stewardship of a paid education: part 1

This is part one of a two day blog on an article I read from Real Simple magazine. In the article a woman was interviewed and asked how much money, total, she would need for the rest of her life. The answer to that question and the bulk of the article will be tomorrow. For today I am just going to write on one part of the article. In the article she stated that she would want $100,000 to go toward her child’s education. (A.K.A. her child’s education is paid for. They are granted at least a free bachelors’ degree in life.)

Now being asked the question how much money would you need to live on for the rest of your life, of course you would include your child’s education into the mix. In reality, though, almost everyone has to earn their own money. In turn when this question is brought to mind in real life, should we be paying for our children’s education?

What does it do to a child when everything is paid for including one of the most prized assets someone can have: a college education? I myself have a Bachelors’ and Masters degree. Along with a trail of college loans to be paid off. That trail got me up for 8:00 AM classes. It made me go to night classes when I would rather be at the University basketball game. It made me appreciate the cost of books and the cost of food. But what if that was all paid for. I wonder how many 8:00 AM classes I would have missed or how many basketball games I would have gone to?

Would the luxury of free school made me not appreciate it as much? In general when someone’s education is paid for is the appreciation there? Is there good stewardship in having a free education? Is it teaching our children to live in the real world when that happens? When someone else has to pay for it? I’m not sure if there has ever been a study on this before, and I don’t have the means (a University Library) to find out. Just thinking about it though: 1) it would be hard to determine, and 2) would the test results come out the way I think they would.

When we talk about stewardship if we compare a student with a free education to a student that had to pay for their education (almost all of the time) the person that had to pay is going to have more debt - whether school or credit card. So, already stewardship may be screwed. Maybe spending habits could be looked at, though. And savings accounts probably are skewed too. A person who doesn’t have to pay for college has a better ability to build a savings account.
What about overall degree. Well, if someone has a free education they may have a better ability to have a bigger and better degree where someone paying for all of their education may only be able to afford a community college, an associate’s degree, or a smaller, less powerful college.
And what about appreciation? Is there a way to study this? It’s easy to mark on a survey when asked “Do you appreciate the free education you received?” Yes. In reality, though, does the person really appreciate and understand what it means to receive it and understand what people go through to have the same education?

My personal history, in undergrad and graduate school, would suggest that indeed people whose education is paid for by their parents or from a scholarship from sports, etcetera are not as appreciative. Their understanding and stewardship of money are often twisted and blind, and often marks of superiority are there. Of course there are plenty of exceptions. Many of the exceptions that I saw were in undergrad - in students who grew up with no chance of going to college and were given a scholarship because of their low socio-economic status and given a chance. In the whole though I wonder if this is just an experience I have seen, or is universally true.