30,000 Points of Pain

I want to start this by flatly stating that I pay roughly $30,000 per year for my son to attend a private college in the Chicago area, where he majors in music. Had you asked me twenty years ago when I was the P.O. in Chicago making about that same amount per year, with a newborn son and a stay-at-home wife, that I would be able to shell out this kind of money for my baby to attend a private institution of higher learning from 2016 through 2020, I wouldn't have believed it to be possible.  Not to mention getting ready to pay even more from his yet-to-be born sister.

We had zero dollars saved at the time, like many families now.  

I realize, of course, that the amount I pay for his college is roughly half of what the  median household income for a family is in the United States, about $61,000. This amount represents roughly a quarter of my own family's annual household income.  Although our income has continued to grow, albeit slowly, over the past few years, $30,000 would represent 30% to 40% of our annual household income had you measured it five, six or seven years ago.

For those of you with young children now or with children winding their way through grammar school, or in high school like my daughter is, you may not realize a few things about the real cost of college.

We took our daughter to our school districts college night last week, at which time we stood in several lines to speak with several recruiters to get a two- to five- minute synopsis of what their schools are all about, and in my case, to inquire as to what the overall cost might be. When these people tell you that the school costs thirty, forty, fifty or even sixty thousand per year, but can be reduced by various scholarships or grants, you are just getting a partial feel for what the total cost will be. 

If you were to go up to ten different students at that very same college or university, you may be surprised to find ten different amounts being paid. There may be some athletically or academically gifted students from very poor families paying little to nothing, there may be some children without athletic prowess any particular academic strengths that hail from wealthy families that might be paying $40,000 or $50,000 per year. Then there's going to be many middle-class families like our own where the students get a decent amount of scholarship money, but their parents still pay a significant amount of the cost. In the case of the college where our son attends, this is the case with many students who he is spoken with and whose parents we have spoken with. Most of us are paying in the range of $25,000 to $35,000 per year.  Many of the students and/or their families are borrowing heavily to fund it.  

Seeing as how I am able to a transfer three grand month after month from our checking account to our son's college, you may ask how. Well let me tell you, it wasn't exactly easy but somehow I was able to squirrel away a hundred grand per child, although I have taken great pain to state repeatedly in our daughter's case that the hundred grand I had saved for her was a current amount.  

After the last week of huge losses in the stock market, I'm somewhat afraid to look at the state of her college account right now. It is largely invested in the stock market, and it has done fairly well or really I should say very well over the past few years, but it lost several thousand dollars this week alone. Seeing as how neither I nor you know what the future of the stock market, or the economy in general holds, this number could be depleted by an even larger amount in the coming weeks, months, and years, but I certainly hope not.  The Next Recession is sure to be a doozie, and we do not know exactly when it will begin to take hold.  

So to recap the long college finance journey that I began for my son when he was about two and then for our daughter soon after she was born fifteen years ago, I generally just sent money month after month to their college accounts no matter what the circumstances were. 

If I had a month where all the bills were paid and there were still a few thousand dollars left, I sent $300 or $400 to each of their accounts. some months were tighter than that and I was only able to send $200 or maybe just $100. There were a few years in the middle of the recession in 2008 and 2009, where I didn't send anything at all. In retrospect, those are the years that I should have been sending as much as I could have because the investments that I had for them were very low at the time, far less than half of what they are worth now even considering the recent losses in the markets.

While we observed friends, family and neighbors going on vacations, purchasing new flat screen television sets, new iPhones every year, adding new rooms or patios to their homes, going out to nice dinners at fancy restaurants, we were extremely frugal and skipped all of the above, opting to send whatever extra funds we had to our children's college savings for many years. Not to say that we were total sticks in the mud or that we never did anything fun; after all, we did take our children on Disney World vacations six times, each time staying on Disney grounds at Port Orleans French Quarter and getting five- or six-day park hopper passes.  Each one of those vacations ran us in the neighborhood of five grand.  

We did go out to eat plenty in those years, as well, just as we do now. But we did drive clunkers into the ground and have several years of not making any car payments while other people we knew we were buying or leasing new cars every few years.

So back to the 30,000 points of pain.

The college where we send our son has many fees that, of course, they never mentioned to us while we were touring the school. For instance, there is a fee called in applied music fee that's supposedly cover of the music department providing areas to practice in, for the software needed for students to compose music. that magically was doubled to $500 for this current semester. Neither us or any one else ever received an explanation for this.  I asked my son if he knew about it, but he did not, and told us that hose students who pay for themselves or a large portion of it for themselves are quite upset by this, as you might imagine.

Even though music students are required to take a series of private lessons in various genres of music, something that you might not know is that students are expected to pay for those in addition to all the other fees that are paid to the college. These lessons are weekly and the rates for them are not onerous, however taken altogether, thy can add up very quickly to a few hundred dollars per semester.

Musicians require instruments.

This is another DUH! type of statement, but instruments do not come cheap, either. This school year alone, our son has purchased two new instruments, one of which is a somewhat rare, professional level vintage trumpet that cost approximately $4,000, and a flugelhorn that cost $970. 

Being his parents, we of course are willing to provide musical instruments for our son, who is a music major, and our daughter, who plays trombone in several high school bands. but again, this is another large expenditure that many families would not be prepared or able to make. Although I have not yet nearly achieved the type of income that I desire, dream, and plan to, I still feel privileged to be able to pay for these types of expenses to help our children achieve the type of success that I know they can.

This would be a good time for me to interject that, beyond ten different  students at the same college or university paying ten different amounts, so it goes with the ten families from which those students come. You might have a handful a families like ours that do our best to pay the full expenses for our children's education. Although this is not the most popular sentiment nowadays, many of the families who we are friends with fit this bill. We have two families that we are good friends with who pay considerably more than we do every year, but both of their children are studying engineering at prestigious universities.

We also know several people who do not contribute much at all to their children, some for philosophical reasons while others simply do not have the financial ability to do so. From my extensive reading on the subject, I realized that some of these students who are working and paying their own way through school are going to become far more successful than other students who have their parents paid every single expense for them. In our case, it seems as if we'll be able to cover the next seven months of this year for another $21,000 plus other school-related expenses, plus the 30,000 more points of pain next year, and then it's all on him.

He does plan on going on to graduate school, but we hope that by his strong academic record in his undergraduate years plus his very prolific musical abilities, we'll be able to find a place for him to attend graduate school where the cost to him will be minimal. Should he choose to go the route of a very expensive School, like DePaul, University of Indiana, or some others that he has spoken of, I guess that he'll become yet another student with a large amount of debt to pay off over a number of years. But by paying the $100,000-plus for his undergraduate education, we hope that he has a leg up on the others who emerge with a BA degree with a heavy debt burden already.

When it comes to our daughter, that's a whole new ballgame. The schools that she speaks of attending include Northwestern University, where many members of my own family attended, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Iowa and other schools of that ilk in the Big Ten and costing thirty to forty grand per year.

I don't know if any of this helps any readers, but it is at least some food for thought for those of you who have children heading towards  an expensive college in the future. A widely covered topic, it has been proven time and time again that those Americans with a college education tend to fare better economically in general than those without one. The dichotomy between those who have a degree and those who do not has almost never been wider in terms of earning potential, political affiliation, health and welfare.  Hardly a day goes by when I don't hear about the economic benefits of attending college, sometimes more as a signal than as an institution of higher learning.

Again, that's a topic for a future post.

For now, I'll just realize that the fifty or so grand that remains in our son's college accounts will have to take us all through to that hopefully sunny day in May of 2020 when he walks across the stage and becomes yet another newly-minted college grad with a music degree trying to figure out a way to make a living or, more likely, where to go to grad school.

By then, I' should be good and ready to feel thirty-five or more points of pain every year.