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Are you going to college or is your kid going to college? Serious question.
Let’s be honest. Many parents live vicariously through their children, especially if they couldn’t access the resources that their kids enjoy, and if they want to uphold a specific tradition. The logic usually goes, “Every generation of this family has had doctors since your great-great grandfather’s time, so it’s your turn now.”
I engage in vicarious living constantly through my own kids, who are 2.5 and 4.5 years old. It’s not always a bad thing because you could be giving your kids greater intellectual freedom and room for creativity and exploration, yadda yadda.
Or you could be forcing your kid into a path that’s entirely unsuitable for their mental and emotional state. Or any number of situations in between. I suggest calibrating your position on the spectrum before continuing by introspecting and questioning your motives as a parent.
What Is The Desired End Goal Of Going To College?
No, don’t give me “getting a good job and being financially stable” because we all know that’s the minimum requirement from most parents. Let’s be more specific and create a vision statement that includes details about your child and how to maximize for their strengths and buttress their weaknesses.
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For example, “My kid is extremely creative but needs a structured environment to channel their creative energies. So, I want to consider colleges that give them a creative outlet with a rigorous and liberal arts academic program that will equip them to be both employable and also continue to explore his/her creative vision.”
Or “My kid is obsessed with marine biology, but I’m a bit worried about employability after college, so I want them to go to a college with a strong marine biology program but also a strong core curriculum.”
It could also be, “My kid is really smart at various subjects and is shy/uncomfortable in large groups, so I’d want them to be in a setting where they get a lot of one-on-one attention and have a strong liberal arts curriculum. Plus, a great career office with proactive recruiting programs so they can develop confidence and receive personalized career guidance.”
Having a specific vision statement for your child’s outcome from college is important because
- It shows that you are attuned to their strengths and weaknesses, all of which will become potentially either magnified or subdued in college;
- It can help set them up for success in a new environment based on evidence of the child’s past and current behavioral and academic patterns, even when you aren’t around to check in on them and auto-correct their course;
- It creates a filter through which you can consider the schools best suited to your child, who will be different from your other kid(s) and other people’s kids.
This last point is critical because I’ve noticed that many parents, especially immigrant parents, pick colleges for their kids based on the college’s overall reputation/ranking, rather than filtering through their own kid’s needs.
Based on my and many other peers’ personal experiences, I feel like this is a lopsided approach. In the United States, colleges have distinct reputations, identities and cultures, which is even more evident if you spend any time abroad or talking to friends who did their undergraduate work outside North America.
This is particularly true for top private colleges – the stereotype of the Harvard [wo]man exists for a reason. In addition, the range of non-academic offerings such as extracurricular organizations, mental health services, career services and so forth can range considerably from college to college.
Non-academic offerings can affect a student’s college experience as much as the academic experience.
How My College Experience Helps Make a Decision
Case in point: me, Kate Wang. In high school, I was a very smart, hardworking, but very naïve and sheltered immigrant kid who developed clinical anorexia from stress.
I knew a lot about getting A’s but nothing about prioritizing mental health, socializing with people from very different backgrounds, and very little about the opposite sex. It’s hard to say no when Harvard accepts you, and you have Chinese immigrant parents, so off I went, despite a terrible experience at admitted students’ weekend and my personal inclination to prefer Wellesley.
I don’t want to brag, but it wasn’t the academics at Harvard that threw me off – I was perfectly capable of handling them. It was the social environment that absolutely wrecked me. I didn’t know how to deal with college drinking, with advances from boys who tried to get me drunk to take advantage of me, with seeing wealth beyond my imagination while being from a modest immigrant background, with petty jealousies from peers who thought I had it all buttoned up because I dressed nicely and seemed outwardly adjusted (I was not well adjusted but high functioning anxious perfectionists project perfection).
I became very depressed, periodically suicidal, and barely tried at academics. Let’s be honest, a 3.4 GPA at Harvard is like a 2.0 GPA elsewhere, so high is the grade inflation. Yeah yeah, I did see a mental health counselor like many of my peers but it didn’t help much.
I could talk circles around the therapist, and it was useless in and of itself without additional support structures in a complex environment that deluged me with intense social stressors every day.
How could a nice, white therapist at university health services understand my traumatic childhood, my feelings of inferiority as a middle-class Chinese American girl among wealthy WASPs? And I also fought with my overprotective parents constantly because they were calling me every day trying to track my movements (please don’t be that parent), and they didn’t understand me at all.
I’ll stop the self-pity for now because in the end, I did turn out okay. But this was after years of clinical anorexia and bulimia, clinical depression and anxiety, being taken advantage of by men and women in professional and personal situations because I was so incredibly naïve and unschooled in the ways of this world, and my parents had no ability to guide me.
It took five therapists, trying two different SSRIs, multiple modalities of therapeutic intervention, and so much more to reach a reasonable state of emotional wellbeing at the cusp of turning 40. I’m pretty sure none of you want that for your kids, and I definitely don’t want that for my own girls.
So yes, please try to understand where your kids are at emotionally, developmentally, socially, and psychologically before you start thinking about where they go to college.
What school would I have picked for high school Kate? Wellesley. A small, intimate college with a lot of hands-on guidance and attention from faculty and staff. Where I could have grown into a greater sense of confidence as a young woman, while focusing on my liberal arts interests that had always been shunted aside by my parents (who refused to give me drawing lessons until I was 14, saying that they were “useless for college”).
But to be honest, I’m not sure Wellesley would have been enough to fix all that was wrong with me at the time – my personal problems stretch back into infancy and childhood. However, I do think it would have been a healthier environment for me, relative to the larger private university options that I had been admitted to, such as Harvard, Northwestern, and Duke. Hopefully, your kids will be much more emotionally well-adjusted and able to thrive in diverse environments – that should be every parent’s goal for their kids who go off to college.
But let’s be honest, that’s far less often the case than we think, and you’d be surprised how many parents are ignorant of the state of their kids’ emotional health.
Your Family’s Financial Arrangements During And After College
My husband and I came from middle-class and upper-middle-class immigrant families that did not hesitate to pay for our college tuition. I received a partial financial aid package from Harvard (which incidentally also gave me the best financial aid package, followed by Wellesley) with a few small scholarships. My husband received nothing from Northwestern (to which I was also admitted and which gave me a much smaller financial aid package compared to Harvard), so our parents did have to shoulder paying for most/all of our tuition and room and board.
I see the merits of paying for your child’s college tuition, making the child take out loans to pay for their tuition on their own, or a combination of both. This is a personal decision based on each family’s values, and it is not for me to judge.
However, I do recommend understanding the basics of college tuition pricing.
I’ve obtained information on in-state and out-of-state tuition for the University of Washington (UW) and from Harvard College from the universities’ respective websites below:
At a glance, the sticker price, which is what economists called the price displayed on the university websites, is much higher at Harvard, $82,866 per year compared to $65,541 for UW’s out of state tuition (living on/off campus) and $35,305 for UW’s in state tuition (living on/off campus).
However, the net price, or what an individual’s education ends up costing, is highly variable and is often never the sticker price. Harvard has a net price calculator on its website, where you can plug in your family’s financial information to see an estimate financial aid package.
For a family of four with one child in college, with a yearly income of $200,000 and assets of $500,000, Harvard will provide a financial aid package of $28,416, which means you would pay $58,950 out of pocket.
UW’s net price calculator is currently unavailable because of “significant changes to the 2024-2025 FAFSA application process”. However, I did fill out the federal student aid estimator with the same information I entered for the Harvard calculator and received the information below:
What the calculators do not tell you is that a large part of Harvard’s financial aid package is not loans, work-study, but actual financial aid that you do not have to pay back.
On the other hand, financial aid from public universities consists primarily of loans and work-study, with federal Pell Grants available for low-income students. Note that these scenarios do not yet factor in scholarship money, which is a separate consideration.
What you end up paying for college is the sticker price, plus college and federal financial aid and scholarships. I entered a relatively simple scenario, but it is important to note if your family has additional complications, such as multiple children attending college, a disability, child support from divorce, and so forth.
I can’t tell you what’s the best “deal” for your family because I don’t know your financial circumstances, I don’t know your personal circumstances, and I don’t know you and your child’s expectations for their future earnings.
I do think it is important to consider not only your financial situation but also what kind of discounts you can get from each school, whether financial aid or scholarships. This information is not evident unless you poke into each school’s website.
To be honest, there is a ridiculous amount of opacity in calculating returns on investment in education because we also have relatively little data insight into labor market outcomes for individual institutions of higher education in the United States. In addition, how do you calculate the value of intangibles, such as a professional network, access to privileged resources, employers, mentors, etc.?
This is why I feel that college in the United States today feels like a discretionary purchase – your input may not necessarily have an equivalent or calculable output. I know high school classmates who’ve gotten a UW education for virtually nothing (and I would have too, had I attended) and are earning a higher income as programmers at Amazon than me, the erstwhile double Harvard graduate (I did pay my own way for my master’s degree).
But am I a bad return on investment for my parents? I doubt they’d think that if you asked them this question, because I’ve brought incalculable value with my network and networking skills, in finding excellent money managers and investment opportunities.
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have found those people had I attended UW, but I know for a fact that I am who I am professionally because of having attended Harvard, even if it did witness my emotional breakdown (but I suspect that would have happened at other institutions too).
In conclusion, extracting a specific calculable value from attending one institution over another is quite difficult. How you and I define “value” will be different, and we simply do not have the hard data on an institutional level to quantify certain values anyway.
Let me know if you’ve found a good method; I’m still waiting to find one.
In Conclusion…
The reason why I focused on existential and macro-level considerations of picking a college is because I feel that most college picking advice available focuses on an outcome and works backwards from there.
I rarely ever hear people discuss teenagers’ college readiness from a perspective of emotional and mental health. College in the United States isn’t just studying and getting a job – it’s socializing with a wide range of peers from different socioeconomic, cultural and racial backgrounds; it’s facing temptations from alcohol to drugs (both illegal and prescription); it’s encountering ambiguous situations and moral and ethical dilemmas as a young adult with limited mature adult supervision and support.
Only if you accept the undergraduate experience as all of this and more will you be able to make a fully informed choice about college.
