Ain't That a Kick in the Asphalt...

If you looked through my mail every day you’d think that I owed the U.S. Department of Education hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you’d be right. I get a letter or two from them almost every single day. It hurts.

All three of my children have now graduated college, and the government loans that I took out on their behalf, as cosigner, now have to be paid back. It's an astounding number. 

How I would love to have planned early for all this, starting when they were infants, with some kind of sensible and effective savings plan. 

Guess what. I didn't.

How I would love to have had a gigantic inheritance with which to pay their tuitions (and living expenses and books and parking tickets) while they were attending. 

I'm afraid I didn’t. 

How I would love if they had all won scholarships to cover the majority of funds needed. 

Believe it or not, they didn’t. 

How I would love if today they all earned the kind of money that would all but eliminate my own participation in the responsibility of paying it all back. 

Do I have to say it? They don’t.

This is not a discussion about the merits or disadvantages of allowing children to go to any college they wish, of letting them live out of state, of getting them out of jams... This is not a discussion about planning for college. I don’t want to have those discussions right now. We will not discuss it. Do you hear me? Understand? For crying out loud, do you hear what I’m saying? NOT NOW!

Sorry. I'm not sure what happened there. (I think you do.)

Anyway, I would like to tell you that all three of them tried to win some scholarships. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? In fact, between them they applied for almost 100 of them. I was confident that at least one would come through. 
        

What I initially didn’t take into consideration at the times they were applying, however, was that they had no interest in asphalt and were taller than Munchkins.

Let me explain.

There are actually thousands of scholarships available in the United States, but unless your college-bound teen has some sort of strange physical attribute or is passionately concerned about things no one else is concerned about (like flying bats, for instance), he or she will have little chance of getting one of those scholarships. One look back at a small but representative sampling of the real-life scholarships that were available when my children were looking into them bears out this fact. The following were all absolutely real:

 

The Billy Barty Foundation gave a $2000 scholarship to deserving students who were under four-foot-ten.

The John Gatling Scholarship Program gave an $8000 scholarship to those who were born with the surname Gatling and attended North Carolina State University.

 

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance gave $500 to students in New England who accepted the existence of fat.
        

There were also scholarships for students who played darts, wanted to conserve nocturnal animals, worked as caddies at golf courses in Philadelphia, wished to study welding, or planned to go into driveway paving. 

My children were (and are) smart, capable, reliable, firmly-rooted, well-grounded, ambitious, sensible, hard-working young adults of average height and weight, which is why they didn’t qualify for any of those scholarships. They were too normal.

Actually, we found a few that at first seemed perfectly reasonable, such as the Simon Youth Scholarship, administered by a huge corporation that owns several shopping malls. I handed in an application for one of them at a tiny information booth in between The Sharper Image and The Gap at a local mall that was staffed by a bored high school senior reading People Magazine. But we never heard back from the Simon Youth Scholarship people. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the application were still stuck between pictures of George Clooney’s face and Hugh Jackman’s abs.  

So here’s the first bottom line: never hand in a scholarship application to someone who has green hair and an eyebrow ring. Secondly, be thankful when your kids graduate and you don’t have to deal with this madness anymore. And finally, be rich. Very rich.