In general, the richer someone is, the less likely they are to have as many children. See https://www.economist.com/node/21561112.
There's also the whole "not being aware contraception exists because you couldn't go to school" thing.
Sex is free, fun, and easy. The less education you have the less likely you are to understand effective birth control. The less wealthy you are the less you have to spend on contraception. Those things together with the easiest and cheapest form of entertainment would seem to cirrelate with a higher birthrate in lower income brackets.
I cant find any studies that support what Im saying right now, but the logic holds.
I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
So double the kids for same price assuming they go to a public university? Sounds like a good deal to me.
FYI, you can cut that down even further if you go to a community college for the first year or two and then transfer.
But yes if you only gain admission to the long tail of private colleges, then you would almost certainly be wiser to go to a low-cost public school.
I wouldn't want my kids to consider community college unless they had to. By definition, I'd like them to have the same academic opportunities I had, if possible.
Depending on how you define it, children are actually a much more reliable way to have a reasonably enduring legacy than businesses/foundations/accomplishments/fame/etc, though both approaches are ultimately ephemeral. You probably have to successfully make it at least three levels down an ancestor tree, rooted at yourself and with an average replacement rate around 2, in order for your own genetic legacy to have a high statistical likelihood of enduring through anything short of a species-level catastrophe.
If your kids are too stupid to get tuition assistance, private college isn't going to do any more good for them than a regular local uni.
I also assume you'd only go to a private college that ranks highly, which means low access to meaningful amounts of income/wealth-independent scholarship money. A low-ranked private college is usually no better than many public ones.
Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.
Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.
There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.