeling that maybe you shouldn’t bother.
I suspect the “Should I bother?” conversation will gather some steam over the next few years, but till then, many of us will still be trying to figure out the finances of higher ed.
Okay, it’s expensive; we know that. The problem isn’t just cost, though, but that it’s not clear what the real cost is. College is one of the most elusive price tags we face in America, maybe only next to cell phone pricing plans.
Okay, it’s going up, we know that too. But that conversation is normally about tuition. There’s more to it. A piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education put it straightforwardly: “Forget the Rise in Tuition and Fees, What About Living Expenses?” Zakiya Smith, a strategy director at the Lumina Foundation [1], said living expenses are an “underdiscussed” aspect of college pricing. Also, the article cited another big, underappreciated college expense: the “opportunity cost,” or the time you spend in and doing work for class that can’t be spent working. Overall, to get a handle on the overall price tag, families have to consider a somewhat complex “cost of attendance.” Colleges might do more to help families figure that out.
The other side of any “Should I bother?” conversations is simple right now: Demand for college remains high, especially the demand driven by people mesmerized with the owning-a-Zenith-U-sweatshirt idea of where they want their kids to go to school: They want it to look good to their country club friends.
If you can avoid that pressure, there are surprises out there for you. Programs like NJ STARS [2](Student Tuition Assistance Reward Scholarship) offer free community college tuition to high achieving high school kids. The program in NJ has gone through some change, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jonathan Lai reported [3], but students at the top 15% of their classes still get to go to school for free.
Hearing from some STARS kids in that article, what’s amazing is how much smarter kids can be than their social-climbing parents. Bright Eastern High School student – where I went! – Caitlin Hale, who attended Camden County Community College, said, “People were shocked when I told them I was going to Camden County. It’s not the name you’re going for; it’s the learning.” Of course, Obama discussed a similar national community college movement [4]; we’ll see how that fares.
Financial decisions about college may be frustrating because we operate in an information-poor zone. But there are resources. For instance, you might check the College Affordability and Transparency Center: http://collegecost.ed.gov [5], there, among other things, you’ll see how institutions are subsidized. The College Board has interesting college pricing information here: http://trends.collegeboard.org/ [6]. Damn, I hate magazine/newspaper school rankings/lists, but some might help you do that rare thing: Gather what your student’s experience, both during school and post–graduation, will be like. Business Insider’s “The 50 Most Underrated Colleges In America [7]” is such a piece.
People are tromping not so much blindly as uncritically into college. It’s a commitment, and you might want to think long and hard about why college is the next step — in fact, that may be the best thing you can do.
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