<p>Well, if your parents were turned down by PLUS, you can get another $4000. Stafford. That leaves about another $20K you need to get. If you can get cosigners, you will owe about $30K in loans for this year alone. I guess if you work triple jobs, including a high paying waiter/waitress/busboygirl job you can maybe, maybe, maybe make $10K this summer. Perhaps your friends and relatives have given you some graduation, congratulations gifts that will, and maybe your parents can scrape some money with a garage sale, some savings somewhere, insurance policy, etc. If they can come up with $5K somehow, that leaves you $5K to finance. Maybe you can talk to the fin aid office and beg for some more grants. Have they included state TAP funds in their package?</p>
<p>Friends of my son who went to NYU had a tough, tough time financially. One ended up commuting. Still expensive, given train fares. He tried to get rides from folks he knew were commuting, and lived on sofas of friends and acquaintances much of the time. Do you live close enough to commute or have a relative that can take you in? THat could shave some of the costs down for you. Food, you can scrounge and eat cheaper than the COA allowance. You can also borrow books from the library or others who have taken the course.</p>
<p>Unless someone has a nice car they can sell for $30K and donate the cash, it might be hard to come up with cash quickly. I am not meaning to be flippant, but it is unfortunately difficult for many families to come up with a chunk of change quickly.</p>
<p>The other thing my son’s friend did was take off a semester each year to earn money to pay for the next. It was a very rough ride for him. He would not advise it to others. He felt like his major emotion during college was worrying about how to make the necessary payments. NYU is not sympathetic to late payments. They will not let you register or get your room.</p>
<p>You got into your dream school, so well and good. But paying for it can be a nightmare that can last a lot longer thatn the exhilaration of the the acceptance. $30-40K total is the maximum an undergraduate should be borrowing, and even less if your parents are not in good financial shape since that means that they will not likely be able to help you make those payments or help you out financially in the future. In fact, they are likely to need YOUR help in their old age.</p>
<p>*Oh dear, I do hope your “other parents” sit you down and make you understand. You do not “need” $30,000 you “need” 30,000 x 4. Please understand that. All the bravado in the world is not going to “find” you $120,000. *</p>
<p>This is soooooo true. If these people are as affluent as you think they are, then they will have the $$ savvy to explain why this is a bad idea. </p>
<p>Does anyone out there know which SUNY/CUNYs have a film program?</p>
<p>You can try to beg your wealthy friends for money (it is unfortunate that after they have been like parents to you, you only see them as a source of cash), but when the first day of classes arrive - if you have not paid your bill in full, NYU will not allow you to attend. Even if you tell them NYU is your dream school and that you really wanna go. </p>
<p>I am sorry your dream school did not work out.</p>
<p>This is truly depressing. I keep thinking about an article posted here recently about loan defaults where a recent NYU grad says she wishes she could give her degree back. </p>
<p>I think every adult here knows it’s unlikely that any affluent adult will cosign and help this young woman get into that kind of debt. The OP does not yet understand money, debt and how even the best of friends view cosigning loans they know you can’t pay back. Hopefully one of these friends will help her understand that these loans would ruin her life.</p>
<p>There are other ways to get an education and to get to NYC, hold on to your big picture dreams but you’ll need to achieve them without NYU. If there was a way to find this money or borrow it in your situation, someone would have told you.</p>
Assuming you mean NYU, they don’t do this to kids. Kids (and their parents/GCs) do this to kids. NYU plainly states they don’t meet need. Every time I read about a student with a dream school they absolutely must attend, despite the cost, my head wants to explode. Everyone on this thread has been telling the OP he cannot afford to go there (and his own numbers prove it), yet he persists in asking for some magic FA fairy.</p>
<p>Please, please, please listen to the many caring adults who have posted here!!!</p>
<p>My son also was admitted to his ‘dream school’, a conservatory. Even earned some merit money. BUT he could not attend… he/we could not afford the remainder due, about $105,000 to complete the last 3 years as a transfer.
We were sad for him for a few weeks, he was sad a bit longer.</p>
<p>Then he accepted another school in our price range, had a wonderful, enriching time and earned a scholarship to grad school. </p>
<p>To the OP, I wish you would listen to what people are telling you. I’m the first one to be less than practical and tell someone to do everything they can to get to their dream school but even I have my limits. Not this kind of debt and not for film school.</p>
<p>If I was one of your adult friends with money and you asked me to cosign for a loan I wouldn’t do it because I wouldn’t want to give you enough rope to hang yourself. There is no doubt in my mind that you will ultimately regret getting into this kind of debt. That is assuming you can finance all four years. A likely scenario is that you’ll have to leave NYU before you have your degree. Then you’ll have whatever debt you have accumulated plus no degree.</p>
<p>You keep telling us you want to go to NYU but what is it you want to be? There are other ways to get there.</p>
<p>*If I was one of your adult friends with money and you asked me to cosign for a loan **I wouldn’t do it because I wouldn’t want to give you enough rope to hang yourself. **</p>
<p>There is no doubt in my mind that you will ultimately regret getting into this kind of debt. That is assuming you can finance all four years. A likely scenario is that you’ll have to leave NYU before you have your degree. Then you’ll have whatever debt you have accumulated plus no degree.*</p>
<p>Very true… even if the student somehow got someone to co-sign for this year, it’s highly probably that the student wouldn’t end up graduating from NYU because of lack of funding. Then the student would have $50k+ in debt and no degree.</p>
<p>*You keep telling us you want to go to NYU but what is it you want to be? *</p>
<p>Good question.</p>
<p>I was just over on the NYU thread and became almost sick reading other young kids’ posts who are in a similar situation getting co-signers for these mega loans. One kid found a relative to co-sign. He’ll have about $120k in debt at graduation. He thinks his NYU degree will make that all worthwhile. LOL </p>
<p>My SIL has a NYU degree. Her salary as a school psychologist is the same at those who graduated from the local state school. She deeply regrets the debt she took on (and hers was a lot smaller than what people are borrowing these days!)</p>
<p>Wow, this is so sad. This poor kid appears to not want to face reality and I hope someone–whether her parents or pseudo-parents–have the spines to help her face facts. I went through this with my D, who would have had to take a comparable amount of loans to attend Duke. There was no source of funding other than loans and when she added it up, looked at her monthly payments (almost a grand a month for 10 years) then she was able to make the decision herself and that was the end of Duke. She is now at a school where she’ll graduate debt free and have the ability to go to law, med, whatever school she decides post grad. She won’t be handcuffed by an enormous debt. Kid, do yourself a favor. If you choose not to listen to the posters here, give your forer guidance counselor, trusted teacher, or pastor/priest a call and listen.</p>
<p>It sounds like the parents are as naive as this kid because they were willing to attempt taking out such loans. They knew about the loan situation last March, yet they didn’t shut this down then. </p>
<p>Hopefully the pseudo parents will be able to clarify things to this student. However, I think they will just say “no” to the co-sign part without further explanation of how unlikely it would be for the student to pay such loans back. </p>
<p>I know what it’s like to be lovingly close to other people’s kids - but that doesn’t mean that I would co-sign a loan for them - especially when the prospects of them being able to pay the loans back is not likely.</p>
<p>*I created this thread to get alternative plans for funding my tuition to NYU. I appreciate all of your (I’m sure) love-based criticisms, but you really should leave your baggage of pessimism, intimidation and futility at the door. Thanks.</p>
<p>Any helpful suggestions? *</p>
<p>The reason that there haven’t been any helpful advice given to find such money is because there aren’t any answers. Many of us have been able to help kids who’ve needed to close a $3k - 5k gap, but your gap (each year) is tooooo big. </p>
<p>We don’t have “baggage” in this area. We have practical experience…with loans, mortgages, paying for living expenses, etc. We know that young people don’t have an extra 1000+ per month to put towards loans each month. </p>
<p>Why don’t you go around and talk to young people who’ve graduated within the last 2-5 years. Ask them if they have an extra 1000+ EVERY month for 10 years to put towards student loans.</p>
<p>The term “baggage” has a negative connotation to it. As in…he has a lot of “baggage” from his past failed relationships. That implies that he won’t make good decisions in the future because of the limitations of his “baggage”. </p>
<p>So, when the student wrote that we have “baggage,” I took that as she was implying that we have failed at being as “go getter” as she has been at “making things happen” and therefore we don’t think she can do it (because of our own baggage.)</p>
<p>We have wisdom (not baggage) from our experiences and from what we’ve seen/learned here on CC (numerous kids getting lousy aid packages with low EFCs and NYU expecting these families to take on HUGE loans).</p>
<p>I think Garda is spot on in the usual tongue-in-cheek way…adult experience, when it means saying no, is seen as baggage, much the way telling a kid to get the dirty dishes out of their room before they’re overrun with bugs is termed nagging. As soon as the kid has to live with the consequences of ignoring all that baggage, nagging, etc, a miracle happens and suddenly the old naysayer becomes an oracle and advice is then sought on how to undo the damage. If no horrible, negative (aka reasonable, rational) adult was on the scene, however, kid still has to live with the consequences but gets to blame his mistakes on the fact that no one ever told him and so how was he supposed to know? Some kids just have to learn the hard way…</p>
<p>It’s always NYU, isn’t? Last year it was a similar situation for a NYU wanna be. In July he realized that his parents couldn’t get any loans. </p>
<p>If someone I was mentoring came to me with this situation, I would tell the person to go to a school he/she could afford. Even if OP could borrow over 100k, she wouldn’t be able to pursue her dream of working in films. She probably would need to get a different job in order to pay back those loans.</p>
<p>I was the one that started the thread about if a parent would support his/her child in getting involved with someone with high student loans. My kids are lucky that will be able to graduate debt free. It is our gift to them so they could be free to pursue their dreams. I would be upset if they were to be sacked with someone else’s student loans and had to give up their dreams.</p>
<p>OP - don’t be forced to give up your dream in order to have few moments of glory in telling people you go to NYU.</p>
<p>I would tell the person to go to a school he/she could afford. Even if OP could borrow over 100k, she wouldn’t be able to pursue her dream of working in films. She probably would need to get a different job in order to pay back those loans.</p>
<p>Such an excellent point. When kids take out huge loans for majors that don’t pay well at first (like Film, acting, etc), they often end up not being able to actually work in their chosen fields because they have to “sell out” and take jobs that immediately earn more in order to pay their huge student loans.</p>
<p>*don’t be forced to give up your dream in order to have few moments of glory in telling people you go to NYU. *</p>
<p>wow— what the hell’s wrong with you? this is worse than applying to a school ED and then get accepted but have to back out because of FA.</p>
<p>What these parents are suggesting are harsh but true. You’re really immature and idiotic for not having “FA safety” schools.
Watch, if you do attend NYU, few years down the road, you’ll hate yourself to death because it’s a terrible mistake to go into that kind of debt.
Have you thought of what might go wrong after you graduate? What if you can’t find a job?</p>