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DH and I did not get help for college and we both worked our tails off to get our degrees. I think it really helped us not to screw around. Therefore, while we want to help our kids with school as much as possible, even if we had the means to pay for their entire education, I don't know that we'd really want them to know that.

So along the lines of what the previous posters have said, we'd probably make them take out loans on their own and work part-time jobs through college and pay the loans off as a graduation gift. My friend's dad also did something like a PP had said where he told all of his kids if they graduated with at least a 3.5 grad average he would pay for school (and he gave the same deal for any kind of graduate school). The friend's dad was extremely wealthy so all his kids knew he COULD afford to send them to school, so that worked for them.

I think another thing DH and I agree on is being attentive to your kids needs with regards to college in general. We're not convinced that college is for everyone and would be okay with our kids pursuing a vocation that does not require a degree, although we'd have to be sure that our kid was really gifted or dedicated to that vocation. This was a hard thing for us to accept, seeing as how we both have professional degrees, but we have a lot of relatives that are perfectly happy in their non-degreed careers, as well as those who dragged themselves through college for 7, 8, 9, and even 10 years at a HUGE expense just to get a BA that they never used.