FAFSA and CSS for Biological and Step Parents

What is your dream major and what do you hope to do in the future?

@blossom

Hunter, Macauley, Baruch, U Mass Boston, Temple, Queens and Brooklyn, City College.

You seem to misunderstand the connection between “don’t give financial aid and have very high admissions standards” and your current problem. The problem is your list- not the colleges, and not financial aid policies, and not your bio dad.

Every college in America gives financial aid- except for the military academies because they are free. The fact that you may not QUALIFY for aid- either because your family makes too much money, or your grades are too low, or whatever, doesn’t change the fact that the colleges offer aid. Enough for you to attend? That’s a problem that kids deal with by crafting a better list up front.

Paying over 30K for Pace demonstrates weak analytical thinking for someone looking for a strong college in business. You have better and cheaper options among the public U’s in NYC.

http://www.american.edu/kogod/undergraduate/BS-BLC.cfm

That program is available at virtually every college in America with a business undergrad program. You combine it with language studies and a few history/literature/political theory classes in the region of interest and voila.

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BS in Business, Language & Culture Studies


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Ok…

Please don’t go into debt while chasing after some unique sounding major. You can get to the same place in life and career w/o some fancy named major.

CUNYs are very good schools but most students don’t live on campus. They’re not quiet like private city colleges. It hard to find public affordable school identical to a private one in a city.

Can your family afford these private universities located in very expensive urban areas? Can they? Without loans?

Will you get accepted at BU or NYU with sufficient aid tomattend at costs close to or exceeding $70,000 a year?

You know…there are some great programs with great summer internship opportunities in NY or Boston or D.C. You don’t have to go to college IN those towns to get experiences in them.

One of my classmates applied to San Francisco State University. That’s the only example I could think of a large public city school. I should’ve applied there.

How would you have paid for SFSU. CA colleges give practically NO aid to OOS students.

It’d still be cheaper than Pace. I wish we had a college like SFSU in NY.

The OOS cost of San Francisco State University is ~35k( you must factor in transportation costs). The only aid that you would be guaranteed is $5.6k loan

Then Pace costs the same amount of money. For the residents of California it is a very affordable school that is very big and not extremely hard to get in.

Are there more schools like California state colleges that are located in big cities, but in other states that give aid to out of state students?

The role of a public university is to provide an affordable option for their tax payer base (because they are subsidized by the taxpayers in that state). They provide merit $$ to some OOS students at the tippy top of their accepted student pool.

The only public colleges that meet 100% demonstrated need is UVA and UNC-CH (which caps its OOS enrollment at 18%). They use the CSS profile and non-custodial profile.

You HAVE a public university system in NY. It is reasonably priced for instate students. You just don’t like those schools.

Grass is always greener elsewhere.

As noted by @sybbie719 the mission of public universities is to provide lower cost optoions to residents of THAT state. Some schools provide some aid to OOS students, but they seldom cover the differential between the instate and OOS costs.

You believe that ONLY schools located in big cities can get you where you think you want to be in the future. You seem to be ignoring acceptance criteria for those schools…as well as the costs.

You also HAVE placed location above cost, and program strength as can be evidenced by your application to Pace. It’s a good enough school if you can afford the costs…but really, your instate public options are FAR better schools. FAR BETTER…and for a fraction of the cost.

ETA…SFSU does NOT guarantee housing for students. On campus housing is VERY limited (which does beg the question of how many students live ON campus). The costs of rents in the SF area are exhorbitant.

There are far more affordable options for people who either enjoy living in small communities where everyone knows each other or for people who like quiet suburban and rural life and not enough options for people who like to be in a large community where they don’t know anyone and their families and like to live in cities where they go home only to sleep because they cannot run out of things to do, people to meet and places to see, and having everything within the walking distance never having to use a car.

Have you looked at colleges in Chicago? Minneapolis? Atlanta? St. Louis?

Most people have their AFFORDABLE school as their local commuter school. That is reality. But if you don’t want to do that, there are lots and lots of colleges in big cities all over the country. Are they affordable? Maybe, maybe not. But most rural and suburban schools aren’t affordable to most people either.

You’d really be surprised how few times things like this will actually happen since you’ll be, oh I don’t know, studying (hopefully).

PS: By your description, you could easily do that in places like Ann Arbor that are not big cities. Most of my friends here don’t have cars and don’t run out of things to do if they want to.

After you finish waxing poetic, you must attend college where your grades and your money will take you.

It does not matter that your friend applied to SFSC

It does not matter if you feel that there are more affordable options for those who live in small communities

It does not matter if you feel that there are not enough options in big cities, where there are always things to do.

What matters is that you must sit down with your parents (mom and stepdad). find out realistically how much they are willing to pay for you to attend college and then find schools within those financial parameters.

FYI, most of the kids attending high school in NYC are very happy to attend SUNY in remote upstate because NYC is not going anywhere!!! But they apply to CUNY so that they can have a financial safety.

If you know affordable big city schools in other states, can you share some with me? Thank You.

Other people can attend anywhere they like and like it there or hate it but I want to go somewhere where I will feel comfortable if I pay money for this.