People who are successful are either connected to the underworld (hidden power structure) or overworld (visible power structure). All of them have backers on one side, or both.
I am spectacularly unsuccessful at everything other than philosophy and drug use. I can't even get a minimum wage job, although to tell you the truth, I might go postal. I'd like to work for the postal service.
Or And be a drug dealer.
Do both at the same time and be spectacularly successful. Or go to prison.
To the point: Money gifted does not have the same value as money earned. Oftentimes, parents do their children no favor by giving them a full and free ride. Make sure they have suffered and learned their financial lesson first.
And I beat the free education drum again. This should be on the gubbermint.
My children are examples of millennials who have done extremely well because their parents gave them a full and a free ride. They both went to private schools through high school. They both went to Georgia Tech, without question one of the absolute best engineering universities in the world. They both worked hard and graduated with honors. They both went on to post undergraduate schools paid for by their parents.
The only schooling that we didn't pay for was their undergraduate at Georgia Tech. They both earned and kept the Hope scholarships, paid for by the state out of the lottery funds. We briefly struggled with the irony of accepting the scholarship for my oldest, my son. We always opposed the lottery. It is a case of largely poor people buying lottery tickets supporting upper middle class kids tuition.
What we finally did was to give him the the relatively small amount of money that had been set aside for college by his grandparents, about $10,000, with the understanding that if he lost the scholarship he would have to use that money to pay tuition before we would step in to pay it. We obviously made the same deal for my daughter. How much this helped to provide incentive for them to work hard in school is up to serious question. Both were focused on doing well in school without added incentives.
I never encouraged my children to work while they were in school, including summers. I told them that their job and their responsibility was to learn. They spent their summers learning to drive, to fly, to speed read, to speak another language, to ride horses, to deep drive, to rock climb, etc.
Possibly the best that they did was to tutor other kids. You don't really understand something until you have to teach it. When I was working out of the country they would join me, even to go to school in Germany, Canada and the PRC. Who can argue that they would have been better off to have worked in a typical teenager's summer job?
In turn my wife and I thought that our main job was to educate our children. We never thought that a new house or car or a vacation should come before that.
It was an unspoken deal, my children worked hard learning because they knew that we worked hard to provide them the chance to learn.
I can't say that this would work for everyone or even for anyone else. But I do agree that society as a whole should pay tuition for anyone to go to a public college. This is the single best thing we could do for the future of the country.
Yes, I know that college isn't suitable for everyone. But the current waste is that there are kids for whom college is important and suitable and who can't go because they don't have the money and there are college graduates who are so burdened with college debt that they have a hard time starting their lives after school. As a wedding present, we paid off my daughter in law's undergraduate and law school student loans from . She told us that it was the single best thing anyone had ever done for her. It allowed her to look forward for the first time in her life.
To a large degree education is a matter of meeting expectations. The higher the expectations the higher the achievement. I saw this over and over in the military. Kids who had never been expected to do anything, who had never been asked to achieve something, were put into a situation where the only thing that could prevent them from a goal was themselves. Not all of them succeeded but an impressively high number did, a near majority.
I would have the government pay a graduation bonus instead of what we currently do, saddle them with debt. Money to use to buy a house, to buy a car, to start a business. On the order of $10 to $25,000, possibly graduated by class standing.
