Welcome to College Dollars. My purpose here will be to outline different strategies available for making college affordable. I will analyze different programs that are available to families, including 529 savings accounts, Coverdell ESAs, UPromise, scholarships, grants, and many other topics related to education.
First off, let me reiterate what is probably common knowledge to most. College is expensive, and it is becoming more expensive every day. The cost of education is increasing beyond the rate of inflation. However, this does not mean that it is impossible to pay for an education without going into debt. There are means to reduce the cost of education, and means to save for college without the tax man plundering our fruits.
Let me come out and tell you right away, because it will certainly be evident by my posts; I am an advocate of personal responsibility. For those of you that may not consider that a big deal, you are probably not very politically aware. Many of us feel responsible, but because of influences from the media and government, we are not personally as responsible as Americans should be. So, what does this mean in the context of my writing here? It means that I do not feel it is the government's responsibility to educate our children, especially the federal government. The federal government has one purpose, to insure the domestic safety of our citizens. States' have various constitutional responsibilities, but I still do not advocate government run education. Beyond my principles, there are various statistics that show how poorly our children, as a whole, are being educated. The majority of American children are being educated in public (read government) schools. Private schools generally perform much better than public schools. There are certainly aspects of the paradigm that can be misleading (considering that private schools can select which students they enroll), but as a whole, we spend more money (in tax dollars) in public education, and we get less results.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good public schools out there. However, they usually cost more to run, even if you do not see the costs directly. And do note, I attended public schools for my primary education, and I send my three children to public schools for their primary education. Why am I against something that I have used and continue to use? For starters, I had no choice in my primary education, as a child; my parents had the same impression of education as the majority of Americans, and that is that the government has a role in providing education. My children attend public school because I cannot afford to send them to private school, and because my wife and I do not feel that we would do a better job home schooling them. The primary reason that I cannot afford to send my children to a private school is because of all the money I have to pay in property taxes to support the public schools. If I had that money to keep, I would be able to afford to send them to a good private school.
For my secondary education, I attended a public community college for two semesters before I transferred to a private university. I was not a traditional student in the sense that I worked full-time, and I went to school in the evenings (but still had a full-time course load). As a matter of fact, this worked to my financial advantage, because many private universities (including my alma mater) are courting adult students by offering special arrangements that allow you to pay significantly less money, and reduce the amount of time it takes to earn a degree. More specifically, since evening courses do not increase the infrastructure overhead of education institutions, private universities are able to offer evening courses for much less, because the full-time day students are paying for the infrastructure as that is the universities bread and butter. In addition, many are offering accelerated programs where all, or most, of their classes are offered in a shortened format. In my particular case, classes were five weeks long and met one night a week, but for a longer period of time each session. This allowed me to take nine credit hours in one weekday for the entire semester. Most of the schools offer a limited number of degrees. Instead of getting one of the two degrees offered by my school (Liberal Studies and Organizational Leadership), I took all of the accelerated courses that I could, and then took traditional format courses to finish out my requirements. This made my education less expensive in two main ways: 1) my tuition was about one-third the cost of day-students, 2) my student loans did not accrue the interest they would have by extending the amount of time I would have needed to complete my degree, otherwise.
I will leave you with this in closing: education is the key variable in improving your place in life, do not let a lack of an education be a roadblock to your, or your child's, success.
