College is expensive. We at financial service companies will keep reminding you of that with all sorts of scary statistics to encourage you to get started saving now. It’s already too late, but contact us right away and maybe we can help you. Of course, when you sign up with one of our college saving’s programs we’ll take a small percentage of your savings every year for five, ten, even twenty years. You won’t even notice the charge, because we hide it, but it adds up very nicely for us.
While our ads will talk about ever increasing list prices for colleges, they won’t mention the fact that few students pay full price. We’ll focus on expensive private college rates, not on some very fine state school alternatives available at a fraction of the private college prices. According to The New York Times, 89% of private college students don’t pay full price, and 50% of freshman pay about 50% of the list price tuition, but we don’t talk about that. We certainly won’t explain how the more you have saved up the less you are to likely to get in need based assistance. Why would we shoot ourselves in the foot?
The colleges, by-the-way, kind of work with us here. We affectionately call them our co-conspirators. They can’t keep raising their prices the way they do if their target market doesn’t have the money to pay those prices, can they? So it works for them to rely on us in the investment industry to encourage anxious parents to start saving for college long before their babies are out of diapers.
Don’t even think about questioning whether a college education is always worth it. With the help of politicians, educators, and lots of others, that question is almost considered illegal.