I am in Florida and have gone through all my admissions now, and my acceptances have boiled down to a few. At Boulder I received the presidential scholarship at 15,000 for the first two years, 2500 for work study and my 2770 pell grant, but they didn’t offer me any actual financial aid besides loans. obviously this only brings the total cost down to about 35,000 which is way more than I can afford, but I’m wondering if there is any way to actually get financial aid? Do they just not give generous financial aid usually? I know the merit is the highest I can get and from what I’m hearing is much more than others have gotten. But other than this I have a less than 20,000 per year option, but i really prefer boulder. i’m female headed into a math major and like that boulder has the data science program and would like to be able to make this work if i can
They DID give you financial aid. Your merit scholarship is financial aid. Work Study is financial aid. The Direct Loan of $5500 is financial aid. And your Pell is part of your financial aid.
This school is a public university in Colorado. Their first mission in terms of providing need based grant aid is to their instate residents whose families pay taxes there to help support these colleges.
You are OOS. The school is expecting you to pay the OOS differential. And in addition, they don’t guarantee to meet full need. And they didn’t.
Sure, you can ask them to reconsider your need based aid…but even if they do this…they aren’t going to come up with $10,000 or $20,000.
Why not one of the FL universities? There are lots of options. Do you qualify for Bright Futures? Did you apply to any of your instate publics?
My opinion…CO is unaffordable for you.
Don’t pass up the Bright Futures options. Move to CO after you graduate college.
Boulder won’t be affordable. You’re OOS and their taxpayers expect OOS students to pay.
You’re a Pell Grant recipient which suggests a modest income. It is what it is.
Which Florida schools were you accepted to??
CU/Boulder’s business model is to charge a lot to in-staters (as in-state costs go) – $30k or so depending on what division you attend. That tends to send a lot of in-staters to the cheaper state schools – Colo State, No. Colorado, even Univ of Wyoming. That opens up a lot of seats for out-of-staters – CU is about 50/50 in/out of state enrollment.
The sweet spot for CU (a pretty popular place with OOS-ers) is to sell those seats at a net price of $35-50k to OOS-ers. There’s lots of TX and CA kids at CU who were closed out of UT/Austin, UCLA or UCB. A good number of NY and NJ kids too.
If you are looking for a low net price for college, CU/Boulder OOS is really not the best place for you to be looking. CU only gets about 4% of its budget from taxpayers, so the way they operate is pretty understandable. Their engineering and comp sci programs are pretty strong, but I don’t think they are life altering.
Good luck.