@SirEdan There are two ways to get aid at a school: financial aid, and merit aid.
With your GPA and ACT, merit aid is out of the question at most schools. The University of Alabama, for instance, has an average ACT of 26 and accepts more than half of all applicants (this isn’t particularly selective), but to be eligible for anything close to full tuition, you need a 3.5 GPA and an ACT of 30 or higher. At the sort of schools that carry real weight in finance, the bar is set higher still. Maybe 33-34 on the ACT and a 3.8 GPA at the very least. Sorry to be harsh, but most schools could care less about the fantastic internship you’re doing when your ACT is in the low 20s.
As for financial aid, a CC transfer will rarely be eligible for aid. Even if you are eligible for financial aid, there’s very little reason for schools to want an applicant with a GPA of around 3 and a 21 ACT (or a 27-28, which is the highest score you’re likely to get even with extensive prep). Supposedly “need-blind” schools will ‘gap’ students who need a lot of aid, by offering them what they know is far less than the necessary amount, forcing those students to choose another school and thus saving the university money.
If you get any aid from a decent university, then, it won’t be much.
Community college tuition in NY is just under $5,000 a year (Governor Cuomo is currently trying to eliminate CC tuition, so thank him for that). At NY state universities, the cost of attendance for an in-state student ranges from $12,000 a year (as a commuter, and the room & board expenses this figure assumes are ridiculously low) to $20,000 a year (living on campus). Assuming you’re going to graduate in 4 years, you still need to find $34,000 to fund your education, and I get the impression your family can’t afford that. If you’re going to live on-campus, that rises to $50,000. If it takes you more than 4 years to graduate (and, assuming you keep your position at BlackRock, it will), the cost rises by $13,000 or $20,000 for each additional year.
In short, $34,000 is the bare-bones minimum college will cost you, and it’s quite possible that the figure will be in the $75,000-100,000 range. If you want to attend a private university, tuition will be higher, and $100,000 is the low-end figure for your 4 years (places like Berkeley will cost $55,000 a year, plus the $10,000 for your two years at a CC). If you want to spend 4 years in university and bypass the CC route, the cost rises more still. You need to find that money somewhere.
The assumption you appear to be making is that your company will take care of you through college and have a well-paid position waiting for you when you graduate. They likely won’t. Most financial institutions look to hire Ivy League graduates or products of similarly prestigious schools (as several people have pointed out already), and back-office work rarely means a highly paid position down the road. So you almost certainly won’t get $34,000 from your company, to say nothing of larger sums (this is what I was pointing out). Very little is coming your way through financial aid. Which leaves a big gap between what college will cost and what your family can afford. And there’s no worse outcome for a low-income student than to enroll in a CC or university, drop out for financial reasons, and end up spending tens of thousands of dollars with no diploma to show for it.
Many people have done their best to offer helpful advice on this thread. I would suggest you take some of it to heart. If you want to insult everyone who says things you dislike hearing, you can also do that, but you’ll find that fewer and fewer people are willing to offer you advice.
Good move!