We talked about how attending college is now so expensive, they want far more than 4 years worth of money.  Specifically, colleges want your (parents and children’s) savings, they want your current income, and they want your future income.  Let’s start with some historical perspective.

When my mom was headed to college in the late nineteen sixties, to earn a science degree in a time and place where women didn’t do that, her father’s blue collar trade job of ~$8000/year was well able to support her annual cost of attendance at a premier engineering college (in-state, public) of ~$500.  That’s less than 10% of his income, and it was do-able. Yes, my mom worked and saved too, on-campus and on breaks; making it even more do-able for the family.  No parental savings needed, no loans needed.

Then there was my father.  He was on ROTC scholarship during the Vietnam war era, worked 80 hour weeks when on school breaks, plus he worked as a TA on-campus.  He paid for his entire schooling without parental help, or loans.

By the time I was going to undergrad, prices vs wages had risen enough that I couldn’t pay for the whole thing out of my own high school and school break work, or my on-campus job.  But I attended a budget-friendly engineering college (engineers don’t feel much need to have fancy, functional is far more important), my student savings and income plus merit scholarships could make an appreciable dent in the bill, and with assistance from my parents I didn’t need to take out student loans.  I chose a field for grad school (and had the grades to qualify) that via a Research Assistant position, included covering my tuition bill as well as a very modest stipend that was enough to rent an apartment and put food on the table, so I didn’t accumulate debt in grad school either.

In all three of those scenarios, one thing differed from today.  That’s the attitude of the American public about who needs to go to college, and the commoditization of the system.  Dorms were little more than boxes, cafeterias had unimpressive food, a gym consisted of a couple of basketball hoops and a pool, and nobody or few had a car of their own.  That’s all a far cry from today’s glittering jewels of “the college experience.”   I’m not saying that’s what you have in mind for your child.  Unfortunately since college went from the purvey of a small percentage of becoming-adults to a-college-degree-has-become-required-to-work-for-a-hamburger-franchise necessity for all, and money in the form of loans being made available with backing by the federal government, there hasn’t been sufficient downward pressure on college costs to even restrict their growth rate to that of inflation.

My own family’s experiences left me completely ignorant of the student loan scenarios when I met my future husband.  He had graduated at 22 with an unknown student loan balance (but one he thought was low enough to be reasonable), and at 30 he still had thousands of dollars left on them – in fact, by what we’ve pieced together in hindsight, he had barely moved the needle on paying them off by that point.  He should have been eligible for public service loan forgiveness based on who his employer was, but he’d never known to enroll in a qualifying payment plan.  In fact, he had no idea what type of payment plan he was in, what the terms were, what his interest rate was; he thought he was in 0% interest loans courtesy of his place of employment.  And I was ignorant enough to just believe his (well intentioned) claims.  It is only now, years later, in hindsight that I realize he/we probably paid thousands of extra dollars on those student loans, out of ignorance at the time.