Free Dave Barry's Money Secrets by Dave Barry Page B

starting their own businesses, the classic example being the sidewalk lemonade stand. This is an opportunity to teach your child fundamental economic principles. I’m not suggesting that you encourage your child to have a lemonade stand; that’s WAY too much work. I’m suggesting that you explain to your child that if he buys lemonade from some
other
kid’s stand, and then happens to choke on a lemon seed, then you would be in a position to sue the other kid’s parents for thousands of dollars.
That
is what I mean by “fundamental economic principles.”
    But whatever else you teach your child, the most important lesson that you, as a parent, can impart is that
money is not everything.
There are more important things in life than money—things like spirituality, knowledge, friendship, and, above all, family.
These
are the things that truly bring happiness.
    So, on second thought, two dollars a week is plenty.

10
    PROVIDING FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S COLLEGE EDUCATIONS
    The Hell with It
    T HE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT that a parent can give to a child—more precious than material things such as diamonds, or gold, or a big mansion—is a big mansion filled with diamonds and gold.
    Alas, most of us cannot afford to give this to our children, so we must settle for sending them to college. We’re giving them the gift of knowledge, which is also precious, especially in these modern “high-tech” times. Take computers. Today, if you don’t know how to operate a computer,*  25 you’re limiting yourself to a lifetime of manual labor in a boring, menial, “dead-end” job such as professional golfer or porn star. Whereas, if you can operate a computer, chances are that you will become an employee of a large corporation that will let you have
your very own cubicle space,
where you may be permitted to put up small photographs of your children or dog until such time as your job is outsourced to Kuala Lumpur.
    This is the gift that you give when you give your child a college education. Unfortunately, college costs money, unless your child is really good at football or basketball, in which case good-hearted knowledge-loving strangers will cover all your child’s educational needs, including a sport utility vehicle.
    But chances are you’ll have to pay for your child’s college education. This is a problem if your child wants to go to a top college such as Harvard, where tuition is currently $37,500 per . . .
    . . . no, wait, while I was writing that sentence it went up, so now it’s $38,928 per . . .
    . . . no, hold on, it just went up again, and now it’s $40,2 . . .
    OK, never mind. There is simply no way, using currently available technology, to keep track of the rising cost of sending a child to Harvard or other Ivy League school. Why are Ivy League schools so expensive? Simple: They hire the smartest professors in the world, and these professors do nothing*  26 but sit around thinking up ways to jack up tuition.
    The pioneer in this effort was Princeton University, which in 1932 hired Albert Einstein to work on the tuition problem. At the time, a semester at Princeton cost $16.75, which included a class beanie and a manservant. After studying the situation, Einstein developed the General Theory of Relativity, which states: “People in general will pay any amount of money to be able to tell their relatives that their child goes to Princeton.”
    This remains the fundamental underlying economic principle behind Ivy League tuitions. Researchers at Yale, using a supercomputer, recently concluded that there is “theoretically no upper limit” to how much parents are willing to pay to send their children to an Ivy League school. Dartmouth seems to be proving this with its Tuition + Organ Program (TOP), which requires that each semester’s tuition payment be accompanied by a functional human kidney.
    “It’s amazing,” reports a Dartmouth official. “We figured that, between Mom and Dad, each set of parents would be good for