Precisely. We are in the sour spot because of our sense of responsibility, thank-you-very-much. Because what we need out of a school system-- and what our daughter is ENTITLED TO under federal law, incidentally-- is unreasonable. Necessary, but unreasonable.

In other words, if I worked and she were the responsibility of the school system? That would be adding to the burden (financially) of that system. Significantly. It would also place her at grave risk daily, and-- significantly again-- require everyone else to make modifications to their daily lives for her. Parents with, er... how to put this... more "self-sufficiency-driven" worldviews tend to tell us to "just homeschool." You know, rather than "punishing/inconveniencing" the rest of them. So we have. Only to be told that not having an extra 200-300K to pay for college (money which-- recall-- we COULD have now if I had been working and not educating our child at home) is our "fault" for making "bad choices."

So I get kind of irritable when I'm told that we've just PLANNED POORLY. I guess that applies to a lot of 2e kids, then. We "planned" poorly when we had kids that required extraordinary or intensive parenting.

There are things more important than income, and the health and safety of my child are among them.

My spouse left a lower-paying job in the public sector for the simple reason that it allowed us to maintain an income level that pays for our necessities (and not a LOT more than that) with a significant margin for error/catastrophe, but it leaves him in a toxic environment. We are already paying pretty dearly for doing the right thing.

We're going to pay again come time to pay the Registrar's office. This does feel deeply unfair in some ways, yes-- but I still haven't seen how our choices would have been "better" had we done things differently.

I, too, just don't care that much about money, but wish that it weren't a factor in college decisions for our daughter. It is. I dread this conflict with my DH, whose parents were emphatically on the "you get in, we'll find a way" bandwagon. It's no longer a prudent or realistic attitude at anything below the top 1% in SES, and we're not in that group-- and otherwise have no desire to be. To be clear, we wouldn't (quite) be in that group even if I did work full time.

The point, though, is that it does make the opportunities to Tiger Parent highly seductive, this particular conundrum.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.