What wrong with all you guys having perfectly reasonable opinions and doing good for your kids? This is the Darkside! Where are all the liberal idiots and butthurt broke debtors? Steelheadman, DBS and Timber sound like you raised them right. That's awesome!

Timber I agree with most of what you said but not the head start. You don't get a head start by going to school, you get a head start by working and investing and the earlier you do it is the head start. Not that you can't catch up or that it is always a wrong decision but if you do the math, compared to someone who went in construction but started 4 years earlier, it's a either financially worse off to go to college even when 100% paid for or maybe a wash, depending on how much you make when you graduate. No matter how you pencil it out you will never be better off financially by going to college as opposed to working and investing at best you can break even. There is no head start by going to college, the head start is by working and investing, the sooner you start that the better it's hard to get over the lost opportunity cost, it is such a head start that it is almost impossible to overcome that. Good for you that at least they are not in debt so they are not held back by that. Instead of looking at it like a head start, look at it as breaking even and breaking even on it is good enough. But to have the lost opportunity costs AND a huge debt, you are behind for sure no matter how much you make. People that do this better like their job because they will be working at it for awhile. My goal was to retire as early as possible and with that goal in mind, college defiantly wasn't a head start.

They shouldn't give out loans at all, it messes the whole system up. I want doctors to be doctors because they are smart, not because they have high financial risk tolerance.