Washington Post has an article on college costs. (This link may require registration. Try Bugmenot for a login. But FWIW, the WaPo does not spam you. I’ve been registered for years and received nothing.)
I think that it’s fine for kids to go to a community or local college to save money, but the flipside is that they have to do extremely well there to go onward to a presitigious university. Transferring into a good school can be difficult if you get crappy grades during your first two years. Trust me, it does matter if you go to a good school. JP Morgan does not recruit kids from second tier and third tier schools.
I’m an academic elitist. I always have been. But my family has a good track record of academic work and high academic achievement was always expected of us. My parents also recognized that the bonds you make at school last a lifetime. Social networking in college counts, which is why I’m not always thrilled by the suggestion of going to community college first. I think you lose out on the bonds made in dorm life your first two years. Two of the weddings I attended last year were for college friends. They lived in the dorm next door my freshman year. I hardly have friends from college that I made during my junior and senior years.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not always convinced that college is for everybody. I think I could have just as easily skipped college and still ended up where I am. There was only one or two jobs that cared where I went to school or that I went at all. Mostly they cared about what I could do and my prior work experiences. In fact, the programming skills I do have are from taking night classes at community college.
The better trick is to take lots of AP classes and try to get as much college credit for them as possible. However, I have to say that my university didn’t give me credit for any of mine. You’re more likely get credit for a science class than say, Greek.
The best advice in the article is to open a 529 for yourself and then transfer it to your future child later on. I suppose after that your child should transfer it to the next sibling if that’s possible. I’m thinking about this since I could always use the money for graduate school in the future.
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Actually, the State of California has a rule stating that if a student attends a Junior College and meets a certain GPA limit (not too high, I think something like a 3.3),that University of California (the UCs) MUST accept the student as a transfer student. This is pretty good deal considering that JCs are generally easier and much much cheaper. This is for ALL UCs… my sister’s boyfriend transferred from a JC in Santa Cruz to Berkeley. And Berkeley has a dorm that is for transfer students-only so that they don’t have to miss out on the dorm life. I am sure a lot of other universities have set up similar programs to help the transfer students adjust. So if your goal is to go to a UC and you live in California, it is not a bad option to transfer from a JC.
But the flip side of it is that I think this generally works for public schools only. I know that my undergraduate institution accepts maybe 2 or 3 transfer students a year, making it extremely competitive for those transfer applicant so we have not seen any JC students transfer to my school. Also, many of my classmates from high school decided to attend JCs for this reason but got distracted by working full time while attending school, and are now on what I call a 10-year track. Some are still working on their AA.
Thanks for that info on 529 though, I wish I had the foresight and had opened one up for myself years ago to fund my schooling next year!
This is such a complicated subject–I’ve been trying to comment for awhile and I’m being totally inarticulate in trying to explain what I think about it. Basically, it boils down to that I think the idea that everyone must have a college degree is tremendously damaging–it seems to me to fetishize a simulacrum, a set of watered-down values. The idea that a college degree is always good (always legitimates its holder) is the result of the recognition of the fact that education is a gatekeeper to power, so there’s some sort of status that goes with the degree. But a nursing degree doesn’t earn you that status. It comes from cultural capital: from the shared experiences and shared language that exclusive colleges create.
If parents want their children to have “an education” in that sense, in the way that will move them up the social ladder, they do need to know that telling their child to spend two years at a community college and transfering to state school is simply not going to accomplish that goal. If parents simply want their children to be able to start a white-collar life debt-free, then state school can certainly get the job done.
I’m also an educational elitist in some way: I believe that non-vocational education is beneficial in and of itself. I also have to recognize that it’s socioeconomically beneficial. (I went to high school with a whole bunch of first-generation American kids whose parents worked 80 hours a week to make sure their kids, my friends, could go to Ivy League or Little Ivy schools when they got in, basically in recognition of this: that it would advance their children socially.)
I think, really, parents have to understand what the point of college would be in their child’s life before deciding how to treat college, personally, interpersonally, and financially.
I work in the music business and lots of my interns or young kids I know ask me why they should bother going to college, since you don’t “need” a college degree to work in this business (although really I would argue that point anyway, but that’s a different story). Anyway, I tell them that college is more than just classes – its a chance to try things without worrying too much about failing for four years. Specifically for the kids I know, its a chance to work at the college radio station, or organize a concert for the student activities board, or put on a music festival, without the actual risk of the real world (finances, attendence, etc.). It does not seem to me that JCs, which are usually mostly commuter colleges, offer the same opportunities for that kind of learning.