«   |   »

Affluent parents should make their kids pay some college costs

by Grace

A new study from Bank of America reports that 47% of Americans with more than $250,000 in assets won’t pick up the full cost of their kids’ college degrees.

I’m actually surprised that it’s not a higher percentage.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents said that limiting their financial support for their kids’ educational expenses would teach them responsibility.

Zac Bissonnette, author of Debt-Free U: How I Paid For An Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents, writes that working is preferable to taking on debt.

There is considerable research that suggests that working during college will not hurt academic performance and may actually improve it. And, it can give students valuable work experience that will help them land jobs later on.

But there are also unwise ways to make your kids help pay for college….  Debt is too abstract to really impact a student’s approach to college. You’re not helping your kid by making him borrow a bunch of money for college; in fact, you may be pushing him into a debt load that will leave his career options deeply constrained when he graduates — forcing him to take the first thing that comes along (to make payments) rather than being able to plot a long-term career based on abilities and interests.

If you want to teach your kid responsibility, do it with work, budgeting, and short-term sacrifices — not debt.

I’m not picking up the full cost of my children’s college education, having always considered work experience to be of great value for young people.  There’s also some student loan debt in my kids’ future.

Posted on August 12, 2011 at 5:06 am in paying for college, Uncategorized   |  RSS feed

Tags: , ,

6 Responses to “Affluent parents should make their kids pay some college costs”

    
  1. BKM
    August 12, 2011 at 5:48 am

    The research finds that working a few hours a week doesn’t hurt academic performance, but does hurt once the student works more than around 20 hours a week or so. Most of my career, I have worked with students who are working 25, 30, even 40 hours a week. It definitely hurts academic performance, and often causes students to drop classes midsemester.

    Like

  2. gasstationwithoutpumps
    August 12, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Whether working hurts a student academically depends very much on what major they are in. Many of the low-pay majors are structured to require only about 10–20 hours a week of effort, and so a 20-hour-a-week job has little impact on them. Many engineering and science majors are structured to require 40–60 hours a week of effort and leave little time for paid employment.

    Forcing a student to work substantial hours while a student pushes them into majors where they are less likely to be able to pay off student debt afterwards. The gradual erosion of the fraction of students in STEM majors is in part due to the shift away from grants and scholarships to work-study.

    Like

  3. Grace
    August 12, 2011 at 5:42 pm

    Many of the low-pay majors are structured to require only about 10–20 hours a week of effort, and so a 20-hour-a-week job has little impact on them. Many engineering and science majors are structured to require 40–60 hours a week of effort and leave little time for paid employment.

    Interesting . . . this certainly would be a factor. When I was in school, I usually worked at least 20 hours a week and it was sometimes tough with 3-4 hour labs about twice a week, not to mention homework.

    I’m going to get a post up about study hours surveys. The latest I’ve read is that college kids are spending less time these days studying.

    Like

  4. kcab
    August 12, 2011 at 9:09 pm

    I worked about ~18 hrs a week throughout undergrad, as an engineering major (mech e) at MIT. Admittedly, my job was extremely easy (lifeguarding). In any case, it didn’t appear to hurt my grades and I was far from the only student working significant hours. I didn’t know anyone working more than 25 hours a week during the term though.

    My daughter, a rising HS freshman, has had a job for most of this past year. It seems fairly uncommon these days, though the place she works has a large group of teens helping out. I expect that she’ll contribute to her college expenses to some extent, but who knows how I’ll feel about that in four years!

    Like

  5. Grace
    August 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm

    Most high schoolers around here do not have jobs, other than the summer lifeguarding or camp counselor types. Many of them spend quite a bit of time on their extracurricular activities, with an eye on building their resumes for college applications, I assume.

    Like

Trackbacks