<p>Hello everyone. I'm fairly new to this forum, I hope I'm posting this in the right place.</p>
<p>I'm an international student who will be going to college in the fall of 2012. So I've got a year left of school, but the thing is, my grades are horrible. Even though my family and I are foreign, I moved to the US when I was young and moved back to my native country when I was in my teens. So English is my first language.</p>
<p>I don't want to get into details but my grades have suffered due to social and linguistic factors. I have a 3.0 GPA, but my GPA in English or science classes taught in English are all 3.5-4.0. I know that I won't get any scholarships due to my horrible grades, but I can't imagine getting a secondary education where I currently live.</p>
<p>I've definitely considered applying to a community college, going there for two years, and then transferring to a 4-year university. I don't have a whole lot of money, but I don't want to get a crappy education. So nothing super expensive but no horrible schools either. Are there any areas that come to mind that could accommodate students such as myself (preferably in the Mid-Atlantic, although I'm certainly not picky)?</p>
<p>Thank you in advance. :) Also in case this sparks a debate, I'm not looking to steal your jobs and I was never in the US illegally (my family was on a H1-B, if you know what that is).</p>
<p>You need to find out what your parents can afford each year. Then you can look for institutions where the estimated Cost of Attendance (COA) for international applicants is no more than your budget. The college-matching search engines allow you to find institutions within a certain cost range for tuition and fees, but you need to look at each website to get the COA figures. </p>
<p>There are a lot of threads on this issue in the International Student Forum. If you spend some time there, you should find useful information.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>There are few, few colleges in the US where internationals are need-blind, and relatively few get financial aid. You can inquire as to whether your country will pay any portion of your college tuition-some countries even pay all of the tuition for overseas study.
With your GPA, it is quite unlikely you’ll qualify for any of the international need-blind schools, sorry. 
I’m not sure what their transfer policy is.
Your best bet is to go to a college in your own country, do very well, and come for graduate school. You can definitely get into an Ivy grad school from any college you go to.</p>
<p>I agree with your strategy to start with US community college. Look, the fact is that private colleges generally cost $50,000 - $60,000 COA each year, going up 6% per year. If you are not really, really rich, do what not rich americans do… community college or the local State school. You might have to work a lot of hours outside school to pay for even the $8,000 tuition and books or so a Community College will likely charge and out-of-state student, but I can’t think of anything cheaper. </p>
<p>To be honest with you, there is a pervasive sense of entitlement in our country with regard to higher education. My own Dad worked full time while attending UCLA and then Cal State Long Beach. Those were six long years of limited sleep. He was back from the Korean war, and had two kids, and that’s just what he needed to do to achieve his goals! I myself worked 16 hours per week, plus summers full time, to pay my way through UCLA. My wife worked 20 hours per week to pay her way through the last two years at UCLA. The notion of college as an extended summer camp is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least among the middle class, and not something my Dad, my wife, or I experienced.</p>
<p>Most international students in US colleges have rich parents. Just a fact of life.</p>
<p>Or go to college in your own country.</p>