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I graduated high school when I was 16, and went to college that fall. Nothing fancy, just the local community college in town. I signed up full time, and then realized that I needed some source of money other than my mother since I was now a high school graduate. I got a job at the local grocery store and worked part time, and went to school part time, and studied…well, never. Fast forward a few years, and I had two kids, and a husband. And I was STILL going to school part time. Forget the fast track, I was on the slow track! It took me 5 years to get that 2 year degree, in part because of the kids and the husband, but also due to not having the cash to go to school full time. If I had been able to do that, I could have gotten a bachelor’s degree in that same time frame. Student loans weren’t even an option for me, simply because no one told me that I could get one.
It won’t be too long before my oldest is thinking about college. She’s going into the 6th grade this fall, which means she’s got another 6 years left. My plan is to pay for it for her - I don’t want her to feel like she has to come up with any of the money for her tuition or books. I just want her to focus on the classes and graduating. Same goes for the other kids - college is a lot harder when you’ve got to work and go to school. I hope my kids don’t need financial aid or a federal plus loan, I hope that I can pay for everything, but if I can’t - well, I am surely going to explore the options that I didn’t know about when I was a student. If I expect my kids to go to college and get those degrees, the least I can do as a parent is to figure out how to pay for it.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Family Ties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
You’ve got the right idea.. that’s what my hubby and I plan to do when we have kids. I went the college/job route and did terribly - it’s just so much harder to hold down a job and study at a college level than it is to hold down a job and study at the high school level. Good luck!