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.