With the expenses going up, the best thing to do would likely periodically remove one kid from Catholic school and make your older kids pay their own way, working to earn their way. AS for the young kids, move them into a kindergarten class in a public school and save, then send them to private Catholic school as they get older.
Don’t foot the bill for the older kids, make the older kids work their way through school, instilling a work ethic.
Sounds like home-schooling is the way to go.
If a PHD can’t afford to send his children to a catholic school, something does not add up.
I worked to keep them in an atmosphere conducive to virtue.
PFL
As for college....well....Catholics along with most Christian denominations are failing to properly educate their children. Honestly, isn't a denomination's **most** important mission field that of their own children first? I would think so. Educating the children in the Faith of their Fathers should be the very highest priority for the use of any donation.
As for my own experience with Catholic university, it was disappointing. It was more about the faith of Marxist Liberation Theology than it was about reading and studying the works of the Church fathers and philosophers.
The cost is high for the same reason the costs are healthcare are high.
The system (in this case colleges) are responding to an environment where someone else pays the bills (in this cash government in the form of loans and or grants) This distorts the marketplace and causes prices to soar.
If you want the cost of healthcare and college to go down, simply outlaw health insurance and loans and grants and the price of both will drop 80-90% overnight.
Not only is the cost excessive but an objective person could question just how truly Catholic these ostensibly Catholic colleges and universities are. If Georgetown covers its Catholic symbols during a speech by Obama and Notre Dame gives the leading proponent of abortion an honorary degree, those questions are legitimate.
Just this last weekend, I heard of 2 parishes (OK-KS)that require tithing so that there is NO tuition payment required to attend the parish school. Makes me wonder what are these parishes doing RIGHT to achieve this.
But, then, you reach high school - my own Catholic HS in Dallas is more for one year than my son’s tuition at UNT.
Don’t know how tithing would work for that.
Something to think about.
I think our kids will be going to a public university with a strong Newman Club. There is no sense in spending extra money for an institution that will probably be embarrassed to be Catholic, anyway. There are some that are faithfully Catholic, but they are expensive or don’t offer STEM or are really cold (University of Mary in ND, for example).
Rising prices are the bane of all education these days, unfortunately. The University of California is going at least a hundred thousand give or take for four years, realistically. (Yes, even Riverside.) Cal State’s sixty thousand for four years even for commuter students. Live in the dorms or off-campus and you’re going closer to a hundred. The private universities, of course, for the most part go up from there. My (Protestant) private school is $6300 a year for junior high, $7500 a year for high school, and our sister grade school costs $5100. (I think the high-school rate for a year is not much less than it cost to put me through eighth through twelfth outright, the years I went there, in the Seventies and Eighties. Oy.) So believe me, even though I’m not a parent I’m feeling the doc’s pain.
How to fix all this? With all due respect, for obvious reasons, I’m no longer as keen on the voucher thing as I used to be. I’m inclined to tell the government “keep your money and we’ll keep our freedom”. I’m also not crazy about being too tough on sports and other programs, although I’d watch the budgets even more like a hawk than the educational budget, and in all cases if we really need the new toys figure out how to get them as economically as possible. Generally speaking, I’m thinking raise money, squeeze every dollar until it screams and get people to give as much time and talent as they can as well as money. Basically, the old fashioned way.