College Tuition costs

[disneysteve]

I don't know how manageable it would be working full time trying to live and pay $15k tuition.

15K/year is 60K for 4 years Add another 10K for books and supplies so that's 70K.

If parents would save just $100/month from birth, they would have about 40K at age 18 so that's more than half of the cost right there. Another $100/month for the 4 years of college adds another $4,800.

If the kid would save birthday money and earnings from jobs, they could easily build up a few thousand more. My daughter babysits once a week and earns about $1,000/year from that. She hasn't really pushed the babysitting but she could have easily made a whole lot more. My niece had an after-school babysitting job 5 days/week. She made a few hundred dollars per month doing that in high school. Add in a summer job each year in high school and college and that 70K total isn't out of reach at all, and that's without working during the school year at all.

[feh]

Increases will vary from school to school, but the average tuition increase per year over the last 35 years is 7.5%. Roughly doubles every 10 years.

[txex86]

Tuition at The University of Texas at Austin from 1982 until I graduated in 1986 was $4 per credit hour and fees were $400 per semester. So, based on 128 hours and 8 semesters of fees for my business undergraduate degree, the cost was $3712. The low cost was due to the large subsidy the state of Texas gave to state universities back in the day.

Compare that to today, where my daughter's tuition at the same university and same degree is $5369 per semester(42,952 for 4 years) and you can see the effect that decreased state funding and inflation has had on in-state tuition in Texas.

[Sinbad43]

College cost a lot. I didn't really consider how much when I went, nor the impact of paying student loans. I don't think many people do, which is sad.

[Like2Plan]

CNN-Money Magazine has an article on college costs in the January/February 2014 issue.
Here is a link to the article "Grow a bigger college fund"

They have an inset titled, "Another Option For College Savers" where they talk about pre-paid tuition plans. Here's a quote from the article, "True, many prepaid plans ran into trouble over the past decade as tuition inflation outpaced states' investment gains. Ten plans shut down, and two ended up paying parents less than promised. Yet the health of the 12 surviving plans open to new investors has improved dramatically due to the stock market's resurgence and in some cases the adoption of more realistic (read: less generous) pricing and refund policies."

My thought is--here are these smart people whose full focus is on college funding and they couldn't attenuate the effects of college inflation costs with the investment choices.

And for the individual investor, you move your child's college savings out of stocks as you get closer in, but there is a risk to investing in bonds as interest rates go up. Investing for college is a daunting task.

From the article: "After running thousands of simulations, Vanguard, a major 529 provider, found that no matter how conservative or aggressive a fund they choose, families who are able to sock away $6,000 a year in an age-based portfolio starting when the child is a baby would have a 99% likelihood of banking enough to pay all four years of tuition, fees, room, and board for one student at an instate public college. "

[Snydley]

I graduated from my undergraduate in 1996. If I'm remember correctly the annual cost was ~36K. Now, it looks like it's $57,550.

It's a "semi-name" college. Not the best, but very respectable. I think that a B.S. from my "name" alma-mater gave me no advantage at all down the road.