It's All Too Much

Daniel Indiviglio, writing for the Atlantic, points to a Fidelity study that reveals how much parents need to save in order to send their kids to college. The answer: Yikes!

Parents with a combined income of $55,000 would have to dedicate 9% of their pay to a 529 account. If their combined income is $100,000, then the payment is still 5.5%. If they have two kids, double that, and so on. Oh, and those percentages are of gross income. The families still need to pay their taxes, medical insurance, housing, food, and any other living expenses. They would also presumably want to be saving for retirement for those 21 years.

As he points out, these numbers are unsustainable. At some point, colleges are just going to have to start lowering their costs since there's only so much debt that students can take, especially nowadays when there's no guarantee of a job upon graduation.