If your son has an opportunity to get a quality education, you should do everything in your power to help him. The "when I was a kid" logic is a waste of time. The economy today is different than its ever been and you want your son to have every advantage possible in this atmosphere. Putting yourself through school is very difficult and a lot of people get derailed by family or health or other factors and never finish.
Man some parents are cheap. My dad just put up like 90 or 100k for my sister to go to MIT. I paid for my own grad school, but the world is getting competitive. If you skimp on your kids education he will be behind the 8 ball. Its not like 20 years ago where you could get away just a high school degree. You need to go to college and a good one if you want suceed unless you are one of the exceptional case.
If he wants help, have him take out student loans and then agree to help pay them back when he graduates.
If you don't help him achieve his goals now, he'll probably remember that when you are old and decrepit.
My parents paid for everything during my 4 years in college... and by everything i mean EVERYTHING. tuition, apartment rent, bills, food, booze, gifts for girlfriends... they gave me a credit card and paid the bill in its entirety each month without question. To this day I still feel guilty about taking advantage of that situation and not getting a job to help out. But my parents told me "it was their duty as parents" to make sure I got as much education as I wanted.
Save the money for grad school. If you work at it and want to, you can get a good education in a lot of places that are not considered elite. If you do well there, you can get into a good grad school and grad school is more important than undergrad if you're following that track. Every decent university has somebody with contacts at the elite schools. Identify those profs, impress them, and get them to help you into the grad school you want. Also, math is math at the undergrad level. All the decent universities are going to have classes on stuff like differential geometry, topology, cryptology, number theory, etc. Looking at the US News rankings, Michigan, Texas, Rutgers, UCLA, Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, Penn State, Purdue, Washington, Ohio State, UNC, and Indiana are all in the top 30 of math grad schools. FYI, here's the math undergrad/grad school FAQs from Purdue: http://www.math.purdue.edu/academic/undergrad/faq/ http://www.math.purdue.edu/jobs/careers/faq Interesting that you have to be fluent in a foreign language to get a grad degree from Purdue (and probably other places).
Man my mom was a middle class single mom and my dad was dead. I paid for ~99% of my education via student loans for both of my degrees because if I wanted an education I had to get it myself and not rely on anyone else. See wut I did thur? Mmhmm. No one is saying his kid shouldn't go to college or that he should sit back and do nothing. OP can't magically make money appear to pay for his kids education and this doesn't and shouldn't make him the bad guy or a bad father.
meh..you guys are lucky..I gotta pay my full tuition by myself. No excuse. Tell your son to apply and look for schloarships, it's the only way to get free money other than financial aids
If you doesn't have the money thats one thing and that isn't what I am talking about, but if you have the money and then don't help you are just putting up more barriers. School used to be much cheaper and you didn't even need to go to college and you could be successful. You can go work three jobs take 6 years etc. take the long path. However you are just putting more obstacles for the kid. Some may overcome them, some won't. The most successful cultures in america are the ones that preach education and, but if you preach it and then when your kid ask you for help you say tough love well what does that mean. I think putting something away for college is probably as important as getting him the latest shoe etc.
He got his Bachelors' in Econ in '03, I got my UH Finance degree in '02. He's a trading VP at Barclays on their MBS desk, and over the last year the First National Bank of Omaha has turned me down for a Credit Analyst, Personal Banker and Loan Processing Assistant job.
At the very least I would hope that you had taken him to some banks or helped him with his FAFSA application.
Again, I don't know much about you or your brother, but I would speculate that he is quite the overachiever if he got into Yale in the first place which would explain why he is doing better than you. I have friend that is a VP at Goldman Sachs with a degree from ATM. He did not have that high of grades either. From my experience, a bachelors from an Ivy league school really doesn't mean much more than one from any other top tier public schools. A graduate degree on the other hand means a lot.
Better companies with better entry-level opportunities recruit at Ivy league schools, and top-tier public schools usually have ten or twenty times as many kids applying for a single job posting or internship opportunity.
It's not a dick move. It really depends on the child. Some kids don't deserve to go to college. Some kids don't appreciate college. Some kids don't value things when they haven't put any work into having them. If your kid falls into one of these categories then I can completely see why a parent wouldn't want to pay for their education. This seems fair: Seems like you don't want to help because he can be lazy. Well if he graduates with a good GPA then that means he handled his business, right?
Count me in the 'pay for it yourself' crowd. Not only that, not everyone should go to college- that's the warped American dream.
