Father of 3 here, one recently graduated and one about to start US college.
With reasonable preparation, college is very affordable. Scholarships are easily obtained with a good ACT or SAT score. Both of these are well documented, a few months of self-study practically guarantees a good score.
My experience has been that good preparation puts out of pocket costs below $10k per year. (I think that's actually on the high side.)
> Scholarships are easily obtained with a good ACT or SAT score.
For the children of people that read Hacker News, I could see that. For normal American kids? No way. Not even close.
The average american kid is not going to be able to get an SAT or ACT score good enough to get a scholarship. It's just not going to happen. You're vastly overestimating how smart and committed they are.
How much effort do you expect a kid to put into something that has no immediate benefit and no guarantee it'll ever pay off? To get to that level of delayed gratification requires a very special sort of upbringing.
You raise an excellent point. My kids (and others like them) are being raised in a 2-parent household. We encourage the kids to study, and help them where needed.
It's a form of privilege, but I don't feel guilty about it. We take part in programs that help other kids outside the family (including after-school homework help for ELS kids). IMHO, we all should become 'privilege factories', helping first our own kids and then other kids. It advances quality of life for everyone involved.
> Scholarships are easily obtained with a good ACT or SAT score
Ha ha ha. Having gone to college and recalling some folks I met, and listening to some stories from a friend who is a high school teacher at a public school, I laughed hard at that
With reasonable preparation, college is very affordable. Scholarships are easily obtained with a good ACT or SAT score. Both of these are well documented, a few months of self-study practically guarantees a good score.
My experience has been that good preparation puts out of pocket costs below $10k per year. (I think that's actually on the high side.)