[cosmie]

   > You want to raise kids that can pay for college by themselves? Be wealthy in the first place and reap all the implicit rewards that come with it.

Or be poor and reap all the implicit rewards that come with it. I came from a low-income, single parent household and was a first generation college student. Every single bit of that played in my favor when I applied to schools - from waived application fees to great fodder for compelling admissions essays. I actually had a higher acceptance rate at prestigious schools than state schools due to how under-represented my background is at that type of institution (since so few disadvantaged people apply there to begin with). The bar for being considered "above average" seems to be relative to your peer group, and luckily my socio-economic background played in my favor in that regard too. As a white male who had mediocre grades, decent-but-not-great test scores, no sports, no clubs, and no extracurriculars (except a job), I never would have gotten accepted at many of the places I was had I been from a wealthier family.

And those same prestigious schools all tend to have sliding scale tuitions, where an expected family contribution of $0 means a tuition bill of $0.

    > This entire article is just that though: It's a wealthy baby-boomer piece written from the stance of someone who's never wanted or struggled for anything. Their idea that you can project their methods onto other kids is unbelievably ignorant of the economic climate of working class America and is so disconnected from the real world as to be painful to read.

I wouldn't go that far. Yes, a lot of the particular examples he gave came from a position of socio-economic advantage. But there are several that can be generalized and scaled to any socio-economic standard. Instead of getting a car at 16, I was given a junky bike at 10. I got it as cleaned up and working as I could, then made a list of everything that was still wrong with it. My mom took me to the store to pick out parts. She only had $20 we could spend on it, so I picked out innertubes, a chain, and replacement spokes (instead of new rims). It taught me to fix things rather than replace them, and properly prioritize nice to haves vs. must haves. Yes, it was done out of necessity rather than the privilege of artificial and arbitrary constraints (like giving someone a Mustang and unlimited raw materials, support, and tools to fix it). But in the end, it instilled similar habits of appreciation for my belongings, defaulting to fixing things myself instead of replacing them or outsourcing it, and to better evaluate the value in things that aren't readily apparent (i.e. see the bones instead of the veneer). By the time I was 23 I made more in three months than my mom ever made in a year (and raised three children on). And those habits are every bit as translatable to my life now as they were when I learned them before.