Health & Fitness
Ask the College Counselor—Marriage STRESS and College
So what do you do...enroll in a college that is a "dream school" without regard to affordability, therefore disrepsecting the marriage and the financial future of your spouse and family...or?
This is a true story about a family who came into our office from Capo Valley HS several years ago…This was the first of many, but stood out in our minds, because it was our first experience with the destruction of how emotionally charged the situation can get. Had this family just come in a year earlier, there would have been a lot less stress.
The family was in the spring of the senior year, right before the May 1 decision. The mom and daughter had severe “college brand name paralysis” and the high achieving little princess was admitted to most colleges on her list, including Harvard, her “DREAM” school. Without any regard to affordability, they spent over $1000 on college applications, transcript fees, test sitting fees, etc. Being a high achiever, she got a merit award from Boston University of 28k per year, and nothing from Harvard. There were the usual suspects that all the high achievers who do little to no research apply to…so little aid at those schools either.
As they sat in our office, we watched the mom and daughter berate the dad for being “selfish” because he was thinking about the younger son who was going to be college bound in the next 2 years. We would try to bolster his confidence, and affirm his stance…only to watch him be torn down again, and bullied into debt slavery by the mom and daughter.
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I don’t know where this young lady is now…and my hopes are that this pedigree is serving her well, and that she is not living back at home because she can’t find a job to pay her debt….AND support herself…My hopes also are that this marriage not only survived the college stress, but the financial fallout of taking on a massive amount of debt so close to retirement.
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