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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand Americans POV on this subject.

Other than providing tutors and making sure their children are in the best secondary schools, I don’t understand the American obsession with paying for college.

The best way to prepare your child is to let them experience reality not coddle them.

- A luxury university diploma will not guarantee a good job

- There are other educational opportunities besides an expensive university

- Acquiring internships and work experience is far more valuable to establishing a network and getting your foot in the door

It is unrealistic to expect parents to go into crippling debt to pay for your entire time at a luxury university when a regular school and internships will suffice.

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Why are you talking about college? Having kids in general is very, very expensive. More so if you want to provide them with opportunities and activities as they grow up.

Having kids is not terribly expensive everywhere. Not all need to have super expensive hobbies either. I guess there is a huge regional difference - starting from cost daycare.

That may be, but I can only speak as to my reality. It is not actionable to me that in X country things are cheaper. I don’t live there and I’m not moving either.

Also, I’m not talking about “expensive” hobbies. Almost all sports need some sort of equipment and time investment from the parents. Summer camps for some parents are a necessity because they need child care during summer months. Vacations for kids are also expensive and people typically save all year long to take them. I could go on.

Good preschool is $10k+. In large swaths of the country decent schools only exist where housing is prohibitively expensive. The combination of camp and afternoon care in the summer is thousands of dollars a month.

It all adds up and while you can get clothes at goodwill there are some expenses that are unavoidable and scale linearly with quality.

Holy smokes that is expensive.

In my country preschool is free and it’s all around good. I don’t think we ever had to use any summer care either. Kids are now 12 and 15… the only necessary thing that is more expensive is the house since it needs to fit more people but that is just about the size, not location dictated by a good school as such.

For us all expenses related to quality of life just scale linearly with headcount.

Having kids isn't that cheap even outside the US.

I estimate I spend about €1000 more per month for having one baby. It's pretty significant in a country where the average employee earns €2000/month after tax (and a senior engineer is at €3500/month roughly).

I don't know what you think a "luxury" university is- even government run colleges in the U.S. can be expensive.

A local 4 year degree at my city's state run university is around 18,000 to 22,000 per year for tuition. And that's without room and board.

In comparison a private liberal arts school near me is $65,652 per year for tuition alone.

To me the state option is still pretty darn expensive especially if you are also paying for the kids room and board.

Does the money for the college fees have to come from cash? University fees (in the UK) can be paid for by a student loan which is paid off once the student starts working. Parents don't have to pay for it

starting one's life with the (emotional/financial) weight of "just" $80,000 to $100,000 in debt is not a good strategy, in my opinion.

The interest on those loans are pretty low. To the extent that people recommend you max out your 401k before paying off your loans. College graduates have lifetime earnings of 500,000 or more over non-degree holders. If 80-100,000 is prohibitively expensive then something is going on where universities are failing to deliver valuable and education, and the solution is those students stop seeing university as a good investment and stop propping up failing schools on credit.

"The interest on those loans are pretty low. To the extent that people recommend you max out your 401k before paying off your loans. "

You say this like this is normal advice.

People make all sorts of wild recommendations during a bull market, it wasn't that long ago that people were trading stories of buying Bitcoin with the money their grandparents gave thrm for college.

Not sure if you know but things in the US are outrageously expensive. Childcare might cost 4k per month, a private tutor is ~50-100/hr, the best schools are generally either public schools in the richest suburbs or private schools that cost 50k/year. College even at a State University is going to cost $10,000 per year and at least as much for living costs so you are looking at ~$80,000 for a 4 year degree.

>- A luxury university diploma will not guarantee a good job

Maybe not guarantee but it can certainly make a difference. All else being equal a job candidate with a degree from University of Florida is going to get passed up for one with a degree from Yale and one with a degree from University of South Florida is going to get passed up for the one from University of Florida.

I’ve lived in some of the most expensive cities in the U.S.

Childcare at 4,000 is upper quartile of expensive cities. You’ll find many places where it’s half or less of that price. Private schools at $50k a year are either going to be boarding or some of the more expensive country day schools. Even Sidwell, where Obama sent his kids, is cheaper than this.

And finally we get to university education. There are many schools with merit based scholarships. Treating living expenses as unique to college is also wrong.

Nothing is stopping a kid from getting a job in college!

>Childcare at 4,000 is upper quartile of expensive cities. You’ll find many places where it’s half or less of that price. Private schools at $50k a year are either going to be boarding or some of the more expensive country day schools. Even Sidwell, where Obama sent his kids, is cheaper than this.

Most of the people on this site aren't farmers living in Rural Iowa so idk how relevant the cost of living in places like that are.

>And finally we get to university education. There are many schools with merit based scholarships. Treating living expenses as unique to college is also wrong.

Not everyone is getting scholarship. Obviously that changes the calculus.

>Nothing is stopping a kid from getting a job in college!

This is pure boomer sentiment. I had a job every summer in college and through grad school, this was only ~10 years ago and it paid for exactly 0% of my tuition. It was enough to survive the summers and pay my rent during grad school that was it.

> I had a job every summer in college and through grad school, this was only ~10 years ago and it paid for exactly 0% of my tuition.

It also digs into time that you could be socializing, or as professionals call it "networking". Having a job during school also is downward pressure on your grades, it makes it very hard to have top performance in your classes. Which excludes you from most scholarships.

Anecdotally I had two jobs most of my time during university, one on weekends one on evenings.

I wound up with less debt (note, not NO debt, just less) than most of my classmates but the tradeoff was that I basically entered the workforce basically already burned out and that was a seriously negative impact on my early career.

> I’ve lived in some of the most expensive cities in the U.S.

> Childcare at 4,000 is upper quartile of expensive cities. You’ll find many places where it’s half or less of that price. Private schools at $50k a year are either going to be boarding or some of the more expensive country day schools.

You either have not lived in expensive cities in the US or at least didn't have kids while there!

For example in this list nearly all schools are over 50K:

https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-private-high-schools/m...

> I don’t understand Americans POV on this subject.

Long-term, the American style meritocratic striving is probably unsustainable and harmful in innumerable ways. But it is _rational_ at least in terms of the choices parents make. Numerous metrics point to increasing economic disparities; the rungs on the ladder keep getting farther and farther apart. How can I as a parent best position my child to negotiate that climb? Parents, who as a rule worry about such things on behalf of their children respond by taking various interventions on behalf of their kids. One is spending money to buy merit, however distorted the concept is in the U.S.

An expensive education doesn’t guarantee a good job? True. But if they have the means, it’s reasonable to anticipate that parents are going to play the probabilities. The problems that arise for parents, their driven kids and the broader society are significant; and I would prefer the circumstances to be otherwise; but that’s going to take an enormous cultural change in the U.S. One that’s more systemic than that of parents choosing to send their kids to less costly universities.

> An expensive education doesn’t guarantee a good job? True.

Exactly right. The OP set up a ridiculous straw man. Avoiding smoking doesn't guarantee you won't get lung cancer.

The returns to education are well documented and large.

https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2021/data-on-display/educa...

I would say it's not so expensive as it more deprives you from the time you would otherwise spend climbing the corporate ladder, networking, and starting a company/side project.

Kids aren't the huge bill that people seem to think they are unless the parents have a spending problem or don't really want to raise the kids and lease out the education, child care, and transportation duties to other people/organizations. Then it can be really expensive to pay someone else to raise your child.

Childcare is a pretty large expense. Whether you have two working parents and use daycare, or one stay at home parent (single income instead of double), there's a significant cost associated with each.

The average amount spent on a child per year is 17k [1]. It may not be that much if you're making $200k+/yr, but on the median household income of $71k/yr [2], it's a pretty significant chunk — about ~24% of your income for just one child.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/cos...

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...

Yes, that was the point I made. Either opportunity costs or it costs for if both parents work full time.

I do think that families that figure out how to at least have one parent home for the kids seem to have better relationships with them. I like the idea of families that can swap each parent having a year or something with the kids, the issue is that most careers don't support that model. You can't have multiple year gaps in your resume nor do both spouses often make the same income.

I’m American and I don’t really understand where you are coming from. Except for some of the elite universities I don’t think the main reason is networking.

My college experience was at a regular school learning and gaining experience through work. No debt, no loans, and state scholarship that paid 100% tuition if I went to a public school in my state. The scholarship required a 3.0 in high school and thereafter. Most of my high school friends who went to college did a similar thing.

Sure some went to Ivy League or other expensive networking type schools but it was the exception.

i think it has to do with the vast oversupply of labor (at least for white collar jobs). employers generally pick people with degrees of people without because there's just too many candidates.

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