As we enter another school year, many of us have kids starting or close to finishing high school. If this is your first time ushering your child into high school, you (and your child) may be a little breathless about all the information the school administrations give you right off the bat.
Your child has to figure out a class schedule, make sure she gets all the requirements to graduate, maybe pick a track for electives like STEM or music/theater, not to mention the push for INVOLVEMENT in clubs, sports, and extracurriculars to pad that school resume, all in the name of “getting into college.”
If you’re like a lot of us, you likely have other children in other grades simultaneously and you’re having to navigate them through school supplies and all the fall stuff that comes with a new grade.
In the middle of all that, there’s this looming feeling that time is running out. You only have X number of days left with your teenager at home. If she’s a junior or senior, that number shrinks rapidly. While on the one hand it’s exciting to tour colleges (if that’s in your child’s future) and think about launching, on the other hand (especially for parents), there are a LOT of dollar signs that come with the next stage.
If you haven’t thought about it earlier (like, started a college account when your kid was born), you’re sure thinking about it now and maybe panicking at today’s price tags. We want to try to take your stress down a notch, or at least give you some place to start when it comes to trying to pay for college.
Joining us as our guest on today’s episode is BRAD BALDRIDGE, a college funding specialist and college planning expert. Brad’s a blogger and host of the TAMING THE HIGH COST OF COLLEGE podcast and he’s been sharing his college planning insights with clients, subscribers, and listeners for 20 years. Thanks for being with us!
Brad has gone through the college process with two of his three children, so he’s learned the ropes on a personal level.
Bonnie & Renee have each sent their 2 kids (4 total) to college, and they’ve all managed to graduate undergrad debt free. (Grad school is a difft story & maybe we can talk about that.)
**Let’s just start with the basics: as a parent, how do I get started planning for college? Do I even really NEED to plan for that? I’m just trying to pay the mortgage and keep food on the table.
**What if we didn’t or couldn’t think about saving for college until our kid was already halfway thru school? What if we just couldn’t at all (single parent or low income family, 56% of Americans are unable to cover an unexpected bill of $1000. Never mind fund a college education!!)
**My kid is so smart & he wants to go to MIT or one of the Ivies. Is that totally off the table? Will I squash his dreams/future if we don’t get a second mortgage for that?
What are some of the top strategies you recommend for saving and paying for college? 529? Should we NOT do family things while our kids are home (big vacations, really limited Christmases, etc.) b/c we’re saving so much for the someday of college?
Lots of parents worry that paying for college will wipe out or delay their retirement. (There are no scholarships for retirement!) We’re supposed to sacrifice for our kids, right? Give them everything so they can have a better life? How can families balance these two competing financial goals?
How much of a role do you recommend the student having in the $$ planning/discussion?
What’s better: public or private? Given the costs, are private universities even attainable for the average family?
One of the big surprises—if you’ve ever toured a campus—is that the price of college isn’t what they see on school websites. Not that there’s a bait and switch, exactly, but what should parents really expect to pay?
Talk scholarships. Guidance counselors really beat the “applying for scholarships” drum. Aside from the automatic ones a lot of schools offer based on ACT/SAT scores (merit scholarships), you’ll start getting a lot of emails from sites like FastWeb or Niche.com with pages of scholarships you can apply for.
There are some “no essay” ones, but many require an essay or project, etc., and as any parent of a junior or senior knows, those can be some of the most stress-filled years of school ALREADY with AP courses, ACTs, trying to work a job, and applying for/touring colleges. Is it worth it to actually spend time on more essays, etc.? I gotta wonder what the odds are or if it’s like playing the lottery? What’s the ROI here?
Talk ROI in general. I had a kid in undergrad and a kid in a professional school during the past couple of years (2020-21), and I know a lot of parents had kids who entered colleges during the pandemic, who really struggled with the fact that college campuses couldn’t be what they traditionally had been. (lots of loneliness, isolation, classes online with little interaction).
A lot of people also maybe realized—for some kids—the online school worked just fine, and they’ve started to ask why they were actually paying thousands of dollars for what they could get in their living room. (Granted, “the college experience” is meant for more than just classroom time.)
Mike Rowe—philosophy, that trade jobs are VALUED and NEEDED and maybe the classic “liberal arts” education isn’t giving students what they need to succeed in today’s world…???