My wife, Cheryl, and I established CollegeAdvantage accounts for our girls, Heather and Kimberly, about 25 years ago when the program first opened.
Heather went to Miami University and majored in psychology. The CollegeAdvantage account paid for all four years of her undergraduate education. She graduated in 2002 and was accepted in the Teach for America program where she taught for two years in the St. Louis (MO) City Schools. She then got her master’s degree in counseling at Western Michigan University. She worked at several counseling and related jobs in the state of Michigan where she won an award for the best home-based counselor in the state. Currently, she works for Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame (IN) as a student counselor. She and her husband have two boys who are 4 (soon to be 5) and 2.
Our other daughter, Kimberly, chose to go out of state and started at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. She had a scholarship that paid half the out-of-state tuition and she used monies from CollegeAdvantage to pay the remaining amounts. After her sophomore year, she came back to Ohio and finished her degree at The Ohio State University by using her CollegeAdvantage account, a scholarship from OSU, and some other college fund savings. While she majored in water management, she worked at Whole Foods. She is now the Associate Store Team Lead at the Whole Foods store at Easton. Kimberly has two girls who are 11 and 7 and has already set up CollegeAdvantage accounts for both of them.
We were very interested in CollegeAdvantage when the program first started and were glad we had the ability to utilize the program from its inception. We were also fortunate to have benefited from an inheritance, which was sufficiently large enough to entitle them to four years of college education.
Jim Fergus
Delaware, Ohio
