I see. That’s rough. I’m sorry.
Right now you feel very disappointed but once you show up at your new school, you will love it and make the most of your time there. All your schools are excellent and you will get a great education. It is not wise to go into that much debt for a dream. If you got into Penn, then you have already proven your worth and you will do fine in life wherever you go.
You are not alone in this. There are thousands of students who find they just cannot afford the school they want to attend. Your life will be full of these moments. Reality is always different than dreams.
Good luck.
Ouch, I agree with @HRSMom , that is rough, and I’m sorry your parents put you in this situation. On the upside, UGA and (especially) Tech are fantastic schools (we live here), so at least you have that going for you, and you’ll be way ahead debt-wise when you graduate.
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I was basically told they would pay; to be fair they told me after they did Penn’s Net Price Calculator, which turned out to be pretty inaccurate. We
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Sounds like your parents made some mistakes while doing the NPC. Maybe they didn’t include all savings. maybe they forgot to include their annual 401k or IRA contributions…Maybe they put in after-tax income…only they can figure out where they went astray.
With an income of over $200k, they obviously did something wrong. Printing out the NPC that shows the lower amount won’t likely matter because it sounds like Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Borrowing any where close to $30k per year is crazy. Borrowing $10k per year is about the max anyone should borrow…and most should borrow less.
Do your parents realize that they would have to cosign those loans and that THEY would have to pay those loans back if you aren’t able to?
Do you have any idea how that much debt would hog-tie your life???
Please know on cc you are likely to hear don’t go into any debt - but posters on here do not know your finances - income is only a part of it. Your parents could be sitting in an expensive home with a ton of equity or have investments and the loans may not be a big deal for them. Please talk to your family before you give up your dream.
You are investing in you, so are your parents. It is also the social circle that will be your life. 30K is a lot for some to borrow, but for others it is not. Please understand your own situation. Many people turn down full rides to full pay for the school they and their student want to attend. It is not crazy to borrow 30k for a great education for many people. But on cc, it seems no one pays for college. That is not true.
If you got into Wharton I would go to UPenn. You can get an internship at a top investment bank in sophomore year that pays around 80k a year.
@indianSuperman: errr… no. You COULD make 8K a year from Wharton, sure (vs. the typical 2-3K). And make 80K a year when you graduate if you’re lucky. But you won’t net 80K as a sophomore intern. o_0
I think your parents are being sensible. No ‘dream school’ is worth an excessive amount of debt. If you have to pay $2K/mo, consider that you will need to make about $40K/yr extra to cover your debt service for 7-10 years. Those are the years when you would buy a home, get married, have children, go to grad school - and all of those life experiences will be much more difficult unless you are extremely successful financially in your employment. The ‘network’ that people speak of is a lot more important in grad school than undergrad.
You do have other options, like ROTC (which would pay for all of your tuition), but that has a commitment later.
Spend the savings on a great grad school (like Penn) and get a bigger payoff. You just don’t get it with an undergrad degree.
His parents have already decided they can’t or won’t pay more than a certain amount for college. I don’t think it’s helpful to second guess their decision at this point as to whether they could and should be willing to pay more.
If you are able to land internships and a job in investment banking, which is certainly feasible from Wharton but also any other strong finance or econ program, then you can expect to gross around $15-20k during the summers of sophomore and junior year (less around 5k for housing and 6k for taxes). For full time IB in NYC at a BB, you can make 85k base plus 10k signing plus around 50k bonus for your first year. However, very few get these super competitive positions regardless of school, and being a top candidate at any average school could possibly get you these as well.
Also, I totally understand the dream school dilemma. I faced a similar predicament between whether to apply ED to penn or accept a full scholarship to another school, mainly due to parents being unable to afford the full 60k EFC. Ended up taking the full scholarship and am very happy to be graduating debt free and still doing investment banking, which was my dream to begin with.
Keep in mind that no school is worth exorbitant amounts of debt, but of course if your parents are able to help pay for Wharton, it would certainly open many doors in finance. Lots of other great schools with solid finance programs will also enable you to end up in top finance jobs though, and may possibly give you large scholarships, so I would try to apply to other schools on USNews and Bloomberg Business that are well-ranked and have good finance programs, but where you would also be at the top of the applicant pool so as to get scholarship money. Hopefully that’s helpful.
OP, I don’t see how you could be doing anything equivalent to PPE at GTech in good measure! Maybe UGA ?
PPE students are free to explore and integrate many relevant disciplines and research areas. They may examine the nature and implications of human decision-making, the nature of distributive justice, the ethical consequences of the competitive market economy, and the dynamic relationships between the economic, political and legal orders.
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@keepyajessin. I don’t understand how the NPC was so far off he mark that your parents thought you would be getting way more aid than you got. But yeah with an income of over 200k and one kid in college ( I m assuming correct me if I am wrong), you are not bound to get huge aid.
You can break the Penn ED contract for financial reasons. If attending Penn means going into significant debt than yeah forget about. No school is worth going into significant debt for, not even the very top ones, especially since you got other good choices.
It is worth trying one last time with the Penn FA office but not sure that they would accommodate you further since I do not think you family has an objectively greater need than that assessed by Penn, but rather your parents are simply unwilling to pay the extra cost ( which they have every right to do, it is their money). So if you are parents are absolutely unwilling to cover the cost of Penn given your current FA then just forgot about Penn.
If they take the money out of home equity, at some point it still needs to be paid back. And if they have investments, they likely will sell them to finance the kid’s education if they intend to fund it at all. Don’t take out more than your federal loan amounts.
Since private schools like Penn offer binding ED as an inducement to keep their matriculation yield rates so high for bragging purposes, they should also do everything they can to make sure the accepted student applicant will actually be able to attend. I am glad to see that you will contact Penn again and ask them for more aid.
You have two other great options. UGA has a fantastic honors college, and it’s nearly as selective as an ivy. At UGA, you’d be paying less that 20,000 a year all expenses included with Zell. You would graduate debt free and have some leftover money to possibly put towards grad school. Tech is also a fantastic school, but if you don’t want to do engineering or even business it might not be the best place for you. It would also be a bit more expensive when you consider the costs of living in Atlanta. They’re still both great school, though.
Ok if you really wanna go to Penn, take the debt, switch your major to econ and hustle hard to break into investment banking. You’ll crush your debt in a few years if you land a solid gig after your undergrad.
That would be me, but obviously that might not be a risk you’d be willing to take.
Student Loans? Military scholarship? Where there’s a will there’s a way. Don’t give up on that dream school so easily.
@preppedparent : the military is not a financial aid institution. It assumes a sincere willingness and ability to serve in the military forces, and sacrifice life or limb. More and more, scholarships are only given to specific, clearly motivated and prepared freshmen (those have already been granted) then only to sophomores who’ve shown their mettle during the ROTC exercises.
As for loans, they’re capped at 5.5k.
There is no ‘way’ for hundreds of thousands of students who won’t be going to their dream college, a 'sleep away’college, a full-time college, or any 4-year college they got into.
So, when it comes to college, saying ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’ is worse than false or flippant, it’s cruel.
@Flurite : unless I’m mistaken, OP got into Wharton for finance. Hence the dilemma.
This mindset is why the current student loan debt in the US is more than $1.2 TRILLION DOLLARS in the US.
The average Class of 2016 graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt, up six percent from last year.
That equals a payment of $400 month for the next ten years at current bank rates, or $745/month for five years. That’s a lot of money out of your pocket every month for a long time.
If the kid had no other option but to take on this debt, then I’d say do it, but they have other options, thank goodness.