Recently, I had a great Facebook discussion with a number of folks from my church regarding saving for college for our kids. The discussion began with this question:

For those of you with kids, how much are you contributing monthly for college savings and what is your end goal?

Here, I want to distill some of the key points from the discussion. I think most of us participating were starting from the idea that everything we have ultimately belongs to God – all of our time, talents, and resources, and we can trust him to provide to meet our needs. However, the Bible also talks about acting in a frugal manner and saving for the future – though the our real citizenship is in heaven. In any case, that was the backdrop for our discussion of college planning.

However, before addressing practical aspects of how much to contribute, it’s essential to establish goals, and much of our discussion centered around that. There are a range of possibilities worth considering if we have the ability to help our kids get through college:

  • Let our kids pay for their own college and expenses
  • Pay for a portion of their college and expenses
  • Pay for college plus living expenses

Our experience with college and how it affected our goals

Our discussion mostly focused around why we might prefer one option or another. I mentioned that my wife and I put away college funds in order to try and be able to pay for tuition and fees for two years of a community college and two years of a UC-level school for our kids, so something like the intermediate option of paying for a portion of their college and expenses.

Why would we go this route? Maura and I both paid for a chunk of our own college and we believe we benefitted from the experience. In my case, my parents paid my tuition and fees and I paid living expenses (though just for my last two years – I started at a community college); in her case, she paid for pretty much everything. Both of us managed to come through debt free. It’s been a while since we went to college, and costs have gone up, so paying for a full college education without debt would be a lot harder now.

However, we believe we learned a lot from having some skin in the game, as it were; the lessons we learned carried over to how we’ve lived afterwards. I think it’s helped us mostly live a relatively frugal life, so that we have money to give to help others, because we learned how to get by with little and to save. For example, in my case I’d work as much as possible in the summers and save frantically, then once school was in session I’d work a little bit (tutoring, etc.) to supplement but mostly live off of my summer savings. That helped me learn that I could get by with very little when I need to, and since then, as my income has increased I’ve tried to not let our spending grow commensurately. We think that having our kids share in the cost of college to some extent will help them learn how to live frugally and make wise choices.

When we were newlyweds, we lived in an apartment complex mostly housing college students. Seasonally, when it was time for the students to move, we’d notice stuff in the trash that really shouldn’t be there – brand new clothes with the price tags still on and all kinds of other things which left us scratching our heads. Eventually we realized these things were being discarded because of attitude. For us, new clothes gone to waste meant wasted money which equated to wasted hours working somewhere. In contrast, to the students throwing these valuable items away, because someone else was paying for everything, it was no big deal. We want to raise our kids with more of an appreciation for what they have, and more of a sense of the real costs, so we want them to share in their college costs to some extent.

This might mean that our kids will need to work to pay for living expenses, or that they might choose to live at home while going through college to reduce costs. It’d also likely affect how much they might try for scholarships, and where they might choose to go to college. Still, we thought the lessons learned through this would be important for our kids.

Other perspectives

In discussion, one thing that came up was that our own experiences often impact what we want for our kids. A friend related how his experience having his parents pay for his college affected his own desires; he wants to respond to their generosity by passing it on to his own kids. However, he also noted that he may have partly taken his parents’ generosity for granted. He, too, shares the goal of teaching kids about the relationship between work and money, and how much time it takes to earn money.

Another couple had to pay their own way through college, and ended up with significant debt. This resulted in one spouse wanting to pay for their kids’ college to ensure they don’t end up in the same situation, while the other spouse felt that the experience was beneficial and wanted the kids to pay their own way. They still have to make up their mind.

Another friend related how she learned some of these same lessons. Particularly, when she was young her mom told her how much she made and she would always calculate if it was worth it to buy something new, knowing how much it cost her mom (an hour of work, etc). It helped her understand waste and frugality. The same friend also didn’t receive as much help from her parents in school, in order to have skin in the game. She finished with quite a bit of debt, which, although it felt overwhelming at times, helped her better understand the crushing debt of sin and how it’s something we can never repay on our own.

Ultimately, choosing to do one thing means choosing not to do something else

Long ago, a friend helped me make an important decision about whether I should do something by asking, “What would you be giving up to do that?” He pointed out that there’s an important principle here. Whenever we choose to do one thing, we’re giving up doing something else. It’s important to identify what we’re giving up. In the context of this discussion about college finances, Maura reminded us that this same principle is also true there. Time and money are both resources we have in limited supply, and when we choose to spend them one way, we’re choosing not to use them in a different way.

How does that relate to college savings? Well, it’s possible that if we wanted to put away enough money to fully pay for tuition, fees, and living expenses for our six kids at a four-year university, we couldn’t, or even if we could, we simply wouldn’t have any left over for other things we also believe are very important – like helping to support our church’s missionaries, or the poor children we support in Ecuador and elsewhere through Compassion International, or to give to meet needs in our church and elsewhere. Yes, we want to care for and provide for our own children, but we also want to teach them that we are stewards of God’s money, and we want to use it to help others and to bring God glory, not just to give our kids an easy path through college.

What about community college? And other ways to cut costs?

I mentioned that we expect we’ll likely send our kids to community college. My own experience in community college was great; that’s where I had the best instructors I’ve ever had. Some of this may be a quirk of my particular community college, but some may be true more broadly. Partly, this is because community colleges are one of the few institutions that hire instructors almost entirely based on teaching ability. I had small class sizes, close relationships with my professors, and on the whole it was a great experience. Many who have gone to community college and then transferred tell me something similar. Additionally, of course, it was extremely inexpensive, and gave me time to explore several possible majors without wasting a lot of money in the process.

At UCI, I recently found out that transfer students coming into our program from community colleges actually do better in our program than those who start off at UCI, which is interesting. There are, of course, some benefits associated with spending four years at a single school. But I’m fairly convinced that community colleges are underrated and many people skip them simply because of the stigma attached. I think there’s still a bit of an attitude of, well, “If you were a top student, you’d go to a good school…” and “Community colleges are for losers…” However, I think the costs and benefits make them worth considering.

There are other ways to cut costs for college, in addition to the obvious strategies of scholarships and financial aid. Room and board costs don’t necessarily need to equal those the school suggests, and can be highly variable depending on motivation and frugality. When I was a college student and then grad student, I lived cheaply off campus with a few roommates, biked pretty much everywhere, and rarely ate out. My costs were much lower than what the UC would have listed at the time, and this contributed to my ability to get through debt free.

Summing up: These issues require careful consideration

I think this is an area where it’s important that each family wrestle with the issues and make their own decisions in view of Scripture. I think we can agree on the principles - we are stewards of the time, money, and other resources God has entrusted to us; we want to help our kids; we want our kids to learn to be responsible; we want them to take ownership, etc. But despite this agreement, we will differ in how to decide to best teach these issues and how to best navigate the college experience.