College Costs Part 2. When College Plans Go Awry.

What was an unexpected turn of events was that our daughter's scores for the PSAT test she took during junior year in high school was high enough that she was a National Merit Scholar Finalist.  Most of the colleges didn't care about that honor, but some did.  Institutions such as Drexel University offered her full tuition to attend, so did the University of Arizona and Arizona State along with some other public universities she didn't even apply to.  Locally, while she did not receive a coveted interview for Presidential Scholarship to the University of Southern California (USC), she automatically qualified to become a Presidential Scholar as a result of her National Merit status.  This entitled her to a 50% tuition scholarship that goes up as tuition went up.  On top of that, the National Merit organization that administered the test automatically gave her an additional $1000 per year.   This brought the college cost of USC close to that of UCLA, and while UCLA is a fantastic public university, being a large university, the fact that students are left to fend for themselves without the guidance and flexibility a private university would provide, she opted for USC. The scholarship of 50%+ was something we could live with.

Our eldest daughter, has Attention Deficit Disorder and back in 2012,  we transferred her from from a top Los Angeles area public school to a private high school so that she could receive accommodations that the public school was hard pressed to provide. In high school, she was a good student, but not stellar, partly due to her attention deficit. She graduated top 20 percent of her class and made friends from her new school by joining the robotics team, learning some programming and attending competitions which she enjoyed because of the team camaraderie. She had a GPA of 4.0, good, but not great when compared to the top students of her class.

When it came to applying for college, she had high hopes, as did we, that she can follow our footsteps to attend one of the colleges her parents attended. Legacy admit, we thought.  Well, she got into Wellesley, but not Yale.  She got into UCLA, but not UC Berkeley.  She got into Boston University, but not Stanford.  She got into Smith, Mount Holyoke, Drexel, Mills College and Scripps College.  But when it came to scholarships, we found that some of the private colleges do not give merit scholarships at all or gave only to some select students, but not to our daughter.  Those included Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke and Scripps.  Mills and Boston University gave her $20,000 per year, which wasn't bad, but she decided that she didn't want to go to those schools.
One would think that our daughter No. 1 is set for four year of college at USC, right? Not exactly.  When she got into USC's Annenberg School of Communications, we were happy with that, as we firmly believed that journalism is a good profession, although the salary might be low initially.  But, while she was there, within the first two weeks of college she decided to transfer departments before she even had a chance to take a single class in communications.  Why? for the reason that her roommate, who was an animation major in the Cinematic Arts Department, made a comment that the Cinematic Arts Department is the toughest to get into at USC.  Her pride stung, and genuinely more interested in programming and computer games, and finding out that USC actually has a game design program that is the top such program in the country, my daughter applied to switch majors.  Unlike the the public universities, USC's transfer policy was quite flexible. She worked on the transfer application with a motivation that was never evident in high school, and got into the Interactive Media and Game Design program in the Cinematic Arts Department. We were proud of her motivation and gladly continued to pay the half tuition and room and board.

One would think that now, our daughter No. 1 is set for four years of college studying game design at USC, right? Not exactly.  By the time she completed her second year of college, she was burnt out, stressed to the point that one night during the second half of her sophomore year while driving on the 10 freeway, her anxiety caused her eyes to blur, and her heart rate to go up so much it scared her. She pulled over to the side of the freeway near the La Brea Blvd. exit and called us, and called 911.  The fire engine and emergency personnel directed her safely off the freeway and pronounced that she had an anxiety attack. When she approached us during the summer that she would like to take a year off, we were all for it.  After all, mental health was more important. She also had enough AP credits (she took 10 AP classes in high school) that allowed her to graduate from college a whole semester early. She wanted to work on her own game and take some classes more leisurely.

Come fall of what should have been her junior year in college, she moved home, took a digital music composition for games class through the UCLA extension program, a writing class and a MAYA design class at the local junior college, Santa Monica College. As the first semester ended, she traveled to the east coast and to London and Manchester to visit her old friends from college, high school, and elementary school. It was a good de-compressing experience for her. She also applied for a game design internship for the winter semester to work at Sony Playstation in San Mateo, California.  While she did not get the internship she originally applied for, she was referred to another position in the Playstation game design department in Southern California. She interviewed with four different people in the department and got the internship. Her job was to learn sound implementation for a triple A game title (a game with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion) for Playstation.  She got paid $15 an hour for three months to learn about game design at a major game company, and she was thrilled. Student work study jobs at USC only paid her $12 per hour.

When the three months internship ended in April of 2017, she still had time on hand before USC's fall semester starts up again. She asked Playstation if she can continue to work for them.  They were short staffed and since they needed someone experienced in the sound implementation department, they said yes. However, she is no longer an intern. To her, and to our surprise, they more than doubled her salary to over $31 per hour.  Now she is making some real money.  On top of that, she, as part of the team, had to get their game ready for the Eletronic Entertainment Expo or E3 Expo, so it was crunch time and everyone had to work overtime.  The pay for overtime is over $45 an hour.  While we started to worry about the long hours she has to put in, she loves it.  She loves the camaraderie, she loves being the youngest employee on staff, and being one of a handful of women on staff, she loves socializing with her teammates after work, and on weekends.  One would think that people would stay away from coworkers once work is over.  Not this group.  They go out to eat, to sing karaoke, to ski, rock climb, to the beach, to see movies and musicals all the time. She found a boyfriend.
She learned that the game she is working on will ship in January, and she wants to have the credit of having shipped a triple A title on her resume.  She asked Playstation if she can stay on through the end of the year.  They said yes.  She talked to her advisor and department chair at USC and asked to take an additional semester off and argued that this would be a great opportunity for her. They agreed with her assessment and reiterated that her scholarship would be there for her when she returned.
Now we are just hoping that she will return to college in the new year. On pace to make $70,000 this year as a 20 year old, question is, how do you convince a kid that she should give it all up to finish college? Is a college degree essential for her to continue in her profession or is it just a notch in the belt that we think a person should have in order to say that she has a college degree? Will a degree that requires her to take more classes on diversity, language, history and science help her get a better job in game design at all at this point? Dangling the carrot of paying for her college while she gets an education all of a sudden doesn't seem so effective an enticement anymore when she can probably pay for herself and move out at this point.

Sometimes, we plan and plan for our kids to go to college, to make money to fund college, yet what ends up happening can be completely beyond our planning and control. And sometimes, we need to understand the difference between funding our kids' education for their benefit, and wanting to continue to control their destiny as if they cannot make their own decisions.  We are at this crossroads where we are so proud of her becoming an independent young lady who has found her mojo and her own path, and yet we also worry about the fact that she is taking a path completely unfamiliar to us. Yet who is to say that this is not a worthwhile education in itself even if it does not involve studying Shakespeare, anthropology, the history of feminism, advanced math, etc?

Back to personal finance: the money we saved to send Daughter No. 1 to college will not be used for a while, if ever. She is making good money and doesn't seem that interested in returning to college. It's hard to fight over it because we didn't make this kind of money until many years out of college. This money we are saving can be used to supplement the savings we have made for Daughter No. 2's college.  We don't have to dig into our retirement savings, and any additional money we save can go towards helping out our kids in the future, grad school, or in an emergency. We mourn that our child grew up too fast, yet we should be ecstatic that they are learning to become independent, no?