Investing in the Future

Following in the footsteps of many other middle-class, baby-boomer parents of teenagers, my wife and I are taking our high school senior daughter (and our eighth-grade son) on a "vacation" this summer that will consist of driving nearly 2000 miles in two weeks on two coasts from Philadelphia to Boston (and back), and San Francisco to LA (and back) to look at colleges. We plan to be constantly on the go spending the morning at one school, driving 100 to 200 miles to the next one in the afternoon, and then driving another 100 to 200 miles to our next destination so we can be rested and ready to start again the following morning at the next school. This will be family togetherness to da max, but we are hopeful we will survive.

This college tour rite of passage seems to have become quite a tradition, at least for the children of us baby boomers. If it existed when we were kids, our parents certainly didn't seem to know about it; when we left home for the first time to go to college, they said good-bye to us at the airport or bus station, and we made our way alone to places that most of us had never even seen before. Though one might say that kids today are too pampered and that we're depriving them of life's adventures, I guess I like to think that we're just sharing in an adventure that we can better afford to do than our parents. And as far as being more pampered, well, there's no question about that, just as we had things better than our parents as did they compared to their parents.

More daunting than the trip itself is the thought of paying for college. When we promised our kids that we'd send them to the best schools they could get into, we didn't fully appreciate at the time what a great lesson in deficit spending it will be since, like most people we know, we're in the "too rich to qualify for financial aid, too poor to pay" middle class. Again, we're able to do better for our kids than our parents could do for us, but in this instance, it isn't about lavishing our children with more than we got: it is about investing in the future. The better educated they are, the better able they will be to contribute to the community and, hopefully, to solve some of the global problems (e.g., war, famine, environmental, political) that we leave as our unfortunate legacy to them. I like to think of college costs as being no different than the capital investments we have to make as business people in our businesses if we want them to grow and thrive in the future, or than the higher taxes we have to pay for education and mass transit to ensure we have a community in which they, along with our businesses, can also grow and thrive.

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There is a transition I would like to specially note this month: the departure of HB's Ad Director, Meredith Low, for new challenges and opportunities with Hawaiian Telcom. Meredith accomplished great things here at HB; our loss is most certainly Hawaiian Tecom's gain.

We wish her all the best.

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