When I was growing up it was impressed on me that college was the key, perhaps the only one, to any sort of professional or financial success. Neither of my parents attained a four-year degree, so it’s possible that their pressure, loving as it was, could have been because they perceived that they came up short academically. I never really gave it a second thought. My parents said I was going to college, so I was going to college. However, that’s not the mindset I plan to impart to my children.
They Deserve To Decide How They Want To Live Their Lives
The decisions my children make about their futures should not be predicated on my or my wife’s successes or lack thereof. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but if my children end up self-sufficient, independent, and conservative then we’ll accept the ‘Parents of the Year’ awards that will no doubt be presented to us.
If my children want to start a business or practice a trade, who am I to say that attending college is the best and only way to attain success? If they’d like to pursue a career in sales, why encourage them to wait for four years? And even though I would be worried sick, if any of them want to become a police officer, firefighter, or serve in the military, college wouldn’t necessarily be the best path forward.
None of that is to say I wouldn’t give my two cents. After all, there should be no one in the first 20 years of a child’s life besides a mother and father who have nothing but their best interests at heart. We as parents need to trust that our parenting sets our kids up for success. This applies unless they want a degree in art, film, or theatre. At that time, all bets are off the board.
The Vast Majority Of Jobs Don’t Even Require A College Degree
As the well-known job board, Indeed, noted recently, the majority of jobs posted don’t even list educational requirements and the percentage that require a college degree dropped from over 20% to less than 18%. It’s not hard to understand after realizing that fewer people are attending college and post-secondary institutions are making massive cuts and, in some cases, are shutting down altogether.
And it’s not just the private sector refining their job postings to meet hiring needs. In my own home state of Ohio, last year we joined many states in eliminating college degree requirements for most government jobs. More and more employers understand that degrees in liberal arts, women’s studies, African studies, and other chickensh*t courses of study aren’t preparing young people for the shifting economy.
The Cost Of That Piece Of Paper Is Outrageous
As with anything else the government touches, the decision in 1965 to guarantee student loans massively increased the cost of education for everyone–regardless if you took out a loan or paid for the degree outright. Since that time, the cost of attending college increased between 139% for public schools and 187% for private schools.
Once the government backs these loans, colleges and universities do what any of us would do when given a blank check with no accountability or consequences–take advantage of the gift. That has led to the inability of most people in their 20s and 30s to do things that used to be a given–like buying a house, getting married, having children, and being able to buy really anything without being gouged–thanks to an untenable student loan crisis.
These Damn Student Loans
The average student loan borrower owes nearly $38,000 in loans. And there are people who owe that money without having a degree to show for it. And half of those people enter their 40s while still owing $20,000. That means the average student loan borrower must make 120 payments of $450 before their loans are paid off. How many 22-year-olds do you know who can afford rent, a car, groceries, save to buy a house, and save for retirement on top of a $450 loan payment?
And before we go on, student loan debt relief is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. The idea of forcing American taxpayers, more than 60% of whom do not possess a college degree, to pay for someone else’s poor educational and financial decisions is preposterous. We need to focus on addressing the issues that created the debt in the first place. Let’s start with holding institutions of higher education, many of which have hundreds of millions and even billions in endowments, accountable for the role they played in fu*king up our economy.
The student loan crisis tells me a few things as I prepare to talk to my children about college in the years to come: 1) too many people are attending college before coming up with a plan about how to make their investment pay off, 2) there are too many useless degrees, 3) the average American has no idea how compound interest works, 4) the average American doesn’t have a use for college, 5) student loan debt relief is not a long-term solution to either the student loan crisis or rising cost of tuition, and 6) as I am writing this paragraph I am beginning to hate the idea of my kids going to college.
How I Plan To Help
Like most folks, I was not fortunate enough to have my parents pay for any part of my loans. My mom worked at a university, so I got a discount on tuition, but I still graduated with $25,000 in debt. While that debt was paid off a year ago, it was a long and windy path. One I don’t want my children to travel.
I don’t know if I’ll be in the financial position to pay for the entirety of my children’s expenses if any/all of them choose to attend college, but I’m trying to do my part to give them a head start. As I wrote in my article detailing how I spent the child tax credit money, $500 of the $2,000 I get for each child goes into their 529 account. I also create our monthly budgets based on 24 paychecks each year. The other two paychecks add to our savings, increase our investment accounts, and, now, add $1,000 to each child’s 529 account during the year. If nothing changed and no additional money was added, my children would, assuming an average of 9% interest each year, have around $65,000 in their respective accounts by age 18. Will that be enough to fully fund a college education in two decades? No, but it’s a head start.
And if any of them don’t choose to go to college then that money can be used for things like career development, a downpayment on a house, or even seed money to start a business.
It’s Never Too Early To Think About Your Child(ren)’s Future
People growing up today have it harder than ever from a financial standpoint. The dream that many of us had of owning a house, getting married to a smoke show wife, banging out a few kids, and retiring is becoming less obtainable. And, in a weird way, you’re seemingly less likely to get any of those things if the only way you can attend college is by taking on debt.
Unfortunately, there is still this pervasive thinking in many circles that you must attend college to make something of yourself. That won’t change until we as fathers take more of an interest in what our kids want to accomplish in the future (except for art, film, or theatre), rather than what we think they should want (anything besides art, film, or theatre). Stop sending them off to school before they’ve determined what they actually want to study. Stop encouraging them to take out loans to get a piece of paper because, ” that’s what they’re supposed to do.” And for all that is holy, stop fu*king forcing them to go to college.
