I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

This is my beef with free college. It's a huge amount of public money going to benefit people who don't need it, all for an extremely tenuous promise of upward mobility. Kids growing up in real urban poverty aren't going to college, tuition-free or not. The hurdles keeping them from upward mobility are happening at a much earlier point than the tuition payment deadline.

And the lower middle class kids who might go if college were tuition free--are they really being helped? AOC graduated with a BA cum laude from Boston University and went back to bar-tending afterward. Absolutely no criticism of that--it's honest work. But what does that story--which is common--say about the value of a BA from a college outside the top tier? I studied for the LSAT in Atlanta. I was working as an engineer at the time--all my Georgia Tech classmates had gotten good jobs in Atlanta within six months of graduation. But the folks in my LSAT class, who mostly graduated from places like Georgia State with a BA, were doing things like bar-tending, or administrative roles they could easily have done without a college degree. One of my friends works at a brewery--he says that all but one of the guys bottling/packing the beer have college degrees. Is college really adding value for these people? Or would making it free just transfer wealth from taxpayers to college professors and administrators, while graduates end up doing the same jobs they'd be qualified to do without a degree?

For 40k I would consider three years abroad. I think this would cover cost in a good university in Europe. This would give invaluable experience living abroad, give top class education and probably be within budget.

While my wife and I are doing well financially and professionally at the moment, these events have made us distrustful of the current economic model of low taxes and high wealth, which I am practically certain leads to these hours of economic malaise. We had our first at a relatively young age, and the realities of our wealth and savings are not as good as the author of this piece... We only have one salary, which is a particularly huge benefit.

Regardless, one can only hope we decide that a well educated populace is such an improvement to general welfare that we don't continually stuck the costs of raising children on the parents alone. I know that there are tax benefits, but those are a joke.