Investing in Your Children

RacerX recently posted on his views about paying for your children’s college education. Even though he makes over $150,000 a year, he doesn’t plan to help his children pay for college, because he wants to teach them the value of money. A lot of what he says makes sense. But it’s almost the exact opposite of what my parents did, and I think that their viewpoint makes sense too. They viewed paying for a college education as two things: an investment in my future, and my portion the inheritance they would otherwise have left for their children.

They did try to impress upon me the value of a college education. They made me work my last two summers in high school. I ended up being an attendant at an RV park, where people were always yelling at me because the electricity would go out. Just as a side note, attendants do not control the electricity. The local power plant controls the electricity. If the power is out city-wide, yelling at an attendant will not accomplish anything, except to make her vow, every day, that she will go to college, and get a job that does not include mud and irate retirees, who want a rustic experience without any of the inconveniences thereof. That is exactly why my parents made me get a job. They wanted me to know what it was like to work without a degree.

But they did commit to paying for 100% of my college education. I worked 10 hours a week or less in college. Of course, this is something they could do because they are fairly well off (for disclosure’s sake, they have a combined income of around RacerX’s, but my father has a government pension that will pay him a hefty sum plus cover his health insurance for the rest of his life). This means that it was never a choice between paying for my education or funding their retirement. They had enough to do both.

One of the reasons they had enough to do both is because my father went to college. He was the first one in his family to do so. He didn’t have the money to pay for it, nor did his family, so he joined ROTC. They paid for his undergraduate education, and then later for law school. In return, my father spent four years in the military. He hated it. He was assured that he could stay close to his home, but things changed and he ended up moving across the country, to one of those sparsely-populated nowhere states. By the time he got out of the military, my mother was pregnant with me, and they just never got around to moving back to what he called civilization.

But even still, his quality of life is far and above that of the rest of his family. He supplements his mother’s fixed income, and has in the past given his brother’s church a donation so that they could help him pay for heating oil. No surprise that he views college as an investment. He went a step further though, and decided that the kind of college that his children went to would also be an investment. He committed to paying for whatever colleges we could get into, because he believed that the better the reputation of the college, the more doors it would open. He thought that was worth whatever premium he had to pay.

He didn’t necessarily believe that we would receive a better education if we went to a “top” school. He hadn’t gone to a top school, and he’d received an excellent education. But he was willing to pay more for a brand name, because he hoped it would open doors for his children that had been closed to him because he wasn’t part of the old boys club.

In fact, when I started thinking about college, my father refused to let me consider the state school close by, even though I could have gone for free. I think he might have considered it had it been a better state school, but it was one of the ones that had almost no admissions standards, and its specialty wasn’t something that I was interested in. I wanted to go to a small liberal arts college, because I liked the idea of focus on undergraduates, and there were some good ones that would have only required a few hours by plane to get to. I did fairly well in high school, and most of those schools offered me some merit aid. I also had a $2000 a year private scholarship, which would have covered about ten percent of the cost at some of those schools. I had applied to one university, a good brand-name one on the east coast, about 3000 miles away from home, just to see if I could get in. I did. Tuition was about 30,000 a year. Add in room and board and the price tag topped 40,000. I went to visit schools, and ended up torn between two-- a mid-western liberal arts college, and that east coast university. (It was so shiny! And gothic! And the boys wore pink polo shirts, which to this day is a cause for mirth.)

I asked my father to help me choose between schools. He was angry that I was even thinking about the liberal arts college. Go to the big-name school, he told me. So I did. I majored in Comparative Literature with a Chinese concentration, which he hated. He wanted me to be a doctor. He was of the decided opinion that, and I quote, “The world needs doctors, and you’d make money. What the world doesn’t need is one more poor person who speaks Chinese.” Ouch.

But I’m not poor. I make good money, with my Comparative Literature degree and my certificates in Chinese and Creative Writing. More than I expected to be making. And I could be making more. I know this because my first job out of college was for a consulting company, where I was hired because of the school I had gone to. (My boss told me this. My boss also went to a brand-name school. He was, and I say this with all sincerity, a moron. Brand-name does not necessarily equal intelligence.) I was living in mid-town Manhattan, and I still had quite a bit left over to save. Of course, the job was terrible, and I hated it so much that six months later I moved to China and worked for peanuts, but that is not the point. The point is that my father’s money bought possibilities for me, opportunities that I never would have had if I’d stayed at home and gone to the state school.

The sad fact is that having a name-brand school on my resume makes things easier for me. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it has opened doors for me that I don’t think would have opened had I gone to my home-town school. And as I look at law schools, you can bet I’m looking a brand-names, and not at the price tag. Because I view them as an investment.