David Andreatta

@david_andreatta

When the time comes to pay for our children's college education, my wife and I plan to go out for ice cream and never come back.

We're among the 43 percent of parents of children under 18 who, according to Sallie Mae's latest "How America Saves for College" study, don't set aside money specifically for college.

Why bother when tuition at public and private colleges continues to rise faster than the rate of inflation and, often, savings accounts?

For instance, the University of Rochester announced the other day that its tuition would increase 3.7 percent to $51,090 in the upcoming academic year. Throw in room and board and you're looking at $66,414 a year.

Who but the sultan of Brunei could afford that?

Most schools offer financial aid that reduces their price tag to what they call the "real cost." The average real cost to attend UR, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, runs about $34,000 a year.

What a relief. I don’t have to be royalty to send my kid to college, just a senior partner at Goldman Sachs.

In the interest of full disclosure, my wife and I have a fallback built into her job. She works at UR, which charges children of employees the same tuition as that at a State University of New York four-year college.

But that's more of a wing and a prayer than a plan because the child still has to get into the university, which accepts only about a third of applicants.

Even then, if costs rise at the rate they're going, a public college will cost $125,000 over four years by 2030. The average private four-year college will cost $370,000, and earning a degree from an elite school could run as much as $675,000.

That's according to Edvisors, an informational website about planning and paying for college. The company estimates the college price tag triples every 17 years.

"It's very scary," said David Levy, the editor at Edvisors, whom I called for an answer to the question of why bother saving.

"Every dollar saved is a dollar less borrowed," Levy replied. "And every dollar borrowed will cost about $2 by the time the debt is repaid."

Levy and Edvisors had answers for everything related to the cost of college — from reducing the risk of financial aid penalties for saving to whether college is worth the investment.

That's the real question nowadays. Is college worth it? The answer is it depends.

Countless studies demonstrate that it is. College graduates are more likely to have jobs and earn more than people who didn't go to college.

But there are nuances to those findings.

Census data shows that graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math earn far more than graduates with degrees in the humanities — like art, history, music and literature, the sort of studies that can enrich one's life but not one's bank account.

Young people can't afford to find themselves in college anymore. The average class of 2016 graduate has $37,132 in student loan debt. That may be manageable for engineers, but for philosophy majors it can be soul-crushing (if they believe in a soul).

The cost-benefit of a college education also hinges on the type of college and the amount of debt assumed.

Graduates of elite schools make more money after college than other graduates, but graduates of public colleges see the greatest rate of return on investment because their lifetime earnings are only slightly lower than that of their private-school peers.

Saving for your children's college is a no-brainer if you're in a top tax bracket with no debt and lots of disposable income.

But if you live at the bone, or somewhere between the muscle and subcutaneous tissue like most people, your choices are limited.

Even if my wife and I could stash away what Edvisors recommends — what it calls the "One-Third Rule" or the equivalent of the full cost of a college education the year the child was born — our children would still take on debt by the time they go to college.

And our savings would be at the expense of everything we do to ensure our security and that our children are well-rounded people — building up an emergency fund, saving for retirement, and enrolling the kids in athletics and music lessons and camps.

No one said parents have to gift-wrap college for their children. Mine didn't. But they did help me and the debt I took on was more manageable when I was in school in the mid-1990s.

More and more, higher education feels like highway robbery.

At this point, our plan is still to go out for ice cream, because every path is a rocky road.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.