A good comment from my post a couple of days ago from a recent Graduate from my Alma Mater, was, “Why do you think you must pay for your kids education?”. That’s a good question, and the answer I have is, I don’t think I HAVE to pay for it, and if my kids say to me, “I want to pay for this myself”, I think I would be delighted, but I don’t want a situation to arise where one of my children cannot take advantage of a post-secondary opportunity because she or he thinks it is too expensive. So should parents pay for university costs?
A lot of the people who I view as financially intelligent paid for their own University Educations, and they may not say it, but seem quite proud of that fact. My parents on the other hand paid for my education, so there are two ways to look at this idea.
I guess I’ll only really know about all of this once they reach the University age, but I do have money put away already to deal with at least the first couple of years of education.
I think this is why my generation has been dubbed the “sandwich” generation because we want to take care of everyone, our aging parents and our kids. Maybe we are just a generation of wanna-be martyrs as well.
Epilogue
At the end of it, I paid for a great deal of my kids’ education costs, but I couldn’t afford to pay for all of it. I am glad I started saving for it early. I wrote this piece before my daughters started at University, but now they have all graduated, it is fun to read my thoughts from that time.
To me an education can be considered an Asset that will be utilized to produce income for many years in the future.
I told my Kids get an education where you can get a job at the end. No basket weaving courses!
No pain no gain. Kids need some skin in the game in the form of paying for there education. I paid for there first year.
On is a pharmacist the other a consultant.
By the way I am damn proud of both of them!