In reply to Marjorie Suddard :
I'm unsure if debt free is the right strategy. I wouldn't be where i am without a good helping of the motivation it provides.
In reply to Marjorie Suddard :
I'm unsure if debt free is the right strategy. I wouldn't be where i am without a good helping of the motivation it provides.
I am of the mindset that the university one goes to is not as important as the degree or how you apply yourself.
I graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I switched to ME after doing three years of Architecture and having a pretty bad experience with one of the teachers there. Today I am thank full for that idiot as I think the ME degree was a better fit for me.
Anyways, I paid for college myself with zero help from anyone. I also paid for the whole deal as an out of state student. Back then it was $400/credit and a BSME was ~128 credits IIRC.
How did I do it?
I went to school either early in the morning or late at night. So it was either 8-10:30am or 6-9:40pm. The rest of the day was studing or sleeping.
From 1997 until 2004 when I graduated I had 1 day off. I will never forget it, it was a Sunday.
I graduated in 2004 with zero debt, all my school paid for. and luckily with a job lined up as I had done an internship the last semester and they liked me enough to create a position for me.
This is not a pat in the back but more than anything to show that if you really want to better yourself you can do it. My parents were not in a position to help me other than a place to sleep in, and many times not even that. But in the end it all worked out.
I just checked the rates at FAU, its $201/credit hour and ~128 hours for an Engineering degree - $26k. I have three kids and I will help them as much as I can. Hopefully none of them will have to work while they go to school. If they want to study, whatever it is that they chose I am sure between my wife and I and them we will figure out how to get it done.
Also my situation was pretty extreme but other examples:
My brother graduated high school and was given a bright future scholarship that paid 75% of tuition at FAU. He also graduated with a BSME with 0 debt. Worked his ass off with me.
My wife graduated from FAU with a BSME as well. Found work and got her MSME paid for by her employer. Her parents were able to pay for her tuition, so she did not have to work.
$68,000 Thats what Its going to cost to send my daughter to a private liberal arts school for one year here in Massachusetts. Granted she got a great award to go there, which makes the final cost very close to going to a state school. If she had been a boy, there was no way I would be paying for school. She/he would be riding next to me in the plumbing truck. World needs more plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and people that want to work hard, and a lot less liberal arts educated snowflakes whining about how the world is broken. Even if she leaves there and becomes a teacher, how is she ever going to earn as much as a real estate agent that has zero college background? I offered to keep paying for everything and let her stay here for 4 more years. She could work and save, and have no bills. After 4 years she would have 100K plus in the bank and zero debt. Instead, she chose to go to school, and rack up debt. I don't get it.
Education in Canada is significantly cheaper than it is in the US, but still, even the Canadian University system has joined a long list of other institutions that have crossed the line from symbiotic to parasitic when it comes to collecting their share of the consumer's income. I just finished four years of basically paying for a new car for my daughter for four years.
I have both a liberal arts degree and an electrical engineering degree. The engineering degree got me jobs, the liberal arts degree got me success at those jobs.
Currently, it is my generation that is still pushing kids into University; even knowing the low short term return in investment, I see value in the contacts that can be made. With the low returns on investment that our current generation is seeing I can see where enrollment in Universities might fall off in a generation.
Pete
I had a retired guy that worked with me part time to limit how much drinking he did. 30 years as a union carpenter. No loans, no weekend work and 8 hour days. Retired at 52. He is one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. I learned quite a bit from him concerning people , life and business. He’s in been into boating like we are into cars. If he’s not out on the lake he’s restoring a boat. The trades can be good.
The problem is, not every kid is suited for the trades. Awkward kids, girls, women, gays, blacks, etc, they can encounter lots of pushback in the trades, at least in the USA. In most cases, to get started in the trades you've gotta be doing coke, because it's hustle hustle hustle all day long, they don't want your brains, you are there to be the whipping post. I had the brains to work in the trades, but heat-related headaches and very little interest in sucking the dee of the foreman had me learn right quick that I didn't like someone watching over me all day, judging me by how hard I was sweating.
The one summer during college I worked alongside a guy who had to bail mid-summer in order to get back surgery. I was more or less his replacement. I worked by myself, digging out a dirt basement, for another month until some high-school wrestlers showed up and ran circles around me. Decided I was done with construction work and got into another trade-heavy industry: utilites.
Sometimes you don't need to be the one doing the trade to benefit from the trade industry. I make more than just about all the guys on our gas pipeline construction crew, aside from maybe the welders.
Oh, and I went to community college, had a single semester paid for, flunked out, went to work, and took 7 years, roughly $40k and two schools to finally get a Bachelors in a mostly worthless field of Geography. Luckily I found the one technical sector of geography to build skills in, and here I am.
I graduated with about $26k in debt, as I got a Pell Grants and a small scholarship to pay for about $10k of my total 7 years of school.
Best way to save money on education? Live with your parents during the troublesome years. First 1-2 years of college is often a very expensive lesson in drinking and living in a college dorm.
mazdeuce - Seth said:In reply to kazoospec :l
...goes well 3-4 years in a medical school of some sort (animal or people).
The context of this discussion is, at least in part, financial responsibility. I definitely wouldn't recommend veterinary school for anyone that has to borrow money to get the degree. While they're certainly other considerations to take into account when making that decision, it's definitely not worth it financially.
I neglected to mention in my earlier post, that (at least where I am), your average degree salary job and your average trades job bring in about the same salary.
I still caution kids year after year - "Don't go to University to find yourself. Get a job. Figure it out while you're making money. If you want to find yourself, buy a Volkswagen Bus, grow some dreadlocks, and learn to play the guitar."
Followed closely with "Have you been up North? I have have. If you're going up North to make money, don't squander all of it on beer and women. Everyone who goes up North makes money hand over fist, and they come back with a big truck that needs tires and balljoints, and they have nothing else."
Everything you need to know is here:
We have 5 kids thanks to twins.. We're not going to be able to give our kids a free ride, but both of us have made it quite well without.
One thing to remember: max out your retirement before funding school; you can always get a loan for school, but you can't get one to retire :)
SkinnyG said:02Pilot said:I teach in a small private college with an economically diverse population. Much as I am an advocate of a traditional liberal arts education, I also am the first to say that it is not worth the commitment in time and money for everyone. For students who can benefit from it and who want to do so, fine; for those uncertain of what their path might be going forward or who are not inclined to academic work, there are a lot of other options out there that should be given serious consideration. The conventional wisdom that college is a necessity is based on a flawed set of assumptions and generally works to the detriment of almost everyone.
THIS. In freakin' SPADES.
I teach high school. High school is all about pushing you to University. Almost ZERO students I have taught come out of a degree with a job in that field.
I've also crunched numbers (locally), that I share with my students EVERY SEMESTER.
Taking local cost of books/tuituon (UBC-O), assume you live at home and make zero money (not realistic, but let's roll with it), taking into account the average salary of a degree field, and compare it to starting off in a trade.
Unless you make 25% MORE MONEY in a degree field, you will NEVER catch the money you make in a TRADE after 32 years of working.
Your mileage may vary.
This times a million. I remember reading an article that the average college graduate makes 15k a year more than the person without a degree and is an average of 300k in debt. This means you work 20 years to break even. If you start working at 22 after college that means that means the degree pays off when you are 42. Thats insane. I havent looked into exactly how true that statement is but if thats true....
Trades are a great option, an amazing amount of people get degrees and cant get any sort of job, where in the trades you can pretty much walk into most construction jobs for double minimum wage with zero experience, tools or skills. Then you get paid to learn a skill that you can take anywhere and make a decent living.
The pushing everyone to get a degree in anything is stupid IMO, it kind of skips over the original idea of going to college so you can have gainful employment in order to support yourself. There is a a not-wanting-to-work factor in a lot of the newer generations but the average millenial does want to work.....its just the ones that would rather make minimum wage working in a store in an easier job than work in say....concrete and make double but work way harder that makes everyone say millenials are lazy
I was one of 3 people in my new hire orientation for my first job out of college (2012). We all had similar degrees. Mine came from a satellite campus of a state school, and the other 2 new hires got theirs from a fancy private school up north. My degree cost me about $10k/yr, theirs cost about $30k/yr and we ended up with the same job. The name of the institution on that expensive piece of paper has never been less important. Higher Ed is an investment in your future. Like any investment however, you have to make sure that the payoff is likely to exceed the initial investment or it's a waste of time/money. Getting the degree in the most cost efficient way possible only makes that investment more likely to payoff.
I'm not against the trades, at all, but there are 16 million college students in the US right now. The trades can't absorb them. There aren't enough good jobs available for young people no matter which track they take, but that's a completely different discussion.
My wife has a friend who works in academic advising and behind closed doors he'll tell you that 1/3 of the kids he sees have no business in school at all. Rather than let them flunk out, the school bends over backwards to assure "retention". C's might get degrees but those degrees don't get jobs, in general, even though all of those degrees cost the same.
In reply to Floating Doc:
lt's rare for me to meet a veterinarian who doesn't eventually say that they would have been better off in human medicine. Both of my parents are vets, I've met a lot of them. As part of the money sit down with my niece we had a chat about that and keeping her eyes wide open.
It seems to me that much of the discussion here illustrates the nature of the problem quite well, and mirrors a conversation I have with my students on day one of every semester. Clearly there is an assumption that a degree is a necessary prerequisite for a higher level of economic success. This is false, and indeed based on the cost of college is often counter-productive, as accumulated debt impedes students' progress after graduation.
The larger issue, however, and the one we struggle with as instructors, is that a liberal arts education was never intended to be about economic advancement. The point, in theory anyway, is to allow students the opportunity to develop as people, to be exposed to a wide variety of knowledge and the objective reasoning process used to achieve it, and to thus become active, informed participants in a free society. While there is some overlap, the objectives of most students have coming in and the purposes of the curriculum to which they are exposed are frequently widely divergent. Making clear to students the purposes of what they are being asked to learn helps them to clarify their decision to attend, though in my case at least I am only able to do so after they have made that choice.
Note that I am not suggesting this is universal nor always achievable. It is the approach I and some of my colleagues take, however, because it is the traditional basis of education in our society. I will not discuss or debate modern campus politics, which are well-removed from the basic point I'm making.
I recall a conversation with my dad one time when I was a teenager. We were out one bitterly cold day ice skating at the local pond. Weird as it sounds, we got into a talk about college and careers. I don't recall the exact conversation but the crux of it was, if you're going to college, you're going to study something that has a 'payback'. My dad was an accountant; as far as he was concerned I either needed to go into business, law, medicine, or engineering.
I did the last one. Graduated in 1999 with $17,000 worth of 1999 debt from a private technical school. Paid that off in about 10 years. Then decided I wanted my master's degree. Once again, I had a choice- business or engineering. Did the master's in engineering- this time, had a full time job, went to school nights, and the employer paid for it. My total out of pocket for my master's was $0, it took me 4 years.
College can be good for a lot of things. It can teach life skills beyond even what the degree is teaching you. But, man, for what they're charging nowadays, it's a really, really hard sell. Even in a field like engineering- when I graduated, the median starting salary of a mech-E was about $45,000. College tuition at my school was $19k/ year (not including room, board, books, etc). Now, 20 years later, starting salary for a mech-E is about 60k. Meanwhile, my school's tuition is $45k/ year.
Unless a bunch of boomers start dying off quickly and leaving their $500,000 McMansions to their kids, and some magic economic hand waving takes place, I don't see how a whole generation is going to be able to pay for college and start a life. Sometimes I feel like, at 41, I'm on the trailing edge of the boomer wave, the last group of people who had a reasonable chance of getting through college without crippling debt, and being able to save and buy a house and start a family and do the whole baseball and apple pie thing.
Fueled by Caffeine said:In reply to Marjorie Suddard :
I'm unsure if debt free is the right strategy. I wouldn't be where i am without a good helping of the motivation it provides.
This. DD#1 was an excellent student and got a lot of grants, plus she went to our big state university. We could have gotten her out with a bachelor's, debt free.
BUT: we thought it was important that she have some skin in the game, too. So we paid most, and had her borrow about $3,000 per year. Once she got out successfully, for a graduation present, we repaid about half of that on her behalf. She paid the rest off herself within about 2 years of graduation.
To the OP: tuition is one thing, but room and board are another. Most schools require freshmen to live in on-campus housing and have a big meal plan. I understand that idea and even agree with it. But kick that E36 M3 to the curb as soon as they are sophomores. Even in our insane local housing market, I could rent bedrooms in a multi-student apartment for 12 months, and give each DD $300 a month for expenses, and STILL save at least $3000 per year over 2 semesters in a dorm double room plus the cheapest meal plan.
I went to an out of state State university that was has been consistently rated as one of the best values for schools in the country and my parents had used my grandmother's estate to save a decent amount of money for me in a mutual fund (although the crash in 2008 while I was in school sure didn't help that). Even with a "full tuition" scholarship (15 hours a semester covered during the spring and fall semesters), coming in with 12hours of AP credit and that nest egg, I had to take out a very small loan to finish college
02Pilot said:The larger issue, however, and the one we struggle with as instructors, is that a liberal arts education was never intended to be about economic advancement. The point, in theory anyway, is to allow students the opportunity to develop as people, to be exposed to a wide variety of knowledge and the objective reasoning process used to achieve it, and to thus become active, informed participants in a free society. While there is some overlap, the objectives of most students have coming in and the purposes of the curriculum to which they are exposed are frequently widely divergent. Making clear to students the purposes of what they are being asked to learn helps them to clarify their decision to attend, though in my case at least I am only able to do so after they have made that choice.
Aye, but there's the rub. How can something that's not ostensibly about economic advancement only be available with those with the means to pay for it?
I'm not suggesting that college be free. Anything 'free' essentially has zero value. More to the point, I think the universities, if they truly believe what you've written above, have an obligation to keep said education as affordable as possible. The exorbitant spending lately on largely fluff projects (not to mention all the extra and largely unnecessary overhead and staff expenditures) is borderline immoral. Case in point- my college recently spent $140 Million on an media and arts center. Was that the best use of that money, while tuition was more than doubling in the last 20 years?
The trades aren't for everybody, and neither is college. An intelligent person with the proper apptitude, who's willing to work can excel in either area. One really nice benefit of the trades however is that they can't be outsourced or automated. That might prove to be a very big deal moving forward.
Antihero said:Trades are a great option, an amazing amount of people get degrees and cant get any sort of job, where in the trades you can pretty much walk into most construction jobs for double minimum wage with zero experience, tools or skills. Then you get paid to learn a skill that you can take anywhere and make a decent living.
My nephew is not quite 30, and makes a good living as an electrician. He has a house, and some toys, but he is pretty smart with his money. The down side of this: he also has chronic, serious back pain. Another 25 years of working is not going to make that any better. Most of the 45-50 year old tradespeople I know look like they're at least 5 years older.
I am not anti-trade. Although I am a desk jockey, I work in the construction industry. I agree college is not a requirement, or even a good idea for everybody. But there is something to be said for working inside with your brain instead of outside with your brain and your brawn (or lack thereof).
Duke said:To the OP: tuition is one thing, but room and board are another. Most schools require freshmen to live in on-campus housing and have a big meal plan. I understand that idea and even agree with it. But kick that E36 M3 to the curb as soon as they are sophomores. Even in our insane local housing market, I could rent bedrooms in a multi-student apartment for 12 months, and give each DD $300 a month for expenses, and STILL save about $3000 per year over 2 semesters in a dorm plus the cheapest meal plan.
THIS. My first 2 years of college I had to be on the room + board plan. Room was $5k/ year and meal plans started around $3000/ year. $8000 per year- well, actually more like 10 months. Again, this was back in the late 90's. Junior and Senior years I rented a 1 bedroom apartment for $350/ month and my weekly grocery bills were around $40. (Mac n cheese- 10 boxes for a dollar on sale.) Lots of people got together and would rent a 4 bedroom between 3 or 4 people for $600 a month. Even with my "extravagant" private apartment, I was still saving roughly half the cost of room and a meal plan.
02Pilot said:I teach in a small private college with an economically diverse population. Much as I am an advocate of a traditional liberal arts education, I also am the first to say that it is not worth the commitment in time and money for everyone. For students who can benefit from it and who want to do so, fine; for those uncertain of what their path might be going forward or who are not inclined to academic work, there are a lot of other options out there that should be given serious consideration. The conventional wisdom that college is a necessity is based on a flawed set of assumptions and generally works to the detriment of almost everyone.
The problem is that it seems like a lot of places are getting so that they won't hire you if you have a college degree. A good example was my father. Right out of high school he was basically told he could either get a job or join the service, but his family couldn't put him through college. At 19 he started as a machinist for Bendix Aerospace. He then worked as a machine operator for over 10 years, then got bumped to a CNC programmer for another 10 years, essentially functioning as a manufacturing engineer. Then the company he was working for at the time started going downhill, so he started hunting around for jobs. He applied at 4 or 5 different outfits and every one of them told him the same thing "Wow, you've got a ton of experience, more than anyone else who has applied, and seem very knowledgeable. But we won't hire anyone without a college degree."
I feel it can be affordable if people are sensible about it. We are in Michigan which is well in the lower half of states when it comes to higher education and the funding is down over 20% in the last 10 years thanks to short sightedness in Lancing. People have to look at the whole picture.
With the eldest the whole life plan went off the rails with her becoming a parent. What we always told her was we'd pay 1/3, her other dad could pay 1/3 and she had to pay 1/3. She's working full time, raising a kid, putting money away to send him to private school (Waldorf school as we sent her and her sister too) and paying her share of the tuition. We saved some, but not enough as we were also paying private school tuition at the same time, but are providing her a lease car instead and so far she's debt free.
The youngest is about to start her senior year at high school. To be fair we told her we'd cover 2/3's and she had to cover 1/3. She's planning on duel enrollment at the local community collage and local public 4 year collage (they have a program specifically set up to cover that) She will do all the pre-req's and set courses at the CC and the other stuff at the 4 year. With her GPA she's easily going to get 2/3s of her tuition covered by scholarship so her out of pocket will be $0.
If you live in any kind of large metropolitan area there are normally several choices of four year undergrad collages and many community collages. Why anyone would choose to go away, out of state or private, especially if they plan on a post grad degree is beyond me in this day and age. Where you get your Masters or Doctorate is far more important than your undergrad. Paying room and board on top of tuition is to me, plain dumb. Stay at home, work and pay as you go. Both girls will be going on to grad school (vet and Paleontologist respectively) and both plan to do that at the top two state schools in Michigan. That will be harder, but both will be working.
The current model conning kids, especially those who are the first to go to higher education in their families, into signing up for loans to cover a four year degree plus room and board is a criminal gig.
Floating Doc said:mazdeuce - Seth said:In reply to kazoospec :l
...goes well 3-4 years in a medical school of some sort (animal or people).
The context of this discussion is, at least in part, financial responsibility. I definitely wouldn't recommend veterinary school for anyone that has to borrow money to get the degree. While they're certainly other considerations to take into account when making that decision, it's definitely not worth it financially.
This is the truth. If anyone needs someone to talk to a kid wanting to be a vet, my wife is willing to try dissuade them. She's an equine vet and her schooling was mostly paid by her parents. Even though she is a doctor, she doesn't make doctor money, I can tell you that! My buddy drove a fork truck with a ton of overtime hours and took in over $100k in a year. And in this area, that's a lot.
I graduated in 2004 from a state school with $27k-ish worth of tuition loans. Just paid them off last year. We are fairly aggressive with Wisconsin's 529 savings plan. That's why the Renault isn't on the top of the "Latest Topics" list. lol
I'm also in the club of "get a degree that has the same name as the job title you want". I know that's a bit simplistic but there is some truth to it since you would never go to a trade or join an union if you didn't think you wanted to work there.
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