You know those letters you get that tell you to starting to save now for the kids' college?
Here's a better idea: just quit your job.
Brown has joined Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Stanford and will offer free tuition to students whose families earn less than
$60,000 per year.
One way they can afford this is to increase tuition by 3.9%, inching ever
closer to the $50,000 mark for one year of tuition plus room and board (the New
York Times says the amount is $47,740). As my lovely wife says, cool - we'll
just stop working when the kids graduate high school.
I'm not saying free tuition for those who can't afford it is a bad thing. In
fact, it's quite good. But you wonder whether or not the financial aid folks
will take into account factors other than income, such as where the family
lives - it's just a tad more expensive to live in Manhattan than it is to live
in Sheboygan. It's also a fair question to ask just how many students will
actually be admitted who can't afford to pay. It's easy for a school to say
they'll take all comers in a press release, but what do the numbers look like?
Even Brown doesn't have the kind of endowment that Harvard does, and therefore
could not likely afford to have a freshman class full of folks who pay $0 for
their education. Also, is there a grade requirement, like there is with
scholarships, or is the formula purely income based? And what about private
wealth that isn't considered "income" on a tax return? I went to
school with someone whose family could afford to pay full freight, yet she
received a huge amount of financial aid because her father was good at
"fooling" the I.R.S. I'm still not completely clear how my mother
paid for my college education on her single-mom salary (I don't know what that
salary was, but let's just say she didn't exactly work at a hedge fund). I just
know that I graduated without a single loan. I worked part-time (about 20 hours
a week) while I was in school to earn extra cash for books (OK, and beer).
As a Manhattaner with two kids in private school, we're not saving for
college anymore. What's the point, when we're paying for school already? We
just figure we'll keep working until college is paid for and try to save for
retirement. Then, when the little buggers graduate, it's party time!
photo: Dorsetforyou.com
