Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Wasted Time

I think what ultramarina mentioned about freedom is very important to me anyway and I'd keep it in mind when supporting my DD with college and career choices/ideas. Often the huge debt, if you are looking at that possibility, does dictate the type of work that you have to go into when you graduate. You have to consider your personality and if you could tolerate it.

My DD wants to attend this particlar high school we drive past because it has the word "Technical" carved into the old facade. (And it's not a bad idea because they get kids ready for either a skilled job or a college program, it has a good reputation).

She wants a car, a part time job, and she might go to college part-time. I think she hears alot about college, college, college from her bunch of older cousins. She's only 8 and this is her idea. She has many years to decide and of course we would like her to have many options available and it's natural when you have a bright kid to think high like the Ivies. But she might just be on to something. She is very self-propelled and practical and I think, being very realistic, if she has the right tools and confidence she'll head where she instinctively needs to be. I want her to be safe and for her to feel productive and not compromised.

I think the general consensus here is that the Ivies have become a crap shoot.

Oh, and they take into account net assets, too.

I'm not making six figures, my wife makes less than five figures, and it tells me that it will still cost me over six figures to send my child to school there.

I think my daughter felt the same way about school. She went into kindergarten already reading and for a while she seemed to like school. She got awards for reading and math in elementary school. Teachers liked her. I heard only good things about her in elementary.

Then it all changed in middle school. School was boring. She hated math and didn't know why she needed to learn what she was being taught. She didn't like the way the teachers taught. She became a cheerleader. Academics wasn't important. I got phone calls from her teachers who told me she was a smart girl but she wasn't paying attention in class because she was spending too much time socializing. She went to a community college for a while but couldn't stand living where we live so she moved to Dallas at 19 and worked her way up into jobs that allowed her to live the lifestyle she wanted. She could afford to travel and live in a nice apartment. The really good job she has now required that she pass an employment test. She said it had a lot of math on it, including some algebra, and it was timed. She made a higher score than most of the other applicants who had earned college degrees. She got the job. Some of the people with college degrees didn't. She was glad that she had learned a lot of math at her previous job as an office manager for a small furniture company. She had to use a lot of math on that job. In high school she had no way of knowing what she would be doing five or ten years later. She didn't "plan" to work at any of the jobs she had as a young adult, she just took the best jobs she could find and learned as much as she could learn on those jobs. In my experience and hers there is just so much of life that cannot be planned so it is best to learn as much as you can possibly learn while you have the chance even if it is boring and even if it doesn't seem like you will ever use it. I am so glad that she is able to share her life experiences with her little brother. She is able to give him really good advice because of her experiences.

My 13-year-old son hates geometry and that is what he has been working on lately. We homeschool and I let him put off learning some of it the last few years. He took several months off from doing any math because he has to wear a painful brace all day, every day, and now in addition to dealing with that kind of pain he is doing three math lessons a day to catch up so he can be finished by June. So when you are thinking about the pain it is causing you, just know that it could be worse.

By the way, as a homeschool mom I am having to relearn math that I haven't done in a very long time and I have a son who is not satisfied with knowing how it is done, he wants to understand why. I was never taught why. I am too tired and too stressed to even try to figure out why, but he usually figures it out on his own while he is figuring out alternate ways of solving problems so that he can answer questions doing less writing than I have to do to get the same answer. He has dysgraphia, which is another pain.

We have learned to just push through the pain. If we can do it, so can you. It is worth it.

If you are looking for resources for more advanced math than calculating simple areas and circuferences, try:

patrickjmt

The Hippocampus - this
site also has psychology content

Brightstorm


You might want to brush up on those English skills, too. You can do so here:


Purdue's OWL

Hmm--that's a guarantee now, Bostonian? But perhaps only at the Ivies, with their endowments. Still. My kids are damned smart, and the older one is highly motivated (it's a little early to tell about Mr. 4), but I don't know if either will excel at the insane amount of hoop-jumping that now appears necessary to get into an Ivy. It's not impossible, but boy, I don't intend to count on it. And that's assuming they'd want to go to one. I probably wouldn't have gotten into any Ivys--I avoided AP calc and did not even take a science my senior year--but I also did not want to apply to them. I went to a very competitive HS that was geographically very close to an Ivy and I'd had enough of that whole scene.

I played around with Harvard's college costs calculator. It was pretty scary.

Here's one scenario: You live in an expensive state (NJ), have $100,000 in annual income, 5 kids, $20K in savings, and $300,000 equity in your house. Harvard estimates you should pay $23,600, with $3,000 from a student job at Harvard. That's $20,600. Take off $1,600 in summer job money, and $19,000 is left. Throw in plane fare to Boston and you're looking at about $20,000. If you have no equity, the estimate goes down to $12,600. So that means they expect you to pull a fair bit out of your house.

How realistic is this? I made these assumptions:

• You pay 12% Federal tax; FICA is 7.65%
• State tax is 12.2%
• You pay $2,000 a month for your house
• You pay 2.5% property tax on a house worth $400,000
• You spend $1,200 a month for food
• You spend another $1,000 a month for miscellaneous expenses like insurance for your two cars and your house, utilities, home consumables (cleaning supplies, pet food, etc.), clothing, phone bills, TV, gas for the cars etc.

At this point, what's left is way below $20,600 ($7,750), and you haven't paid for health insurance, medical expenses, and all that other stuff that comes up constantly, like sick pets, the oven died, my car needs new brakes, etc. etc. Let's just hope your roof and your cars have a lot of life left in them.

So Little Johnny will be taking out something like $20,000 in loans for year one, which, given the way costs increase every year, puts him well on the way to six-figure-debt when he's done. Unless you turn your house into an ATM and/or use all your savings to get through one year. If you try to pay back the lost equity in a year...well, you can't, so at least you'll have less equity (or no savings) next year when they do the calculation. Though your expenses and home equity debt will go up every year.

And if you have two kids in college, they only take $5,000 off their estimate. Hmm. That arithmetic doesn't work for me.

So the choice is for your kids to end up deep in debt or for you to end up with little or no home equity as you approach retirement. Great!

Sorry, that's broken. Our whole educational model is broken. College is a certification borderline-racket rather than a means to create thoughtful citizens who contribute to the nation, student loans are a multibillion dollar business, and you can't even discharge your debt if you die.

But everyone should go to college!




/rant

Great analysis Val. Its even worse from a net present value of the cost of the debt plus the HELOC.

Compare the cost of an Ivy education plus an MS vs a kid getting a Cisco cert right out of HS earned while in HS. By the age of the MS grad, the kid will be making six figures with no debt vs upper doubles and 200K in debt for the Ivy educated kid.

If the HS kid plays his cards right, he can finish his BS on the corporate dime then go get an MBA as well on the company dime. Playing his cards right the kid can be a CIO or CFO by 35 and again have no debt.

Or, take that equity and form his own firm vs the Ivy grad with little financial room to maneuver.

Student loan debt collection is a billion dollar business that's poised for exceptional growth in the future! So you can always get a job going after student load deadbeats.

"The debt collector on the other end of the phone gave Oswaldo Campos an ultimatum:

Pay $219 a month toward his more than $20,000 in defaulted student loans, or Pioneer Credit Recovery, a contractor with the U.S. Education Department, would confiscate his pay. Campos, disabled from liver disease, makes about $20,000 a year.

“We’re not playing here,” Campos recalled the collector telling him in December. “You’re dealing with the federal government. You have no other options.”

Campos agreed to have the money deducted each month from his bank account, even though federal student-loan rules would let him pay less and become eligible for a plan -- approved by Congress and touted by President Barack Obama -- requiring him to lay out about $50 a month. To satisfy Pioneer, Campos borrowed from friends, cut meat from his diet and stopped buying gas to drive his 82-year-old mother to doctor’s visits for her Parkinson’s Disease.

With $67 billion of student loans in default, the Education Department is turning to an army of private debt-collection companies to put the squeeze on borrowers. Working on commissions that totaled about $1 billion last year, these government contractors face growing complaints that they are violating federal laws by insisting on stiff payments, even when borrowers’ incomes make them eligible for leniency."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...ors-profiting-from-student-loan-woe.html

No one should count on it. The Harvard student newspaper reports that "Regular Admits May See 3% Acceptance Rate" http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/3/27/three-percent-admission-2016/ . But my point is that people should not assume that the net cost of attending the Ivies will be higher than that of attending state schools.

The equity in your primary residence does not affect your expected contribution. The calculator at http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/ has a box for "real estate equity", but the accompanying note says "This should represent the fair market value of your ownership share of any real estate (excluding your primary residence) not already reflected in the Business/Farm section, less your share of any debts."

Harvard says at http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do that
"We do not consider home equity or retirement accounts as resources in our determination of a family contribution, and aid packages do not include any loans."