Two Sons, Eight Years of Tuition Checks A UNH family weighs value and cost By Jake Chapline

Sam Despins '11 is taking an hour off from his job in an environmental science lab to enjoy a fruit smoothie at a downtown Durham cafe. It is a warm day at the end of May, and many students have already gone home for the summer, but Sam, a tall, lean environmental engineering major from Wakefield, N.H., is staying on because of his job.

Not that it's a job most people would covet. In fact, Sam says, he's usually up to his elbows in mud and slime. He collects sediment from used erosion screens so they can be analyzed for their effectiveness. Ordinarily, he works 10 hours or so a week, but now that classes are over, he can put in 25 or 30. It's one way to keep college loans at a minimum.

When he graduates, Sam will become the third engineer in his immediate family. His dad, Richard '81, earned a mechanical engineering degree from UNH, and his brother, Ryan '07, '08G, received mechanical and ocean engineering degrees. His mother, Robin Godfrey Despins '81, and his father met at UNH, graduated together, and married one year later.

The Despins have been paying for their sons' college educations for six years now—two tuitions for the past two years—and they still have another two to go, so they are very conscious of the rising cost of college. Fortunately for Sam and Ryan, his parents were prepared.

"We were still paying off our own student loans when Ryan was born in 1985," Richard Despins recalls. "We put a priority on paying them off as quickly as possible. When Sam was born, we started to look closely at our expenses, and we set up college accounts for both boys. We wanted to make sure their options for college wouldn't be limited by the cost."

Going to college was never considered optional in the Despins household. And from an early age, the boys knew they had to do their part. They helped with summer jobs, but their primary responsibility was to do well in school. They did, and both entered UNH with multiple scholarships and grants, as well as federal Stafford loans. "We wanted them to feel that they had an investment in their education—that it wasn't a free ride," Richard says. Sam estimates that he will owe about $10,000 on his student loan when he leaves UNH.

Although he emphasizes that the choice of UNH was entirely up to his sons, Richard believes it was a good one from both an academic and a financial perspective. "Naturally people want to pay the fewest dollars they can for any good or service they receive, but you also have to look at quality," he observes. "Over the past 30 years, UNH has been building a great reputation, particularly in engineering. There is no question about the quality of the program or the university's commitment to it, and UNH costs about half as much as anyplace else Ryan or Sam might have chosen. From my perspective, it was a really good value."

Jake Chapline is a freelance writer in Middlebury, Vt.

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