I opened the refrigerator door at some ungodly hour to grab another bottle for my six-day-old baby when a thought jolted through my mind, and I was suddenly wide awake: We hadn’t yet started a 529 college savings plan. I ran upstairs while the bottle sat on the warmer to wake my husband and share this epiphany. He assured me that it was an easy task to check off my to-do list, after grumbling that this did not warrant a breaking news alert.
A few weeks later,I did some research and confirmed that it was not just new-mom angst driving my middle-of-the-night revelation when I had barely mastered the art of the late-night diaper change. As a middle-class American and college graduate myself, I've been trained to believe that saving for my baby’s future education is as important as contributing to my retirement savings or going to the dentist twice per year.
The situation became more unsettling when I started looking into the numbers. According to The Vanguard Group, Inc.’s online college savings planner, the estimated total cost to send our daughter to our alma mater when she is 18 years old is anywhere from $593,462 to $864,306, when you consider annual tuition cost increases of 3% to 5%. Vanguard assumes. Cue the record scratch. My daughter’s future bachelor’s degree could be worth more than our current home in a Boston suburb.
Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, posts a total cost of attendance for the current academic year of $83,324, which includes tuition, housing, food, books and $3,000 of travel and personal expenses. That’s up 37% from a decade ago and up 133.5% from 20 years prior. Just 37% of Wake Forest students receive financial aid, according to the school's website. I'm not picking on my alma mater, where I learned to think critically and later met my husband.
Thirty-six U.S. private colleges posted annual sticker prices over $80,000 in the 2022 academic year and an additional 111 colleges are more than $70,000, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education. That list will only grow. It’s worth noting for the sake of this column that our typical reader at