A July 31, 2025, article in The New York Times triggered this post. The headline reads: Saving for College Once Felt Essential. Some Parents Are Rethinking Their Plans.
The article is primarily about 529 plans, but also about saving or attending college at all. One comment caught my eye as it questioned the value of college because it didn’t guarantee a good job. I wasn’t aware college ever guaranteed a job or anything else for that matter. 

I perhaps have a contrarian view of the utility of some higher education courses. This opinion has developed over the last 20 years or so, talking and interacting with younger staff I employed within my past business. Degree courses seem to have somewhat transformed into a business model, more influenced by volume over suitability of the course and proper weight being given to the future earning and retirement outcome expectations the course will achieve.
To use a fishing analogy,

Our oldest child is age 55, – three children ages 14 and 12 (twins),
our second is age 54 – three children ages 14, 13 and 10,
our third age 51 – three children 18,17 and 13,
and our fourth age 50 – two children ages 20 and 17
All ages are rounded.
Look at these ages and what comes to mind, college, retirement? Pretty sure not retirement any time soon. This is what I ponder when I read about FIRE or even early retirement before age 60.

Connie and I had four children between July 1970 and September 1975. That was a fun decade especially given I was going to school three nights a week until 1978 when after nine years I received a degree.
Those fun times were only surpassed by the ten years when we had one, two or three children in college at once. Our oldest went to Carnegie Mellon on a required five-year program and the others all went to Franklin and Marshall –

I’VE TAUGHT BEHAVIORAL economics, which holds that even our most important decisions are influenced by unrecognized biases. For my students, there’s no better example than the choice of where they went to college.
Although the cost is enormous, the decision of where to go hinges on the smallest things. A teenager who says, “I want to be close to my boyfriend,” will zero in on a nearby college, even if her high school romance is fading.

THE CONTROVERSY over student loans has caught up with the latest federal government repayment program. That program is known as SAVE, or Saving on A Valuable Education.
SAVE is an income-driven repayment plan, or IDR. It’s the sixth iteration of an IDR plan. Due to the favorable terms and the high estimated price tag, it was recently halted by legal challenges.
IDR plans follow the same general formula to determine the monthly payment on student loan debt.

I am not opposed to college and certainly not education.
However, college can be a waste of money. Completing college takes too long. College is too expensive and we are lured unnecessarily into a cost/prestige trap.
My college experience is not typical so I am not a good example. I got out of the army a few months early to attend college. I was 26. For the next nine years I attended a community college and then a state university nights and weekends.

Over the last 17 years, I have been saving a modest amount each month in a 529 plan. I have been doing the same for my daughter for the past 14 years. Given the market performance and our steady contributions over time, these modest monthly contributions have grown to be a sizable amount. While I am thrilled that we should have most of our college cost covered, I’ve often wondered if the 529 plan was the best bet in saving for college.

YOU COULD CALL ME a 529 superfan. The college savings plans helped me put my two kids through college. Their state and federal tax advantages cut the exorbitant cost of college just enough so we didn’t have to borrow for our two kids’ education.
Which makes it surprising that I knew the man who created the 529 plan—but I didn’t realize he’d fathered them.
I covered Senator Bob Graham of Florida as a newspaper reporter in Washington in the 1990s,

WE’RE A SINGLE-INCOME family with five children, so the prospect of paying for college for all our kids is daunting, to say the least. Yes, our oldest is now in her second year of college. But we still have a long way to go before they’ve all crossed the finish line.
Our kids are ages 19, 17, 12, nine and six. We’ve been homeschooling them since the beginning, with a few brief exceptions, including one daughter in a Department of Defense high school in Korea for a year and another daughter in a private high school for two years.

WITH NO DISRESPECT TO our representatives in Congress, a new rule taking effect in January reminds me of a scene from The Jerk, an old Steve Martin movie. Playing the role of a carnival huckster, Martin shows off a wall of attractive prizes, but then narrows the choices to an impossibly small set of options.
Congress did something similar when it instituted a new rule governing 529 education savings accounts. The rule in question opens up greater flexibility in how surplus 529 funds can be used.

STUDENT LOANS ARE a hot topic—one that’s fraught with confusion and complexity. Still, many borrowers should consider taking action this year. Want to get a better handle on what’s happening? Let’s start with three changes that have lately been in the spotlight:

Federal student loan payments, along with the interest charged, were paused from March 2020 to September 2023. That gave borrowers more than three years to make principal-only payments or, alternatively, to potentially accrue credit toward loan forgiveness without the need to make payments.

WHEN I WAS YOUNG and unschooled about money, I borrowed thousands of dollars to attend Northwestern University. As I recall, tuition was around $12,000 a year in 1980, and I had only $3,000 to my name. How could I pay?
The dean sent me a letter explaining that the college would lend me the money for my master’s degree in journalism. It would also extend me a work-study job, which would help pay for my spartan off-campus room.

I RECENTLY COMPLETED a course called England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest. Before that was Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers. Okay, I’m a nerd, I’ll admit it.
Since I retired, I’ve looked for avenues to broaden and deepen my understanding of subjects that I was taught in high school and at the liberal arts college I attended. Back then, there were college courses,

OUR FIVE KIDS SPENT a collective 24 years in college. All five have bachelor’s degrees, and three also have master’s degrees. The youngest graduated May 2023. Only one child qualified for non-merit aid—a $300 Pell grant.
My wife and I didn’t give them money for college. We don’t live near a major public university, so four of the five had to live on campus. Here’s what prepared them for college and how to pay for it.