In case we haven’t been talking about college enough

Do you know what all the headlines about the “side-door” college admissions scandal tell me? That news editors and reporters are probably parents of (elite?) college-track kids. Given the amount of ink (bytes?) spilled so far, I have a feeling this particularly story is resonating in certain corridors more than others. I, for one, would like to get us back to more salient LBYM topics about college such as how do I convince my kid that starting at a community college and then transferring to a four-year school is the way to go?

Especially since I don’t have the skills to photoshop her head onto the bodies of elite [insert marginal collegiate sport here] athletes … or the desire to actually drive her to [insert same sport] practice. Or $1.2 million extra dollars lying around to bribe the coach of said sport!

Seriously, though, in seven or so years, when my kitchen table is covered in glossy brochures replete with images of ancient buildings and leafy campuses, you can be sure there will also be … a calculator. People, the retail price of college is officially insane! I just looked up how much it will cost to attend Stanford this fall and I almost had a heart attack. All in—tuition, room and board, a mandatory health service fee—the ticket price was almost $70,000. A year.

And that’s before paying off the sailing coach haaaa.

Factor in inflation … and the fact that I have THREE children … omigod. Clearly, it’s time to start lying about where I went to college. I don’t need to give them any ideas in that direction. Still, I, probably more than most, understand the powerful allure of a “dream” school, and may find it difficult to say “no” to my children’s entreaties (LBYM tip of the day: start practicing now).

How difficult? Until we moved last year, we lived in the most educated town in Wisconsin, with 88.5% of the residents over the age of 25 holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Our local high school boasts the most National Merit Scholarship semifinalists of any in the state. I may have met many of my friends through an Ivy League women’s lunch group. For goodness’ sake, I work in test prep. Forget difficult … fighting this tide is downright crazy, right?

Crazier than forking over $70,000 a year?

One of the challenges in financial planning, regardless of what you’re planning for, is the inescapable uncertainty of what lies ahead. We seek safety and security for ourselves and for our kids tomorrow, but we also need food, shelter, and sunshine right now, especially the latter. I will be honest with you. The college question is a particularly thorny one. Forgetting even the effort involved to save the kind of money required, is college for my three kids really the best use of a million dollars?

In ten, fifteen years, will college even be … college?

I don’t have all the answers, but here are three questions to consider as you’re giving the old college try to … saving for college (and how I got to plan A above).

Will my kid benefit from a brand-name degree?

I’ve said it before—on Friday, in fact—not everyone is going to get the same kind of value from attending a prestigious university. Research bears this out, too. A paper by Stacy Dale, a mathematician at Mathematica Policy Research, and Alan Krueger, formerly an economist at Princeton University, looked at subsequent salaries of students with similar test scores who did and did not get into their “top-choice” (i.e. more selective) schools. Their finding? The value of the more prestigious school was “indistinguishable from zero.”

Will my 18-year-old be a good steward of this investment?

I know exactly one person who knew what she wanted to do at an early age and went on to do exactly that. The rest of us? I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. My husband meandered through his first semester of college at a private school on the East Coast, realized he was wasting his time and money, and dropped out to work on an organic farm. Don’t worry—he eventually graduated with honors from the UW-Madison and figured things out enough to marry me 😆.

Could this money be better spent elsewhere?

The difference between the cost of attending Stanford versus, say, the UW-Madison is stark—close to $50,000 per annum, assuming a student does not qualify for aid. There are a lot of things $200,000 can buy, outside of prestige. If I’ve done my job, my kids will know that, too.