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Health & Fitness

The Cost of College, New Jersey Style

Affording a college education as a New Jersey resident isn't easy...

 

My older daughter will be a senior in high school this coming school year. She's a bright girl with excellent grades, lots of activities, and leadership qualities.  Many colleges will be very interested in her.  This is the good news.

The bad news is that we have to pay for college, and it doesn't come cheap.  We've been diligently saving since she was a little girl.  Every month, her college savings account automatically withdraws a sum from our checking account and starts trying to build interest on it. When she was Bat Mitzvahed four years ago, we took the money gifts she received, less some for a new laptop, and put it all into her 529. 

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Even with all of this saving, it's still not enough.

For some families, the answer is Rutgers.  Right now to live and go to school full time at Rutgers in state is an incredible $24,000 a year, which is a lot more than residents of other states pay to educate their citizens.  We have found public universities in other states that charge less for non residents than Rutgers charges for an in state education.  It doesn't make sense. How are these other state schools providing a four year degree for less than $24,000 a year and New Jersey can't?  Perhaps it's because Snooki isn't collecting speaker's fees at those schools....

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Some of the colleges our daughter is looking at are between $40,000 and $50,000 a year.  At those schools, we are bound to get some financial aid, partially through grants and scholarship money, and partially through loans that we will be paying back into our sixties and beyond, and our daughter will be paying back even after she has her own children.  

Even the least expensive schools fall into the $20,000 to $25,000 per year range.  I really want to know who can afford to shell out this amount of money every year for four years straight -- and that's only for one kid!  Our younger daughter will enter college the September after our older daughter graduates, which means we will be paying for college for eight years in a row.

A lot of people will suggest community college as an alternative.  Yes, they are absolutely cheaper and from what I understand, can boast an excellent education and services. From where we stand, though, going away to college is important -- even if going away is to New Brunswick. We think that part of what a student learns in college is how to live life independently, from negotiating a challenging roommate to doing laundry to making decisions his or her parents have been making for the student for the last 18 years.  In some ways, to my husband and me, the "book" education is secondary to the education in LIFE.

So what to do?  We'll complain and grouse (a lot) the next few years but I'm sure, like every other middle class family, we'll figure out a way.  How do you plan to or how do you currently afford college for your kids? I want to know!

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