Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.
So raising a kid who's middle or upper class is actually quite expensive, and that's part of why low income and high income families have more kids than middle income families. https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...
As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).
Editing to say that if you make the military a career, you can literally save almost your entire salary if your personal peccadilloes are minimal. I knew guys that decided 4 years was enough and emerged after 4 years with over 50k in savings while paying nothing and they also got the BA/BSc degree on Uncle Sam's dime. They emerged debt free, degreed, and ready to start the next stage of their lives. Doing 8 years gets you a masters all the while doing nothing but work a job with everything paid for. At that rate, you might as well do 20, marry another member and have a steady retirement at 39 or 40 with money enabling you to pursue a job you really love because you can afford to live where you want. Bonus: Tri-Care military medical costs $500 year on retirement. Cannot touch that out here.
As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.
if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).
My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.
This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.
I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.
I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.
You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...
I went to a "very respectable" public land-grant university in my home state and today that school costs $15K a year outside of room and board ($35K/year for out-of-state), and students should live on-campus at minimum the first year--so let's say, best case, you're looking at $70K for in-state. Plus living expenses, and despite your claims elsewhere in-thread I can personally attest that part-time jobs even ten years ago took a bite out of but did not solve the problem of food, board, etc.--so we're probably talking closer to $100K when all is said and done.
Even if you assume some defraying of costs, a student loan bill of $50K (which was about what I left school with) is staggering for many non-technical folks, coming out of college looking at salaries closer to $40K than $100K when they can find a job at all. Further, the knock-on effects are financially hazardous. If you end up on income-based repayment because, y'know, jobs are hard to find unless you're a computer toucher and even then there probably aren't enough for everybody, you will be paying less-than-interest, and the principal only grows.
Put frankly, I would advise the cultivation of more empathy for those not as economically advantaged as you or me. This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.
This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.
It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).
Most of your post is pretty good, but I laughed aloud at this, tbh. The reason you go to a university is because your resume gets thrown out for almost any desk job--hell, for Starbucks--if you don't have a bachelor's.
It is functionally necessary. These aren't "rare skills". These are employer-mandated minimums, and it leaves people with that inflated student debt, encouraged and pushed upon them by their parents and by the expectations of society, to subsidize those employers' demands.
We are middle class and have two kids but our kids have close to no hobby expenses. Our son is vehemently anti-hobby and daughters dance and piano lessons are not really that expensive. On the other hand we have no-one close for whom we should "keep up appearances".
Government will pay for the kids degrees. Ditto for healthcare and the dentists for kids are excellent.
I know some kids play hockey or whatever and that can be a bit steep but never have I felt such would be a mandatory hobby. Neither of my kids really showed interest for any team sports and we gladly obliged not to force introduce them.
Sure you need to buy food for 4 persons and wash a bit more laundry, but that's about it when I think of the "overhead" caused by kids. The necessity for an apartment with a few more rooms is probably the biggest financial burden but loans are cheap.
The fact only one of us is capable of working due to health reasons is a much bigger issue financially than having kids.
You have to figure out how to get food & shelter and follow local laws. Everything else is unequivocally optional. I would argue that "not seen as optional" is just a way of saying "I don't own up to my choices."
Editing to say that kids are not too expensive if they're healthy. If you have children who have medical conditions, then all bets are off. What really pisses me off is the local school district always begging for money. I pay those thieves almost over $5000 year in property tax, since we live in an area with ridiculous property taxes. Whenever I've visited the school and my children have also seen this, they beg for school supplies, but the closets in all of my kid's classrooms are brimming with supplies. They spend more on sports than they do on education, which really irks me. Sports may be important, but nowhere near as education. 1% of 1% go on to play pro sports, but here they act as if sports are more important. Classes are let out early to watch games, yet the school district where we live is a poor performer academically. My own children are fine, but that's because we watch and are involved.
Colleague I knew in London literally spent more on daycare for his two kids than he did on his mortgage.
The other option is that one parent quits their job and stays home, but that is also a massive (opportunity) cost if you're both educated and have a decent career.
Now you may think it's worth 'paying' 100k a year to gain all the non-monetary benefits of staying at home and raising kids, but that is a separate discussion.
As I built my career, my lifestyle inflated, and so did the kid’s expenses. We make in 3 days what used to take us a month.
The kids get to share our lifestyle with us. It’s probably different for us because we’ve never been well off + not have kids.
Also, kids need doctors, interests (books or toys), durable goods (clothes and furniture) and more to thrive.
Editing to say that these are not the $500,000 RVs that retired people holiday in. They are kitchen-sized campers (for lack of a better term) that may be the size of 6-8 cubicles. They need outside water connections which many don't have, and they almost always need propane attachments. Many have composting toilets which the owner needs to clean out, as they cannot connect to the sewer lines.
Kids aren't cheap if you want to keep up with your socioeconomic class. And by far the biggest cost is the extra you pay for a house to be located near other high earners so that the schools your kids go to is filled with kids of other high earners.
I make less money than someone in the US, but daycare for me is 250 euro (it was 500 until 3 years old) and public daycare would be cheaper still. Visiting the doctor for a random virus brought back from school costs exactly 0 (a private visit would be around 100 euros). An orthodontist, if needed, would be the only major expense for a child apart from clothing and food.
University will be about 4000 euros a year at most (and would be cheaper if I earned less).
I’ve never known a doctor to charge less than $200 per visit with or without insurance.
You may say, oh well they can just get loans, true, but you can only get so much in federal loans before you have to get private, non dischargeable loans for ~ 7% interest.
Alternatively, you might say oh, they can just join the military. Only problem is the Air Force and Navy don't want little Johnny and now he's getting blown up doing patrols with the 3rd ID in Iraq (I lost my childhood best friend this way).
TLDR: If you don't want to help your kid pay for college or trade school, just don't have them. No one should have to go deeply in debt or put their lives at risk to earn a decent living.