The article I chose to review for this blog post is titled "The Parent Trap: Paying for College vs. Retirement" by Christine Dugas. This article is from USA Today and it talks about parents decisions when paying for college. This article states that "Yet last year the number of parents who withdrew or took a loan from their 401(k) plans more than doubled, to 7.4% from 3.4% in 2009, according to a recent Sallie Mae and Gallup study." So many parents are tapping into their 401(k) plans and taking away from their retirement funds just to help their children pay for college. College has just become so expensive and some parents are willing to risk their future plans with retirement to help their children out. According to this article, "Among parents who are planning for their children's college, 24% say that they tap their retirement accounts." This is a risky choice that many parents are making because many parents are willing to do anything for their children now a days. Many parents think of their children coming first and their children's plans to be more important than their own. "Parents are often willing to put their children's needs before their own. "If you look at human behavior, they are going to address the issue of concern that is most immediate," says Jean Setzfand, financial security director at AARP." So this article pretty much talks about how so many parents are indeed helping their children pay for college and in many cases the parents are taking money out of their retirement plans. But the article also talks about how parents don't need to do this because there are many ways that kids can pay for their own higher education. They can take a year off in between high school and college and save money for college or they can go to a community college for the first two years and live at home to save money.
Christine Dugas is a personal finance reporter. So she is definitely knowledgeable about spending money and the importance of money in today's society. She specializes in the topic of retirement which isn't my topic but it can definitely effect my topic and relate to it. Many parents are spending their retirement money on their children's higher education so these two topics are closely related in this article. Christine Dugas writes for USA Today. This article directly relates to my topic and my research I think this is the best article I've found so far because it really gives statistics about the amount of parents who are helping their kids pay for college. This is a reliable source with statistical information that relates to my topic.
Terms:
401(k)- "A qualified plan established by employers to which eligible employees may make salary deferral (salary reduction) contributions on a post-tax and/or pretax basis"
Savings- "An economy of or reduction in money, time, or another resource"
This is a photo of Christine Dugas.
This is not an academic article or book and therefore not worthy of a lit review. That's not to say this is not a useful point of reference in your final paper, since it does reveal a lot about the way paying for college by parents is being discussed in the media. But it does not provide the sort of analysis that you need to make an academic argument. It's USA Today for Christ's sake. :-)
ReplyDelete