Tuition Insurance

Muffy and Buffy were excited when their daughter (Fluffi) decided she wanted to go to college, but they were pretty doubtful she’d even make it through her first semester, let alone the whole four years. They sure would love it if there was some kind of insurance they could buy that would protect their investment in Fluffi’s tuition, should she change her mind and decide to quit school midway through the term.

Well, “tuition insurance”...is not that thing. Tuition insurance is designed to protect a parent (or whoever’s paying for someone’s college, really) against losing money if the student has to involuntarily withdraw from school, like if they get super sick and can’t finish the term. So if Fluffi decides life outside the nest is too hard and wants to come back home where other people do her laundry, tuition insurance isn’t going to cover that. But if she ends up contracting some weird bacterial thing and needs to be hospitalized for so long that she can’t finish her classes, then her parents should be able to recoup all or some of what they paid for tuition, room and board, books, fees, etc. via their tuition insurance policy.

Tuition insurance isn’t necessarily expensive—it certainly costs less than tuition, anyway—but it also might not necessarily be…necessary. A lot of schools will reimburse us at least some of our costs if we have to unexpectedly drop all of our classes due to physical or mental health problems, so unless we’re already prone to having major health episodes and think it’s likely that at least one will occur over the course of our college career, we might be better served just working with the college or university and saving that insurance policy money for something else.