Why I'm Not Paying For My Daughter to Go to MIT

This Saturday, 17 found out that she had been accepted to MIT. The countdown had begun several weeks before. Friday night, she could hardly sleep. We all gathered around her computer for the news and we cheered and made phone calls when we found out. My husband and I took the whole family out for lunch and dessert to celebrate. MIT has been her dream school for years. I was so happy for her.

And yet, I have no idea if she will actually end up going. I don't mind her going. I just have no intention of helping her pay for it. If she wants to go, she will have to take out student loans to cover whatever cost the university doesn't. She is not very happy about this, and insists that when she has children, she will make sure that she has a college fund available that will pay for ANY place her children choose to go to. I, on the other hand, have no college fund for any of my kids. They are all perfectly capable of getting full ride scholarships to any reasonably priced university they choose. MIT is not one of those places.

I should say that to me, 17 getting accepted by MIT was nothing more than a validation of MIT's intelligence. I already know how brilliant and capable and hardworking my daughter is. My main goal for quite a number of years as her parent has been to get her to take time off and relax. She claims she relaxes too much and "wastes" time on the internet. She won't go on facebook because she's afraid she will waste more time. Ha! This is a child who has taken 7 AP tests already, will take 5 more this year, and has been taking 2 classes at the local university in addition to her high school work for the past two years. She has a 35 on the ACT and I could go on and on, but the details won't mean anything to anyone not in her field. While I was trying to coach her for interviews, she seriously said that nothing she had done mattered because she hadn't won a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. Because those are the only measures of real success to her, apparently.So, yeah, her getting into MIT, not a surprise to me. A relief to her, but if they had rejected her, I would have thought there was something wrong with them, not her.

I understand why MIT has the scholarship policy they have. They say that every student who gets admitted to MIT is deserving of a scholarship, so they give them based on need. I have no idea what "need" MIT will decide that we have. We're well off financially, but we also have 4 other children, and we may end up with 2 in college next year, depending on what 16 decides to do. I think it's very odd the way that we dole out adulthood to teens. They can marry at 15 in Utah, with a parent's permission), join the army at 17 and can die in a war. They can vote at 18. But they can't drink or smoke until 21. But when it comes to college, parents are expected to pay and are considered part of the financial aid package.

My experience as a parent watching other parents paying for children's education has only confirmed what I thought as a college student myself: If you treat your kids as dependents, they will act as dependents. That means, they will not treat college seriously. And they will not treat themselves seriously, which seems the greater threat. I want my daughter to see how capable she is of living in the adult world, and to me that means cutting the financial ties between us when she moves away to college. Sure, there are ways in which she is not fully adult. There are ways in which I am not fully adult, too, sadly enough.

As a teen, I had a dream college, too. Amherst. When I got accepted, they offered me the same kind of financial need based package. But my parents had 11 children and I was 9th. They had several children still in college. They simply could not afford to give me the $10,000 a year Amherst expected them to. My dad wished he could. He offered to call and see if he could arrange something. But in the end, I chose not to go. I chose to go to the local university where I got a full ride scholarship. I graduated in a couple of years and went on to grad school at Princeton, where they paid me a stipend in addition to a tuition waver to go. And where I taught a year and saw what undergrad life at an Ivy league school is like.

Um, I can't say I was impressed. How many times did students tell me they couldn't make it to class because they were going to an AA meeting instead? Look, definitely the right choice. But they were all underage and it was illegal for them to drink. Their parents were paying $25,000 a year for them to go to Princeton, and they were spending their time drinking. Also, I learned that the university had a policy that if professors wanted to give a student less than a B-, they had to file paperwork for the privilege of doing so. Guess how often that happened? It didn't. Parents who are paying that much for an education want their students to get good grades or what happens? They don't come back. So, I learned that an A=A, an A-=B, a B+=C B=D and B-=F at Princeton. Sure, the students were smart. And some took full advantage of their opportunities. Not most.

I worked my way through college and grad school to pay for any living expenses I had above what the university paid for in scholarships. I worked every summer, at places like Bristol Meyer Squibb, David Sarnoff Research, and Johnson and Johnson, which have headquarters in Princeton. I learned a LOT about the real corporate world, too. I had a whole corporate wardrobe and I had multiple job offers in that world (which I turned down). I was proud of my ability to make my own way.

We got some student loans to pay for my husband's tuition since he didn't have a full scholarship, and those came back to haunt us later. I don't wish those on my daughter, but I won't stop her from taking them out, if she chooses to. This is one of the other benefits of not paying for your children's college education. There is no improper manipulation of choices. I shouldn't be the one to choose where my daughter goes to college. It's her choice, her life. And when she takes charge of funding it herself, then I don't have any say.

I loved college. More than anything I experienced up to that point, I had perfect freedom. I could take any class I wanted and no one told me what to do. I don't want to take that away from my daughter. I love her to death. I'd love for nothing more than to keep her at home for another year or two. She is love and cheer and joy at our house and the glue that keeps the other kids together. I don't know how we'll live without her. But that's what would be good for me. I want to protect her and wrap her in cotton so no one hurts her or makes her think worse of herself. But those are the impulses of parenthood that have to be quelled at 18. She will do well in the world, wherever she goes. And it's because I love her that I won't pay for her college.