We are two years into Jada's undergraduate experience and still waiting to hear where Aaron has gotten accepted. Asher is 8 years away from graduating from high school, and we've been saving for college since we first became parents 19+ years ago. So we're in it for the long haul contemplating the notion of how to pay for college and whether college is worth it at all.
This is a deeply personal question that intersects with parents' financial means and children's career interests. My thoughts are my own, informed by my privileges and limitations as well as my own lived experience. I will say that my read on the future, and my responsibility to do what I can to prepare my kids for happiness in the future, gives me the following reason to want to pay for college:
* Credentialing is way different nowadays but a college degree can still be important for landing a job and moving up
* Even if the piece of paper means nothing, the experience, if approached correctly, yields important life skills that prepare you for the rest of your life
* College is tribal in that you are creating a forever affiliation with a brand and with others who are affiliated with that brand, and those ties will come in handy in lots of different ways over the years
* Even if the mechanics of college are artificial and may change over the generations, they represent a sort of package of rites of passage that mark your progressing into adulthood (e.g. living in a dorm, rooting for the home team, rushing a sorority)
Perhaps it is the height of entitlement to spend well into the six figures to buy these things. I do believe people can find fulfillment in life and career by completing or partially bypassing the college experience (e.g. non-college credentials, community college, military), and this will likely continue or expand in the years to come. But I also had a happy and transformative college experience, and I expect that my kids, while their interests and paths are different than mine, will be glad they got to have one too.
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