That’s awesome that you are able to have an impact and explain that to them! Maybe a few will seek out every education option and get the best possible deal, instead of just sticking with one route.
The scammy schools for trade stuff are such a disaster, I don’t understand why it isn’t better standardized. Like what’s the problem with cracking down on that?!
I may have just had really good luck with community college! DH and I both went (in different states/at different times) and paid very little and felt like it was worth the money. We got a ton of aid when DH went, but we were super low income at the time, I don’t think we ever paid more than a few hundred a semester!
This all depends so very much on location. The state school where I teach costs half what anomalily quoted for community college, and our tech schools (which are that but are also community colleges) are slightly less. We do have some private schools trying to compete in the trades, but the public tech schools are not forbidden from teaching anything - that’s stupid.
I feel weird about this because my family was very much a “your job is to be a good student and get scholarships” family when I was growing up, but then when I did go to college (full ride scholarship with room and board included) I sent money home each month to pay the water bill out of my work study earnings. I was on my parent’s health insurance until I was 26, but that cost them nothing extra. They bought me a used car when I graduated and let me move back in with them when I dropped out of grad school. I got a lot of support, but not the kind that these articles seem to be talking about. I also always knew I had a soft place to land if I needed them. We didn’t have much growing up, but we would make do for each other.
Now I’m more settled in my career and I’m the one writing them checks. I buy them groceries when I come visit and recently paid off my mom’s car loan when she got cancer and had to stop working. I send money every month to help with the bills and my sister and I are in talks about buying their house from them so they have a guaranteed place to live. My mom smiles and says that this is how it is supposed to be. That parents help their kids when they are young so the kids will help the parents when they are old.
This is mildly off-topic, but one thing I LOVE about traveling and staying in non-party age-diverse hostels is you meet the most interesting people, who don’t ask the “how do you afford to travel?” question and instead are more likely to openly talk about how they worked for X number of years, saved everything they could to travel. Because I get a lot of “how can you afford to travel?” accusatory questions that seem to imply I’m hiding secret trust fund under a rock back here, but it’s generally understood it’s a matter or prioritizing and economizing according to my own goals and values when I’m in a hostel.
This last trip, I spent a lot of time chatting with a 24-year-old musician who travels for fun 4 months a year and tours the other 8 months for money, and a 40-year-old photographer who shared my “occasionally I’m a grown ass [adult] who throws money at travel problems to make them go away, but also I like staying in a $20 a night hostel bed because I meet more interesting people and then I have more money for food”.
But also, holy CRAP is my job hard to explain. I had to explain it to so many people, in hostels, bars, immigration, US homeland security… ugh. I try to say “radio host” and then it just gets more complicated.
This is so interesting to me. I’m from an upper-ish middle class background although both my parents were working class and I can’t imagine them - a university lecturer and a health visitor - having remotely the life my dad has now if they were in their 30s in this economy.
I have one sister and three cousins and without exception, they are doing well financially in the sense that most of them own property or are about to, there are kids in the equation, have stable jobs and all earn over £50k pa.
I…do not. I rent a flat that’s cheap even for the part of town it’s in (when they made the sequel to Trainspotting, the Scottish drugs & debauchery film/book, they set it in my area because Leith where the first story took place had become too gentrified. I’m pretty sure there’s a drug den opposite the bus stop). I made £26k last year from a combination of fiction, journalism, copywriting and three months of the marketing gig I’m just finishing up. Although I had a good income year in 2018, so many payments were late that I had to borrow rent from Dad on a few occasions, which I’m still paying back. He helped my sister buy her first flat and I’m painfully aware that any similar financial sum set aside for me has now been eaten up by the support he’s given me.
I absolutely consider it somewhere between a gift and a loan - he didn’t have to do it but I will/am paying him back for it. I feel like I have a bigger point to make and a lot of feelings to process which will probably end up in the journal section at some point.
Also, I never got any financial advice from my parents - it was assumed we already knew about pension contributions and savings somehow? Clearly my sister has figured it out, although she was far more financially savvy than I was (lived at home for a long time) but in retrospect I feel like they should maybe have sat down with the kid who had terrible maths skills and executive dysfunction and maybe helped me make a flow chart or something.
I am kinda the opposite to the article, I contributed to household bills from when I got my first job at 14. I am now 31 and help my mum out with bills and expenses when she needs it, I assume that as my mum gets older and stops working I will help her out more.
