Career and Kids

The cost of a good education

by mike on December 18th, 2006

There was a post recently over on Island Life about whether or not you would be disappointed with paying a lot for your kid’s college and then have them not use that education to lock down a big job.

It is an interesting thing to think about and greatly influences how we as parents must manage our finances when our kids are young.

Here’s my background.

I dropped out of college after two years and no degree. I served four years in the Air Force. Then, I came out and stumbled into a programming job despite my lack of experience or education. Since then, I have completed a general studies associate’s degree and do not currently have any plans of going for a bachelor’s degree. I spent several years working myself into better paying and better experience jobs and am very happy with my current position and pay. My parents paid for some of my college, but I also earned academic scholarships to take care of a big bulk of the expense. When I dropped out, my parents made me pay off my student loans myself (which was fair since I had flunked out due to school burnout). I left that first round of college with about $8000 in student loans which I paid off shortly after leaving the military.

My wife earned a four year degree. She worked summers to pay for the fall and her parents paid for the spring. She lived at home all four years. She started a grad degree program and decided to quit early into the program. She left school with $0 in student loans. Then, she went and got a job in a totally unrelated field. She eventually switched to her current field, did some climbing into a really nice position and has parked there while working part time since the kids were born.

Neither one of us used our schooling for anything more than a entry on a job application. Even before I earned my AS degree, nobody ever questioned my lack of a degree.

We do not plan on going bankrupt to get our kids into an Ivy League school. There are very few jobs where your degree really makes that much of a difference.

I will be perfectly proud of my kids if they go to community college to get their AA/AS degree and then transfer to a state school to get their BA/BS degree and then enter the workplace as debt free as possible. Then, if they are looking to make the big bucks, they can climb the corporate ladder. I rarely see people that are rich because of where they decided to go to school. It might help doctors and such, but that’s about it.

Also, I rarely see people who are happy simply because their job pays well. But, I have seen a ton of people very unhappy because they have a ton of college debt and still have trouble finding good jobs. That goes both for the students and the parents who pay for the education.

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