Yale or bust

Here's what's on my mind today: college tuition. Lots of it. Come autumn of 2023, I'm looking at not one but two new college freshmen. That gives me just over 17 years to save up approximately $176,961 times two, assuming the girls go to an Illinois state college. Given our government's propensity for cutting student aid programs of late (they just cut funding for student loans by 30%), I don't think we can count on any outside assistance to pay for tuition. According to one estimate, we need to be saving $9,000 a year, starting now, to make sure we're ready come 2023. Our little family's income barely manages to cover all the formula we need from month to month, so we don't exactly have nine grand just lying around.

I've emailed both of my senators, Dick Durbin and Barack Obama, about this. I hope they'll email me back and let me know what their proposed solutions are, but I'm not holding my breath.

Here's my proposed solution. We've already decided that the girls will be musicians. (We'll let them choose their own instruments--we are very lenient and open-minded parents.) All they have to do is get into Yale's music school. Recently, a $100 million anonymous donation made it possible to for Yale to waive tuition for its music students. So there's our answer--the girls will just have to get into Yale. We'll be starting those Suzuki violin lessons next week.

Oops. Upon further investigation, it looks like it's just Yale's graduate music program that's free of charge. Looks like we'll need another solution for those bachelor's degrees.

How about this? We put together a Save Karyn-style web site and just beg for money. For those who aren't familiar with the site, Save Karyn was a site built by a young woman who, through her own folly, managed to get herself in way over her head with credit card debt. She used the site to beg kind strangers to donate money to her cause and help her pay off her credit cards. Repulsive, if you ask me. But successful. (She also used the site to plug her eBay auctions--she was selling off lots of the designer accoutrement she bought, which is how she racked up that debt to begin with. That's slightly less repulsive.)

So something like EducateEvieAndSophie.com, perhaps? We'll beg strangers for $20 here, $50 there, all for a good cause. We'll post adorable pictures of the girls, and maybe quarterly updates on how well our college savings investments are doing. There can be a little clock counting down the days until we need to come up with those huge piles of cash: "Only 17 years, 6 months, and 24 days until the girls start college!"

Could it work? Hmmm.