“Get into the best school you can” is the conventional wisdom given to many university bound students. In what I thought would have been parental common sense, but obviously is not, Jillian Berman lays out the decision making that should go into choosing a university.
When parents and children talk about applying for colleges, they consider all sorts of factors: the school’s prestige, the location, even the food in the dormitories.
But often there’s one thing that never is on the agenda: How are we going to pay for this?
Even people who over-buy on cars and homes normally know what the monthly repayments will be and how much of their take-home pay it will constitute.
In my mind, a parent who does not have this discussion, including the alternatives to university, is committing parental gross negligence. And for high school guidance counselors who negligently parrot the university administrators’ marketing lines and platitudes from the 1980s; fire them.
