haha I have been maximizing the annoyance level of my parents and others by telling my kids these things:

- don’t focus on GPA, focus on actually gaining knowledge and understanding how the world works. good grades are a measure of how you understand things. they should never be the goal. I was a C student and I am more curious about things than many of my peers with fancy degrees.

- forge your own path, there is always a thousand different paths out there. College is just one.

- no replacement for hard work. don’t expect anything in life. anything worth getting, you’ll have to compete with many others to get it so learn to be a good competitor.

- college should be approached with all the tradeoffs and as any other investment. We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck. We’re the only parents in our whole social circle that aren’t saving for their college. it feels weird and isolating when that topic comes up.

- first think about the kind of life you want and then make choices to get you that life.

they’re already sick if my lectures. and they’re 10 and 5. :-)

I wish I could upvote more than once.

Assuming you’re American you are really screwing then over by not paying for college. The FAFSA assumes a parental contribution. It’s not just other parents, but the federal government and all the colleges themselves that have the expectation that you will contribute.

There’s no exemption for “I want to teach my kids financial responsibility”. If you’re high income your children will be ineligible for any financial aid and have few options for funding their own education.

The problem was they never factor in the single mom with 3 kids, she made "enough" that I qualified for less grants, but she still had 2 other kids to raise and also help put through college since we were only a couple years apart.

The FAFSA is such a crappy measuring stick for college affordability. I ended up having to make up the difference with loans, now it wouldn't be feasible.

Not at all true.

They can choose to go to very good public universities with in state tuition (often around $10-12k per year). We can sit down and discuss the tradeoffs of the degree they are getting vs the earning power of that degree. And the tradeoffs between being a commuter student and one that lives on campus. Or saving money by attending community college the first two years.

NONE of those conversations will happen if I struggle to save 200k per kid and they simply don’t understand the concept of having to pay that back somewhere. Or ever think about whether a particular degree has any real value.

This is part of the problem with just going along with the high fees and running that rat race.

I don’t have time to look up tuitions for each state, but that’s highly dependent on where you chose to live. Something that your children have no control over.

I certainly did not have a “very good public university” with $10k tuition. My state flagship (Rutgers) was over $20k per year. Other states public universities were often even more expensive, Berkeley would have cost more than any private university I was accepted to.

If you live somewhere like CA, Texas, or Michigan then more power to you, your kids should have great options. But it’s not advice that transfers. And again, the government is of the position that that 40-60k is your responsibility. I don’t agree with the way higher education is managed either but you’re not opting out of it, your just passing the costs to your kids.

Annual in-state Tuitions (not counting room/board, so roughly 2x-2.5x if you add these) for a handful of VERY good public universities:

- University of Maryland, College Park ~ $10k a year [1]

- University of California, Los Angeles ~ $15k a year [2]

- University of Pennsylvania, WOW $56k ... that's .... CRAZY for a public University.

Obviously this is not at all a good sample size but I picked public universities in populous areas in states that cover a lot of the population. And I'm picking better known ones. Someone else probably has a lot of good, statistical data on this, like the US Gov Department of Education.

1: https://academiccatalog.umd.edu/undergraduate/fees-expenses-...

2: https://admission.ucla.edu/tuition-aid/tuition-fees

3: https://srfs.upenn.edu/costs-budgeting/undergraduate-cost-at...

In school I didn't care about grades. Still went to a good college.

In college I didn't care about grades. Still graduated.

At work I don't care about promotions. I still get raises well above inflation and am doing great.

You happened to luck out by choosing a career that's in demand (whether consciously or unconsciously), and are probably pretty good at it. Otherwise your story would sound very different. I am the same way, but straddle the professional world and the artistic world (trained / educated in both), and certainly appreciate the randomness involved and how much luck was involved in the fact that I happened to be interested in tech (and had the opportunity to pursue it when I did).

I have many friends without the same opportunities and I would be struggling just as much as them if it weren't for the tech bits (and a little bit of being in the right place at the right time)

Definitely luck involved there! But also I think that as long as you have a realistic plan and are able to consistently work on it early (I started learning web dev at 8) you can mostly disregard the standard education and progression systems. I think that railroading a child through the systems without a plan is wasted effort. Not that there aren't good things to learn that way. I ended up learning a ton about art and art history thanks to my college's degree requirements.

I guess what I'm saying is you can throw a child into extracurriculars and just sort of hope the extra work makes the difference between comfort and struggling. Or you can encourage them to find hobbies and reinforce the ones that will lead to comfort and stability as my parents did.

>We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck

I've read this before from Americans, and I don't get it. In my culture if parents can pay for their kids' education, they do it. There's a time and a place to teach them financial responsability, I feel distracting them with financial concerns during their most challenging years of schooling is not it.

When I went to college (paid for by my parents), I had friends who had to work on the side to pay for rent and groceries. They barely hung by, very few had great grades since they had to split their time between work and study. One of my close friends ended up dropping out because he was burned out.

Of course this doesn't mean you should pay 50k for a degree in feminist dance therapy, you make sure you only pay for something with ROI (That's another thing I don't understand about Americans. In a country with tuition so high, how can so many pursue degrees with such awful job prospects?)

You raise interesting points.

We’ve actually discussed that a bit. We will never let them get to the point where they have to worry about eating meals, or worry that their academics have to suffer to make ends meet.

We even considered for example giving them a living allowance so they have more flexibility in picking jobs, but aren’t desperate. But it’s important to me that they understand and intelligently approach the first large financial decision of their lives.

It’s also important (to me) that my kids work during college, whether it’s waiting tables in a restaurant, or a retail job, and understand the value of money and the value of serving lots of customers (including angry customers). Those experiences never leave you. You have more empathy for someone waiting tables or taking longer or making mistakes when you’ve done it yourself.

We are pretty well off right now and our kids have a very nice life. It’s important that they learn that it isn’t the default, and that it is a result of working hard. They’re already good kids. You’re right, our job parents is not to let them hit a point of desperation. But at the same time we also want them to learn the value of hard work, juggling priorities, and having the pride of having paid your own way through college.

These are all the additional lessons outside the classroom.

I agree. You get to be really careful where you want to put ur skill points. Play time is part of the skill tree too ;)

Full scheduling of random stuff doesn't mean it would always help the children. It's the children's version of appearing busy.

A full schedule is bad for a kid. They need to learn how to keep themselves entertained, or plan their own activities, or manage their own time, and they can't do that if they get a day plan from sun up to sun down.

Kids can keep themselves entertained very easily nowadays, YouTube/Tiktok/games can suck hours away in the blink of an eye. It's not like when I was young where going outside and hanging out with friends was the most fun choice.

As a tech person I long for the days of limited choices.

In this age of extreme abundance, we have lost the ability to just daydream, people watch, etc. I’m not glamorizing being bored. I used to hate waiting for 30 mins for the bus.

Sorry this is something I lecture my kids about a lot! :-)

When does little Johnny learn intrapersonal skills, conflict resolution skills, active listening skills, how to build and maintain friendship skills, or self-determination skills?