I wanted to call this post something like “A Post on Cost”, which would only be awesome if “post” and “cost” rhymed… Looking at their spelling you’d think they do, but one of the mind-boggling properties of the English language is that spelling and pronunciation are like two second cousins twice removed: sort of related, but few people can actually explain how exactly.

* DH and I got our parking assignments. We will be paying nearly $2k pre-tax for parking for our two cars, nearly $500 over last year’s cost. Seeing the number made my heart sink, but we have tried carpooling and it’s too much hassle. We have multiple kids with various schedules, someone always has to leave early or late, and the parking garage is adjacent to a building where major events take place so it is often full and you can’t get in unless you are a permit-holder.

* In an attack of boredom mixed with anxiety over my kids’ future, more specifically DH’s and my financial preparation for the college aspect of said future, I went online and looked at college costs for about 3 min. My entirely unsystematic search revealed the following pattern:

Private schools (tuition plus cost of living) are $55-65k. Harvard and MIT, total cost  is circa $60k (they hilariously differ by about $30). There are places that cost slightly more than Harvard, like Vandebilt (!), by about $850, or Northwestern, by upward of  $3k. Swarthmore is Harvard+$1.6k, Dartmouth equals Harvard+$4k. I wonder what it is that you get for $65k.

Large public schools are about $20-35k, total cost, for residents. Then they diverge in terms of how much they cost for nonresidents. One the one hand, you have places like UC Berkeley and UCLA, where the cost for residents is $32k but for non-residents it’s additional $23k in tuition, so it ends up costing just like a private school. On the other hand, you have places where the in- v. out-of-state tuition differential is not that huge, like the University of Minnesota at $26k for residents, plus $6.5k for nonresidents. UIUC is in between, with $30k for residents, plus $15k for nonresidents. Florida State university is $21k for residents, additional $15k for out-of-staters.

I am sure I am surprising no one who’s been through the US college system or has had kids in it with the fact that these are all huge amounts of money. There is no way DH and I can pay for private school for our kids, that would be like paying off another house per kid. And that’s not even counting that by the time the third is out of daycare, we will have paid about $250-300k in total daycare costs (about $20k per kid per year) . Kids cost a lot of fuckin’ money. There is no way we can pay three more times that for them to go to a private or even many out-of-state public universities.

If we can help it, we don’t want our kids to be saddled with debt before they even start their life. The system where I went to school was such that college admission was extremely selective, but those who got to attend did so for free, and I am in hindsight very grateful for that, even though I took it for granted at the time. The prices people are supposed to pay here are just ridiculous. Even a good state university requires $100-120k for 4 years, which I am sure if well beyond many people’s abilities. DH and I are not poverty-stricken, but we are definitely not rich enough for Dartmouth. Or its apparently lesser cousin Harvard.

Sure, you pay for the name brand and connections, and you pay for shiny gyms and residence halls, but do the kids really get so much more in terms of education at a $60k/yr versus $25k/yr school? Is freakin’ Vanderbilt worth $61k per year; do these overpriced schools give one so much of a leg up in the world? These are huge sums of money we are talking about for anyone from the middle class.

What do or did you do to pay for college, or your kids’ college? Did you/do you pay for the kids, combine loans with parental funding, have kids work along with loans? Pros and cons?