<p>Thanks for the fantastic advice so far!</p>
<p>It’s not really that my parents won’t pay for an out of state school. I can expect at least a little contribution from them toward my education, since they’ve made numerous references about paying for my college. However, as you can probably tell, they don’t have a whole lot of money floating around, so the amount I can reasonably expect isn’t great.</p>
<p>The part where my parents show the biggest resistance is having me so far from home. They, for some reason, expect me to be home every other weekend like all the other college students here. But I want college to be a time to get away from home and see the world. Not a time to mooch off Mom and Dad.</p>
<p>About merit aid: Sure, I’d love some, but it’s really, really difficult to get. It all depends on your ACT/SAT scores, and I’m not projecting mine to be high enough to get merit aid anywhere but OSU and tier 3 and 4 liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Additionally, I’m not sold on staying in Ohio my whole life. Would OSU have the same kind of employment power nationally that a school like Brown would have?</p>
<p>Just for future reference, Carleton, Grinnell, and Beloit are just as far away as Brown and Amherst. Ohio isn’t as far from the East Coast as you might think.</p>
<p>I guess that I’m kind of getting a distorted view of college from CC. On the other forums on this site, everyone’s all gung-ho for Ivies and other Top 25 schools. Then I come on this forum, and everyone is saying they aren’t worth it. So which is it?</p>
<p>There’s one more thing I want in a college. All of my life I’ve been surrounded by…well…country bumpkins. Education really doesn’t hold much value, other than people make fun of degree holders when they mess up, saying something to the effect of “Mom and Dad’s money didn’t buy much for his education!” The two overwhelmingly most common professions for students to enter after high school are nursing and elementary or high school education. When a teaching position opens, it’s commonplace to have 120 applicants for one job, since everyone wants to teach where they grew up. Everyone goes to the same 5 colleges (some are out of state privates) and they’re all carbon copies of each other. I want to get away from this. When I went to a scholastic event last spring, I was so at-home with other students of vastly different backgrounds that still had the capacity to think for themselves. That’s what I want to see more of.</p>