I started this week with a heavy heart, having signed the first of three $20,000 checks for my daughter’s college tuition due this year. It’s stunning to me that tuition alone at her school, as with many top universities (and indeed, plenty of second-tier ones too), costs $60,000. Thank God she’s living in an apartment this year, splitting a $30,000 annual rent three ways, so my total bill for her school year will be a mere $70,000, rather than the roughly $90,000 it would have been if she were living in university housing and eating from a meal plan (I’ve given her $2,000 for food for the next six months and told her to experiment with veganism and maybe find a part-time job in a coffee shop or restaurant with free meals).

This is insanity, full stop. And it has to change, because we are now at a point where only a tiny sliver of the population can afford to pay anything near these fees without taking on huge debts, forcing students to work full time while in school (not a good idea, as it tends to result in higher dropout rates and lower grades, which sort of defeats the point of education) or having three jobs themselves (my own strategy, which comes with carpal tunnel syndrome and a short temper).

The sticker prices of these schools are of course somewhat negotiable. We’ve heard from friends that if you have a child that a school wants for whatever reason (merit, diversity, sports, etc), fees can miraculously change at the last minute. Many schools like to say that aid is given only based on financial need, but anecdotally we’ve found that universities have a variety of means of getting the kids that will tweak their statistics in the right direction.