PERSONAL FINANCE - Weighing in on college costs
My article last week on my personal college financing dilemma generated a maelstrom of responses.
More than 100 readers e-mailed to provide everything from sage advice to hearty criticism. A few suggested that I should not have written a book on paying for college until I had experienced it myself. To that, I'll say only that you don't need to have a baby to deliver one, but you may need to have one to understand how it feels.
By and large, the responses were warm, generous and helpful. They also indicated that there are many different "right" answers. Here are some excerpts.
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I was freaking out until somebody recommended a book called "Colleges That Change Lives" by Loren Pope. Small liberal arts colleges weren't even on our radar, but that changed. We visited several and fell in love with them. We told Caitlin she could go to a private college if she obtained merit money to defray the cost, and we narrowed our search to schools that offered these awards to people who didn't need financial aid. Caitlin ended up getting scholarships at five of the eight schools.
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Your daughter does not have to turn into a snob just because she goes to Georgetown, or a clothes horse either. If she has received solid values from her parents, she will understand the value of the gift of education you are giving her -- and the even more important gift of a lack of follow-on debt. If you did not teach her these things, it doesn't matter where she goes to school; her education will be worthless.
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If money were not a concern for our family, a private school would have been the first choice. But I have doubts that it would have been the best choice. We know other young people who went to Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The jury is still out on whether their education will benefit them more than (or even as much as) a UC education might have.
Of four roommates, Kendra is the only one who left UCLA without student loans. This has given her much freedom. She spent one year teaching English in a small village in Costa Rica. She just finished a master's degree in education at Columbia in New York and has started teaching. She does have student loans from Columbia, but they are manageable. She absolutely could not have followed her heart and become a teacher if she had undergraduate and graduate loans that could have easily exceeded $100,000.
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- Save Early and Even a Pricey College Is in Reach, Advisers Say Sep 17, 1989
- Education Tax Plan Advances in Senate Mar 14, 2001
- 2 Bills on Tomorrow's Tuition at Today's Prices Pushed Mar 11, 1988
