Christina Garcia had her heart set on going to the University of Washington in Seattle.
But with annual out-of-state tuition topping $25,000, the recent Cedarburg High School graduate and her family calculated it would cost more than $40,000 per year to go to school at her first college choice. In the end, it only made sense to head to another UW -- the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That decision came as a pleasant surprise to Garcia's father, a dentist in suburban Milwaukee, who has been "putting money aside" over the years with the idea of helping his two children get through college. Likewise, Garcia's grandmother had also been saving.
"It's funny, because grandma said, 'Don't worry, I've got enough to pay for college,'" says Daniel Garcia, Christina's father. "But she was thinking about when I went to college. I'm like, 'That won't cover one semester today.' "
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