Are you considering making your parents pay for your college education? This might be a question that you haven’t considered yet, but there are pros and cons to making your parents pay for this last huge expense before you strike out on your own.
Arguments for Making Your Parent Pay:
College is increasingly pricey. In state tuition and expenses can run over $12,000 a year, and private colleges and universities can easily soar over $30,000 a year. If you continue on after undergraduate to graduate studies, your running college tab can exceed the price of a house in most of the country. You don’t necessarily want to get stuck with that debt, so why not stick it to your parents instead?
That argument probably isn’t going to fly with your parents though, so it’s more reasonable sounding to remind them that if you try to work to pay for college yourself that’s less time for study (and your “college experience,” which means making friends). Friendships made in college can be the basis of future career opportunities, and more time to study (and to decompress) can mean substantially higher grades.
It can also be very difficult to work enough to support yourself. Here in New Mexico the state minimum wage is $7.40 per hour, which translates to a salary of $15,392 working full time. The University of New Mexico, making basic assumptions for a New Mexico resident, has a tuition of $6950 and assumes that your total costs will run $21,360 per year. That’s a substantial deficit, and it doesn’t take an accountant to realize that you’re going to be losing money, even if you can manage to work full time while taking a full schedule of classes.
Arguments for Paying Your Own Way:
Adults can be unreliable and selfish. You may not have parents that can even afford to pay for college or even the desire to do so. Paying your own way through higher education means that you won’t be dependent on the fickle moods or health of someone else.
Taking responsibility for yourself can be an attractive option, especially since student loans can generate a positive credit history. Having control over your own finances can also force you to make better decisions about your future, such as whether you really need that $2,000 spring break trip your sophomore year even though that dreamy track star will definitely be going.
You might also be concerned about the future welfare of your parents if you make them pay for your education. Saving for your education probably is something that they’ll do alongside of their own savings for retirement, and are you really sure that they’re saving enough so that you don’t have to take care of them later on?
Other Considerations
You should definitely talk with your parents early about whether they started saving for higher education costs already. Probably around kindergarten, actually. There are 529 plans, which are savings vehicles especially for higher education costs, but those are for investments over a long time, and it’s unlikely to help a student that is currently considering colleges.
Don’t surprise your parents with your decision too close to the college decision, you want to make sure that they have enough time to be comfortable with whatever decision you’ve reached on the matter, especially if that decision is that they are going to need to figure out how to pay for you.