Dear Prospective Employers...

The plan is for her to do PSEO junior and senior year and then she'll be done with all of her generals. If PSEO doesn't work out, she can always take IB or AP classes.  I just hope that she can stay on track for it and doesn't like get pregnant and drop out. Not that I know anyone who did that. 

RockinChica78:

The plan is for her to do PSEO junior and senior year and then she'll be done with all of her generals.

Actually, don't do that.  I did all my generals thinking that I would have nothing but awesome EE and CSCI classes when I would start.  Turns out those are much more difficult than generals.  So I ended up having to cut my work load down because I had no generals to take along with 2 or 3 difficult classes.  Just my experience. 

Okay, here I'm at a loss.  Why do parents get so worried about paying for college when there are loans available for this reason?  That is something that has always made me go hmmmm.

What parent wants to saddle their kid with a massive student loan? Sure, most/lots/name a number here students end up having to take out a loan, but a parent's first instinct is to care for their children and do their best to help them out. Paying for college, or attempting to help pay for it, falls under that umbrella.

I know once I realized that I was footing the entire bill for my tech school I dropped out. I got scared of the loan, quite frankly. Prolly a shitty main reason (I had other reasons too), but money makes the world go round, and I wasn't comfortable giving a few pieces of my already small pie away every month, for many years. That's just not something I'm down with. 

rost0031:

Actually, don't do that.  I did all my generals thinking that I would have nothing but awesome EE and CSCI classes when I would start.  Turns out those are much more difficult than generals.  So I ended up having to cut my work load down because I had no generals to take along with 2 or 3 difficult classes.  Just my experience. 

Great point.  Haven't thought about it for awhile, but in those last years of undergraduate it really paid off to take a few easy general requirements per semester.  It was nice to cut the Advanced Seminar in Estoric Bullshit with a little basic logic or general science or poetry or whatever. 

The Manvalanche:

rost0031:

Actually, don't do that.  I did all my generals thinking that I would have nothing but awesome EE and CSCI classes when I would start.  Turns out those are much more difficult than generals.  So I ended up having to cut my work load down because I had no generals to take along with 2 or 3 difficult classes.  Just my experience. 

Great point.  Haven't thought about it for awhile, but in those last years of undergraduate it really paid off to take a few easy general requirements per semester.  It was nice to cut the Advanced Seminar in Estoric Bullshit with a little basic logic or general science or poetry or whatever. 

 

You clearly had better foresight than I did.  My last semester, I had to skip my own graduation ceremony because I was in the fuckin' lab trying to finish my final projects.   

Yes, that is great advice Rost! 

You just made all this worth it.  Granted I'm through already but I'm sure someone will apply your knowledge, nicely done.

Also,  the higher in the EE/CSCI/CompE program you go, the less females there are.  This becomes painfully apparent when you find that all your junior and senior year classes are sausage fests.  Seriously, my VLSI II class had 300 hundred dudes.  0 women.  I took biochem as an elective (completely outside my major) just cause I knew there would be nothing but chicks there.

 

I did the same with Women's Studie, that's a whole notha thread my man.

Financial aid can be pretty hard to get for a lot of students who need it. You have to be lucky to get a grant.

I was lucky and got one good grant, after a lot of work, and a few desperate meetings, but for the first few years I was assed out as far as financial aid goes, JUST because my parents made "too much" money (they didn't care for a second that I wasn't dependant on them, didn't live in their household at the time, and could have had NOTHING to do with them). If you can't leech of mommy and daddy untill you're 21, didn't do anything early on to merit scholorships and grants, then you're NOT going to have a good time trying to find a way to pay for tuition. Loans may have decent interest, but they still suck, and can be depressing when they're hanging over your head for eleven damn years.

True they do loom over for a while but the payments are minimal and you'll find that the payments are gone faster than your think.  I paid off 2 years of school in 3 years.  My wife has her degree from Augsburg and her loan payments are about $85/month.  That isn't much.

 

I was fortunate to have some financial help from dad, and a place to stay at my mom's during college yet I still managed to rack up a lot of debt on credit cards paying for books etc. The last couple years I planned ahead and got some student loans which helped a ton. I didn't care too much for college but I'm still glad I stuck to it and finished my BS.

Rost: Awesome advice. I never would have thought about that.  You are so right on.

Toddah:  I don't want my kid to graduate with debt; I don't want her job options to be constrained by having to take better paying jobs that she just isn't interested in because she has loans to pay off.  In a perfect world, I would pay for 100% of her schooling up to a bachelors.  Currently she wants to go to Johns Hopkins, so we ain't talking state school tuition.  I know she'll change her mind but my preference would be for her to attend a private school simply for the resume cachet.

Made up situation: The kid goes to Hamline, gets half of her tuition paid by scholarships, grants and such and doesn't live on campus.  If she were going there this fall, the cost would be about $15,000 a year, roughly half my take home pay.  And because I'm a dummy, I've hardly saved anything for her school, about enough money for a single class.

Don't look at it as debt like you would a credit card or a car but as an investment like a home or stocks and bonds. At some point you have to let go and place responsibility in the hands of you kid. It also empowers them to make better choices knowing that when the bill comes do they will have to be responsible.

This is probably obvious, but it's never too late to open a 529 for your kid.  To the extent you are able to do any saving for your kid, it's nice to have it grow tax-free.