Review: Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents
January 19th, 2011 Filed under: New Business Loans — Small Home Business Author
The Lowest Price we could find is $16.00 $9.25
This book can save you over $100,000
These days, most people assume you need to pay a boatload of money for a quality college education. As a result, students and their parents are willing to go into years of debt and potentially sabotage their entire financial futures just to get a fancy name on their diploma.
But Zac Bissonnette is walking proof that this assumption is not only false, but dangerous-a class con game designed to rip you off and doom your student to a post-graduation life of near poverty . From his unique double perspective-he’s a personal finance expert (at Daily Finance) AND a current senior at the University of Massachusetts-Zac figured out how to get an outstanding education at a public college, without bankrupting his parents or taking on massive loans.
Armed with his personal knowledge, the latest data, and smart analysis, Zac takes on the sacred cows of the higher education establishment. He reveals why a lot of the conventional wisdom about choosing and financing college is not only wrong but hazardous to you and your child’s financial future. You’ll discover, for instance, that:
* Student loans are NOT a necessary evil. Ordinary middle class families can- and must-find ways to avoid them, even without scholarships.
* College “rankings” are useless-designed to sell magazines and generate hype. If you trust one of the major guides when picking a college, you face a potential financial disaster.
* The elite graduate programs accept lots of people with non-elite bachelors degrees. So do America’s most selective employers. The name on a diploma ultimately won’t help your child have a more successful career or earn more money.
Zac can prove every one of those bold assertions – and more. No matter what your current financial situation, he has a simple message for parents: “RELAX! Your kid will be able to get a champagne education on a beer budget!”
Review:
The things Zac Bissonnette offers in his book “Debt-Free U” seem too good to be true because, guess what? They are. He claims to help students pay for an “outstanding” college education without loans, scholarships or parental mooching, but the book is based on flawed generalizations and impractical advice — with just enough legitimate research to convince people he knows what he’s talking about.
To illustrate my point:
Bissonnette tells parents to keep savings accounts in their names instead of their childrens’ names because the FAFSA penalizes students’ assets much more. Okay, you think, that’s a valuable point. But you don’t need to read his 270-page book to learn this; just read the FAFSA website. Plus most kids’ assets are not large enough for that to really matter. The books is full of examples like this that seem like great suggestions on the surface but in practice don’t apply to very many people or would barely make a difference.
If you want another example:
He also suggests parents save money for their kids’ educations instead of taking out loans later when they’re trying to retire. Solid advice, but he suggests they accomplish this by spending 18 years never drinking a latte, smoking a cigarette, or eating a donut… and by earning an extra $200/month in OT or by doing freelance work. In other words, if you live like a monk for two decades, your kids will have less-to-no debt. Obvious and impractical. Also obvious: his revelation that graduating with $7,000 worth of credit card debt is bad.
Further, Bissonnette has never been to a private school. He will tell you public school and even community college are just as good, but he’s basing this off of research about future earnings and education satisfaction. He’s never been in the real world. I have, and honestly, potential employers do judge people based on the schools they attended, and elite colleges can — and often do — open doors. Bissonnette will probably never be judged for having attended UMass, but your kid will probably not be a published author at age 21. There’s enough scholarship money out there that it actually looks bad to attend low-ranking public schools. My parents worked for a public university for 30 years, so I will be the first to say you can get a good education at one. But you have to work a lot harder for it, and good students can get good money to go to good schools. Places like Tulane and George Washington will literally give tens of thousands of dollars/year to an accomplished student.
Bottom line, Bissonnette does not care about you or your kids. He cares about selling a book, which is one giant exercise in self-promotion. This is someone who entered college with a five-figure savings/stock portfolio and who wrote for AOL finance throughout school. He might have been able to pay for school without loans, scholarships or mooching, but your kid can’t. Your kid probably has no savings and will make $9/hour at a library work-study job. If your kid wants to be debt-free, he needs to work really hard in high school and attend someplace just below his top potential. In other words, if your child can get into a Top-10 school, there’s probably a Top-30 school that will offer her a free ride. If she can get into a Top-30 school, there’s probably a Top-100 school that would be extremely affordable. It really is different for every student; to write a book telling everyone in America they should go to public school as if it’s gospel is impractical. It demonstrates, once again, that this book is not about you; it’s about Bissonnette. What he should have told his readers it to invest $300 in an online SAT course; it will save you thousands later. I wish I had known before college how SAT scores correlate to scholarships. Talk about a return on your investment…
