I've been researching this as an investment opportunity for my son as well and I've come to the conclusion that mining is not worth it at this point. The difficulty of mining looks like it will skyrocket with all of the new ASIC hardware coming online in the next few months, so my thought is to just flat out purchase an affordable amount of bitcoins now and let them ride. Meanwhile I'll still be contributing to more conventional means of savings for his future education.

I'm very new too all of this, so take it with a grain of salt