Question
What should I do if I feel guilty about my parents paying $50k a year to send me to college? I could potentially transfer to a less expensive school or skip college altogether.
Answer
Guilt is a sign that you are internalizing others' expectations as your own and have doubts about living up to them. As a thought experiment, if you didn't have parents paying, but at 18 had won a lottery enough to send you to college from your own first dollar earned, would you have:
a) Gone to college?
b) Done something else?
c) Used some/part of the windfall to give your parents a better life?
You can psychoanalyse your own decisions.
Guilt also indicates an ongoing struggle to individuate. You may like your parents, but even then, want to feel free of expectations. Some people are extremely family-oriented and happy to be as deeply involved with family by choice in adulthood as they were by necessity while growing up. Others want to run away the first chance they get. Things like college debt constrain those adult inclinations.
So, the most useful thing for you may be to carefully articulate your own expectations and motivations and those of your parents and consider if you are compromising yours to meet theirs. In that case, the money has invisible strings attached and you may want to shrug off that burden of expectations.
And I strongly disagree with the answer that said you should get a professional life and consider the money a debt to your children. Absolutely not. Parents choose to have kids, children don't ask to be born and don't owe anything that needs to be passed forward in a generational pay-it-forward scheme. It's the other way around. Parents owe kids for bringing them into the world by choice (a choice that cannot be justified as paying off debt to their parents; that's just a traditional ancestral control mechanism).
Treat it as a gift if you do choose to keep it. You should decide you don't owe anyone anything in return. Especially not grandkids to your parents, unless YOU want kids.
a) Gone to college?
b) Done something else?
c) Used some/part of the windfall to give your parents a better life?
You can psychoanalyse your own decisions.
Guilt also indicates an ongoing struggle to individuate. You may like your parents, but even then, want to feel free of expectations. Some people are extremely family-oriented and happy to be as deeply involved with family by choice in adulthood as they were by necessity while growing up. Others want to run away the first chance they get. Things like college debt constrain those adult inclinations.
So, the most useful thing for you may be to carefully articulate your own expectations and motivations and those of your parents and consider if you are compromising yours to meet theirs. In that case, the money has invisible strings attached and you may want to shrug off that burden of expectations.
And I strongly disagree with the answer that said you should get a professional life and consider the money a debt to your children. Absolutely not. Parents choose to have kids, children don't ask to be born and don't owe anything that needs to be passed forward in a generational pay-it-forward scheme. It's the other way around. Parents owe kids for bringing them into the world by choice (a choice that cannot be justified as paying off debt to their parents; that's just a traditional ancestral control mechanism).
Treat it as a gift if you do choose to keep it. You should decide you don't owe anyone anything in return. Especially not grandkids to your parents, unless YOU want kids.