[quote=Gata]I’ve been following Pigginton’s blogs for some time — very informative and smart comments. I thought I would make my first comment on this topic, as we have basically re-designed our life around the outrageously high tuition costs in the US. For anyone who hasn’t, I highly recommend watching Ivory Tower, the CNN documentary about Ivy League v other schools – it basically supports the argument that Ivy League schools are overpriced, and I agree. I attended a top-tier law school and graduated with honors, finished my LLM with the highest GPA (for which I received an award), all debt free. Now we are focusing on UT Austin for our daughter, who has expressed an interest in pursuing an engineering degree. We’ve given up on UC, due to budget costs and the seemingly prevailing policy of accepting more out-of-staters who bring the bigger $$. UT Austin ranks 8th for engineering (not as high as UCB, but realistically I don’t think our daughter would get in with an 8% acceptance rate mostly met by out-of-staters or foreigners); it’s considered a “public ivy”, and tuition is only $10k/ year for engineering. We sold our San Diego home last year for asking price and bought a house in Austin to qualify for in-state tuition, where she/we will live during her college years. We managed to find a loophole to get an ag exemption on property taxes, which be in effect in 5 years, basically our current property taxes will finance her tuition. Assuming she gets accepted, her degree will be high quality, she will be debt free, and we can pass on real estate to her, which will provide a starting point for her life. And if she doesn’t get accepted into UT Austin, we could sell the house at a profit (it’s paid off) and pay her tuition wherever she ends up (including an ivy school if that was her choice). And my husband and I will retire in our home in HI knowing that our daughter will be financially stable and debt-free, which, to us, is more important than an Ivy League degree, but which doesn’t necessarily result from it. Most importantly, all this moving around was our daughter’s decision – she prefers HI and Austin over SD. Go figure…[/quote]
Hi Gata,
I have a few questions for you here …. to better clarify things:
You state you possess an LLM degree. Did you attend law school overseas, by chance?
Did you take and pass the bar exam in CA, and if so, did you give up your law practice or job in CA to move to TX? Will TX allow you to take the bar exam there or have you been able to find work there?
Do you feel you will be able to easily sell your TX home in ~5 years and recover the price you paid for it (plus selling costs) if you desire to do so after your daughter graduates from college?
Did your spouse have to accept less pay than what he was making in CA to accept a job in TX?
How many years before your daughter’s HS graduation did you move to TX in order to successfully establish residency for public university there … i.e. Dec of soph year, summer between soph/jr year, etc.
Will your daughter be a college freshman this fall (2015)?
Are you and/or your spouse still under the age of 50 years old?
****
Due to high property taxes in TX in relation to property value, you were fortunate to land that ag exemption, which might be able to be renewed, should you end up staying there. However, I’m not so sure about RE appreciation rates in Austin, TX, or even if there will be any appreciation going forward there.
Another thing I spotted from your post is that your daughter never got the chance to even apply to UC/CSU as a CA resident because by the time she could apply for college, she was already or soon to be a resident of TX. Gata, was your family aware of the ELC?
If your daughter scored in the top 9% of her CA HS graduating class, she would have been “guaranteed” a position at a UC. Granted, that campus may not have been her first choice, but she could try to transfer to her campus of choice in her second year for fall admission in her third year.
It just seems that you/she gave up on her UC dream too quickly and so she did not/could not even apply for admission.
I just have a hard time understanding why a parent would relocate their entire family to another state solely for college residency purposes when their kid doesn’t even have an admission offer yet.
Good luck to you and your family in TX. It’s not a bad place, by any means but it is a very different animal than CA.
