U.S. parents appear to have enough resources to meet only 16% of college costs, down from 18% in 2009.
Fidelity Investments, Boston, has based that estimate of family college funding status on results from a survey of 2,500 U.S. financial decisionmakers who have children ages 18 and younger who are expected to attend college and who have annual household incomes of at least $30,000 per year or more.
Fidelity puts data on the number of children in each household, each child's time to matriculation, the current savings rate, future contribution expectations and other data through Monte Carlo simulations to predict what percentage of college costs families might be able to handle.
The current family college funding level is down from 24%, when Fidelity first began tracking the statistic.
But Fidelity found that 67% of parents included in the survey are saving for future college costs, up from 63% in 2009 and up from 58% in 2007.
The percentage of participants who said they are familiar with Section 529 college savings plans has increased to 51%, up from 40% in 2009.
The percentage of parents who plan to start saving for college in the future and want to open a 529 plan has increased to
