After teaching at the collegiate level for a few years, I've come to some realizations that have greatly impacted my approach to providing financial assistance to my child(ren)'s future plans.
Degrees from four year colleges are overvalued. This will likely continue for at least a little while longer, and it may get to the point where paying for college won't make any financial sense.
College tuition has increasingly outpaced cost of living over the last 30 years (2x the rise in cost of living) while
real wages have remained relatively stagnant, and yet enrollment and graduation rates have increased. Thus, the overall ROI in college degrees has declined. If this trend continues, there simply may be no overall ROI for those who earn college degrees by the time my kid(s) would attend.
Moreover, the job market is over-saturated with people who have been awarded bachelors degrees who could have started working straight out of high-school or could have received the training to do their job in 1/4 or 1/8 the time it took to get a bachelors degree. The most popular majors at universities right now - Business and Communications - don't really prepare one for work in a specific field, and as a result, they don't learn any special or general skills that they couldn't learn while on the job. Indeed, internships typically provide Business and Comm majors with their most valuable learning experience, since it actually allows them to utilize their skill set.
Undergraduates don't generally learn much during their time in college that would make them better employees than those with high school diplomas. Employers would be better off hiring straight from high school. If they need someone more specialized, turn to trade & technical schools. Eventually all interested parties will realize this, and the education bubble will burst. But who knows when that will happen? As long as people keep believing college is the best means to a higher paying job, the bubble will keep getting bigger.
Some might argue that the value of a university education is more than just future ROI - it provides exposure to topics that one might not otherwise explore or even know exist, it's an opportunity to satiate one's curiosity, etc. In other words, academic engagement is
intrinsically valuable, and not a mere instrument to increase purchasing power. So even if the ticket price of education keeps going up, it's worth it because one can't put a price on something that's invaluable. In response, I'd say that although the sentiment is commendable, in my experience as a professor, it ignores the reality of the state of university education.
Universities are run as if they were a business. The job of administators is ultimately to increase revenue and endowments. When they succeed, it comes with pay raises and bonuses. The endowments mostly come from fund raising drives, which target high-earning graduates. For instance, at the university I work for, most of the endowment money comes from graduates of the Law, Engineering, Dental, and, more recently, Nursing schools. Some of this money is distributed to other programs, but the vast majority of it is invested in the programs that will generate more high-earning graduates. "Pure" academic pursuits in history, physics, biology, etc. receive secondary attention. Virtually everything is in service of the high-profile programs. As a result, It's become a glorified technical school, a "university" in name only.
Revenue mostly comes from enrollment. Increased enrollment is important, especially in the face of budget cuts from state funding. All sorts of non-academic nonsense is invested in to attract students to enroll. The trend over the last 15 years or so has been to make universities out as if they provide a long, four year vacation: sports teams and shiny new stadiums, cool bar scene, on-campus bowling alleys and cinemas, fancy restaurants, waterparks (yes, my undergrad institution built a waterpark to compete w/ other local colleges!), absurdly expensive wellness centers, resort-like student unions, etc.
This emphasis on college life as "fun and entertaining" spills over in to the classroom, too. Faculty members (who are largely adjunct faculty or graduate students, because they're cheaper [more revenue!]) are rewarded with new contracts and promotions based on their performance. Student evaluations play the biggest role in rating performance, since students are more likely to re-enroll when they have teachers they take a liking to, even if the teachers don't educate well. Many faculty members therefore concern themselves with student expectations more so than (and sometimes to the neglect of) professional academic standards. As a result, we begin to see standards regress: more lax grading, less rigor in covering material, easier and shorter assignments, etc.
There's more to it than the above (I don't want to write a novella!), but the point should be clear. Essentially universities nowadays are in the business of selling degrees to their customers, the students, who want the degrees because they believe it's a ticket to a higher paying job. University education is increasingly characterized and cheapened by the trends that this "edu-tainment" business-consumer model produces.
Knowing that the value of education received will probably be far less than the purchase price when my kid(s) come of age, I can't treat sending my kid(s) to college as a foregone conclusion, as so many have/do. I can't save for college for my kid(s) by locking money into a 529 or any other limiting investment vehicle. To be sure, I'll put money aside as an investment in the future success of my child(ren). However, they will have to sell me on their vision in order to earn the investment. If they want to, say, start their own business, get professional training for a career, buy real estate, or start their own investment portfolio with it, they've got to have a clear game plan set in place and pitch it to me. In the same vein, I'm not intrinsically opposed to my kid(s) attending a four year college, especially if they're interested in pursuing a career in academic research, but they'll have to do their homework and show me why it's the best option for them, what they'll do while they're there, and how they'll take that experience to build something of value for themselves and the world.