When I was 14, I overheard my parents say they would not be paying for their kids to attend a four-year university.
If any of us wanted the traditional college experience, we’d have to figure out how to pay for it ourselves. Community college was always an option, and they’d let us live at home while going to school.
As the oldest kid, I remember feeling stunned at first. For many of my friends, college was treated like an automatic next step that parents somehow financed. But after the disappointment wore off, it lit a fire in me. I threw myself into academics, determined to earn scholarships large enough to make my four-year university dreams possible.
I finished high school with a full-ride academic scholarship to any in-state university. But since my scholarship didn’t include housing, I chose the least glamorous option by attending the school closest to home. I commuted to class, nannied, overloaded credits every semester, including summers, and gratefully accepted the $2,000 a year my parents offered toward expenses.
Mostly living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and praying my debit card had enough money to fill up my gas tank, I graduated debt-free in three years. My younger siblings each found their own version of the “scrappy” route, too. My sister started community college classes at 15. My brother launched a business as a teenager.
Watching other people’s choices changed how I viewed college debt
Then I married someone with student loans.
Compared to many other borrowers, my husband’s debt load was actually modest, around $20,000, but in our early years of marriage, even that felt overwhelming. Every time we deferred the loans, the interest just kept on accruing. So we took on side hustles to pay them off faster, working weddings and bar mitzvahs and proctoring ACT tests on weekends.
At the same time, I watched several friends without degrees out-earn many college graduates because they had entered the workforce earlier and developed entrepreneurial skills. Fortunately for them, they weren’t weighed down by student loans.
It dawned on me that the narrative that going to college equals success is a black-and-white view of life that’s not always true.
Working in admissions further made me rethink the “dream school” mentality
My husband and I both worked as university admissions counselors, where we watched families willingly take on staggering amounts of debt in pursuit of their child’s university dream. Some shrugged off six-figure loan amounts as though it was simply the unavoidable cost of giving their children the “full experience.”
But I often walked away from meetings worried that students didn’t understand the long-term choices they were making. My husband and I developed a slogan we used to advise our students: graduate college in the least amount of time possible with the least amount of debt.
It was the only way we could ethically keep doing the job.
Why we won’t fully fund our children’s college educations
As parents, my husband and I are in agreement that we will not pay tens of thousands of dollars for our children to attend a university.
We value education, but we also value financial freedom. If one of our children wants to pursue a career with high earning potential that requires extensive schooling, that’s one thing. But we don’t believe an 18-year-old should casually take on $100,000 in debt for a career path that may never realistically allow them to repay it.
I’m more than happy to invest time in helping my kids navigate the scholarship process, educating them on how student loans work, and asking them to review all the options to determine what’s best for their needs — this might mean attending community college, going to trade school, or entering the workforce earlier.
Whatever path my children choose, I just hope they walk away from our home understanding that sometimes the easier or more glamorous path comes with the hardest long-term consequences.
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