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Old 12-13-2020, 06:30 AM
  #20  
BFMthisA10
Gets Weekends Off
 
Joined APC: Apr 2010
Posts: 291
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Originally Posted by ugleeual View Post
find a good state run 529 plan and deposit $200/month. I’ve paid for two daughters and don’t regret setting them up for success and be debt free. The argument of “having skin in the game” might be useful for a lower/middle class family (don’t save for retirement let alone college) but doesn’t hold water if you’ll a WB FO or Captain when they turn college age... you can afford it or have your priorities messed up.
You do you, man.

My priorities are raising well adjusted young men and women, vice kids that I can send off to a four year daycare. There's a reason why we have a workforce full of $100k indebted liberal arts majors with <$50k jobs; they all marched off to uni like good little automatons.

Thought exercise: would you send your kid to Med school just because? Law school? MBA? No, not without a solid plan of where you wanted to go with that very expensive education. And yet, like automatons, kids head off to college undeclared, or with a tenuous idea of their own career plans, at best. 5y? 6y? meh, doesn't really matter, mommy and daddy are picking up the tab. What's the value of the education at the particular school chosen? Is it a "party school", or in a fun location like an urban setting $$$ (because of course those are important considerations).

I'm spending my energy teaching my kids about money, about responsibility, about critical thinking. As a counterpoint, you have succinctly boiled down the talking points of the "marketing campaign" fed to us over the past five decades, which has hypnotized us into a behavior pattern driving the cost of education up eight times wages.

Higher education is a business. Once any business gets its feet under it, the next objective becomes growth, and engineering ways to part more money from the customer, and preferably at a lower unit cost than yesterday. Typically through marketing. Looks like the marketing has worked and my thesis "doesn't hold water". Checks.
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