[Porsche-O-Phile]

Have you looked at overseas colleges at all?

College admission has gotten so ridiculously competitive I wonder if it's even worth it for a lot of kids now. Too many people having too many kids and the colleges ain't getting any bigger - capacities are becoming asymptotic. You can only have so many people in so large a space.

College today certainly doesn't seem what it was like when I was there (which I didn't think was all that long ago, but I guess it is!) You pay tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars just to sit in a lecture hall with 500+ other kids with a professor who often doesn't care and is just meeting his contractual teaching obligation as a condition of his research grant. Or worse, some non-English speaking T.A. is teaching the course and is only doing it as part of their tuition assistanceship conditions.

Don't mean to be a downer here, but it seems it has become a total racket. Don't blame you for taking a "screw it" position at all - I'd probably do the same thing. One of my good friends (who graduated from Tulane) was looking into what would be necessary to give his kid a competitive chance of getting into a Tulane-or-better school (ivy or nearly so) without being from a multi-millionaire household or a politically-connected one. What he told me was staggering. Apparently now, it not only matters which high school your kid goes to (preference given to very expensive private schools, naturally), it not only matters what elementary school, not even which kindergarten - now it even gets down to what PRESCHOOL your kid goes to. Yes, it actually matters whether or not your kid goes to a hoity-toity preschool in order to get a better chance of getting accepted to the "selective" kindergarten, which matters because they need that pedigree to get into the correct private elementary school and so on up the ladder. It's ridiculous. As you can imagine (and as he was explaining to me) each level of this "ladder" is quite expensive and it gets progressively more so the higher one goes. All to have a "chance" of ivy-league admission in 20-odd years.

For ONE YEAR of preschool (the "selective" type that would have gotten his son off on the "correct path" to ivy league admittance) it would have cost him $16,000. That's preschool. The prices of elementary and secondary education go up from there - per year.

As I see it, virtually all of these problems are the result of overcrowding and schools preying upon the whole "I-want-what's-best-for-my-baby" panic reflex of parents. (It's worth noting that this is part of an even larger multi-billion dollar industry that thrives on preying on parental insecurity). I feel for you guys with kids. I really do. I don't know how you deal with crap like this. I think I'd want to seriously kill someone if I had everyone looking at me to constantly take advantage of in that way. . .

Anyway (back on topic) I'd perhaps give an honest look at schooling overseas. Most of the "best" universities are still here in the U.S., but it's a trend that I see changing as overcrowding becomes more of a problem and schools feel the need to dole out "McDegrees" by the thousands to kids who can't speak correctly, can't write in complete sentences, can't communicate professionally, have no work ethic and little in the way of critical thinking ability. The "university" experience (at least IMHO) should be considerably more than a glorified trade school where a kid will get out with a "punched ticket" that qualifies him or her to work in front of a CRT screen for 10 hours a day and $30,000 a year. It is (or should be) more than that. And those universities are the smaller, rarer ones - not necessarily the big ones with the wealthy benefactors and huge endowments.

Best of luck to you.