Miners seem a little risky to me right now since you're betting on hardware, a fixed asset, to generate a return on something that will become increasingly more difficult as more people enter the market of generating BTC.

Another alternative you can consider if you have the time / knowledge for it, is to trade BTC like you would on a Forex market. The short term volatility on BTC is huge, the value swings 5 - 30% per day. If you locked in even just 5% a week in ROI on your trades (which is possible imho) with a portion as a long term holding purchased on lower prices, you would be generating a significant amount for your fund (5% / week is a return of 1867% over a year of trading plus additional gains from growth in the general value of BTC) while remaining fairly liquid. Most short term trading principles employed on the stock / forex market can be applied on bitcoin markets as well.

I'm in the same boat with my kids. The way I'm looking at it is this: You've got ~15 years (typical) before the kid is going to be in college. You want something that will have a pretty continual return on investment over that 15 year period. The miner, especially a rented miner, isn't going to do that. The bitcoin itself has a better chance, so I would buy and hold. The only reason to purchase a miner or rent mining power at this point is if there is a very clear path to a positive return on investment in BTC not fiat. Otherwise just buy and hold.

With 15 years you can make some riskier investments. For example, I bought some penny stock with one of my kids when he was 1 and that stock is now in the several dollar range. The kid is now 5.

If you have a very long time horizon then probably the best thing you can do is to make periodic purchases.  Try to get a fixed dollar amount (not fixed BTC) amount on a fixed schedule and stick with it.  i.e buy $100 per week or $150 per month or whatever your budget will support.  People saying things like price is high right now isn't really helpful.  What is it goes up to $5,000 and then "crashes" back to $2,000 while you wait for "lower prices".  On the other hand you probably don't want to dump 100% of saved funds in right now.  By buying a fixed amount each month you can ride out the swings in price and avoid either panic buying or panic selling both of which almost always end up costing you a lot.

This will result in you automatically buying more BTC when the price is low and less BTC when the price is high.  The concept is called dollar cost averaging.  If you do this week in and week out it will lower your overall basis.  That being said Bitcoin should still be considered speculative you may also want to supplement it with contributions to a tax deferred 527 college plan.

Our company will be rolling out a service soon where consumers can buy small (up to $500) amounts of Bitcoins using cash at more than 50,000 locations in the US.  Perfect for this kind of small periodic purchases.

Would it be suggested to buy in now on this alt coin, or has the ship already sailed on it?

Price is very high right now, very risky.. I wouldn't buy any at the moment.