Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Barry

Dave Barry’s line lands because it’s an all-American pep talk that collapses under the weight of its own math. It starts with the wholesome civic script: parents should “encourage our children to become educated.” That phrase carries the moral glow of responsibility and aspiration. Then Barry yanks the rug: the whole project funnels toward “a good college that we cannot afford.” The joke isn’t just sticker shock; it’s the revelation that the culturally approved path is also structurally booby-trapped.

The intent is classic Barry: take a sanctioned virtue, follow it to its logical endpoint, and let the absurdity indict the system. “Must” implies duty, almost inevitability, while “cannot afford” is blunt, unpoetic, and final. The punchline isn’t a twist so much as a diagnosis: the reward for doing everything right is a bill that mocks your effort.

Subtext: parenting has become a performance of upward mobility in a marketplace that prices out the very people most devoted to it. The “good college” isn’t framed as learning for its own sake; it’s a status-laden credential, the ticket to security. Barry quietly implicates parents in the bargain: we’re not only victims of the cost spiral, we’re also believers in the prestige economy that fuels it.

Context matters: coming from a late-20th/early-21st-century American humorist, the line taps a familiar national anxiety - education as both salvation and debt sentence. Barry’s cynicism is gentle but sharp: we preach possibility, then hand our kids a future financed at interest.