Your parents must have extremely high assets if you all can live with no earned income for the last 6 years and still have an EFC of 50k.
Graduate degrees in STEM fields at US research universities are generally fully funded. That means full tuition scholarship, plus a stipend for working part time for working as a teaching asst or research asst.
You Americans? What a nice way to talk about your countrymen.
Most US colleges aren’t $50k/year. Even if you aren’t living in the US, you should still qualify for OOS rates (not international ones) and there are a lot of colleges whose OOS cost of attendance is much less than $50k/year. However, those colleges won’t be the expensive privates or well known state schools. If your parents have been unemloyed for 6 years, it’s not surprising that they can’t pay $40k/year or more. Most other Americans can’t afford that either. Our kids commute to our local state schools or attend community colleges. Maybe you should start your search there.
Caltech is a private university, no taxpayer support. Your unemployed parents were judged ineligible of need based grants. They would need to sell some assets or ratchet down their lifestyle to pay the tuition.
Since Caltech rejected you, why did you even start this thread?
Spare us the sad violin playing…
Your choices in the US were not Caltech or nothing. If you had the stats to be admitted into Caltech, then you had the stats to net large merit scholarships at MANY schools in the US.
Even now, your choices are not just France or nothing. Many students who are disappointed with their college admissions options take a gap year and apply in the subsequent admissions round.
Many American families that do not qualify for need-based FA look to schools that offer merit aid. Their kids still have a life, and you could too, if you didn’t have such a prima donna sense of entitlement.
Again, if your parents can go 6 years without a job and still have a 50k EFC, then they must have extraordinarily high assets. They’re probably getting significant passive income (dividends, rental income, etc).
** We also are not poor enough to get aid and definitely are not rich enough to pay ourselves. I had a major injury which sidelined my career and have only recently returned to work**. We’re URM, and the NHRP, gave them all nice letters, but we own a home in California, so no funding for Pancho Opie, Maria Thelma Lou, nor Juanita Chiquita Rosita. I wouldn’t have the gall to say that we “deserved” it.
Then if you knew that your family didn’t have enough funding to study what you want to study, why didn’t you take the responsibility of kicking butt to get exceptional scores/stats? Why aren’t you seeking affordable options? If you think you are Caltech caliber, why didn’t you get in? @PrimeMeridian answered your question about funding. Just because it’s not Caltech, doesn’t mean you can’t find someone to fund you. Why does it have to be an elite?
{insert violin playing here} can’t feel your pain because I’ve done this for 3 kids, one right after the other, driving clunky cars, working two jobs, using coupons, repairing the house ourselves, no dinners out, no vacations, living on arroz and frijoles for decades (yes, decades!)
We started a 529 account for each child and used short term loans of less than $5k per kid.
Each child worked during every opportunity to contribute to their fees and loans:
-One daughter worked as a hotel maid, developed back problems making beds.
-My Caltech son worked in construction with uncles, who own a roofing company. Try tarring in the summer days, it’s a blast. :(( ; he used those skills on his Eagle project. He then bussed hot kitchens as a gopher/busboy at night. (Missed a perfect SAT score by two questions-he had worked at the restaurant until 2am that night.). Maybe Caltech likes kids who have done tough manual labor?
-Eldest daughter worked at an amusement park in sanitation, getting leftover stale beer falling on her from unsecure trash cans at Midnight. {stop Mozart violins}
You’ve been given plenty of good advice here. Quit playing the blame game. Get over the “trauma” of rejection from elite private schools, and apply to some affordable options.
Your option is to quit whining over things you can do nothing about , swallow your pride and apply to low cost PUBLIC colleges in your state, get a UG degree and THEN try applying to top PhD programs , like many Caltech PhD candidates do .
And next time you come to CC to ask questions don’t bite the hands that feed you - no one here will continue to offer help to posters who are rude .
There are plenty of other forums on the web where you can rant all you want …
OP what’s the deal with bragging about an exam that Caltech students would fail miserably? You are basically saying that your whole life is determined by that exam, which means that they don’t care about where you come from, or if you are a top-notch artist or athlete. Therefore, a top poor Brazilian student coming from a favela would have more chances of getting (and attending) to HYPSM than getting into your French Caltech.
Look, I would be happy to have the amount of income and savings that you have, that would increase my chances of getting into a US university, but I’m not going to cry about it, I’m doing what I can with what I have, and choose the US above any other country because their universities will look me as a whole, unlike other countries (including mine) who only take a single exam in consideration.
Those are my 2 cents.
OP has another thread (5 pages worth) on the same topic. From that thread the college options were:
Cambridge (UK) ($40K). UCB ($60K), CMU ($40K), Brown ($40K), UCLA ($56K), NYU ($70K), Stonybrook ($10K) and GaTech ($25K). OP had deposits down at CMU and StonyBrook.
Then in May the idea of studying in France came up (presumably b/c the available choices weren’t palatable and the OPs father is French). The French option requires a year of intense study before applying; OP was fairly sure of getting into the Grand Ecole Polytechnique, but less sure of getting into “the CalTech of France”, ENS.
Brown, which meets 100% of need, assessed the family’s assets and felt that they could afford $40K/pa. The family feels “cheated” by Brown.
OP turned down GaTech “because it is in the South”
OP has super stats (perfect scores on SAT & APs; placed in the top 30 students on the USA Physics Olympiad and went to the International Math Olympiad) and no doubt wants a prestigious uni to match.
[quote]
You Americans are pretentious, you rely on marketing to promote your BS universities and then use the prestige factor to screw over students and charge them ridiculous amounts of money. And you are so gullible that you accept all this…
[quote]
@bitznbatzn, this sounds like very sour grapes, but now it’s August and the time for railing and being angry is over. It’s time to make a decision and get going. So, where are you going to go?
One last point, OP: you keep saying that there is no money in research, but what is your idea of making money? Physics academic salaries run $100K+; post-docs at national labs start at $70K+ (undergrad interns get about $25/hr; grad student interns ~$35/hr). In industry, of course, numbers can be multiples of that. And there is virtually no unemployment.
Thanks for the heads up @collegemom3717.
Why didn’t the OP go to Stonybrook? It looks like it was affordable.
Pot . . . . kettle . . . . black.
I guess the adcoms at the prestigious colleges must have X-ray vision.
Why are some people so heck-bent on being absolutely and completely miserable???
@collegemom3717 : well it seems you have summarized my situation rather well.
my father tells me that he cannot pay 50,000 per year for cambridge or american universities without seriously endangering his retirement. i did the calculation with him and he says it would be 1200 per month for 25 years tp pay off my loan for cambridge. my father is already 70 years old and probably wont be able to get good paying job again, despite his previously successful career. either he’s being stingy or the colleges didn’t fairly asses our financial situation or he’s underestimating my ability to pay off the loan as a researcher.
my fear is that i won’t be able to pay for 1200 per month on the salary of a researcher. i would like to do research in theoretical physics, which is completely useless from the point of view of industry - so i have to be in academia, where positions are scarce (since theoretical physics professors are mosly old guys - but who know’s maybe they’ll die off and open spaces for the youngsters). after i finish the phd i will take me a while to get a real salary - presumably ill be working for a garbage salary as a postdoc for a few years and i read that assistant professors only get $54,000 per year on average.\
basically i want to know if paying 50,000 per year for 3 years at cambridge and then doing a 4 year phd in the us (free) at 6.4% interest rate is affordable on a researcher’s salary, or if it makes more sense to study for free in france where i will have difficulties adapting and no guarantee i will get into the school ENS and be forced to make a 5 year commitment to france and other downsides.
Edit - deleted because it was too nasty. But I sure enjoyed typing it.
Building affordable schools into your list is essential. Many kids don’t realize this until it’s too late.
You needed a better college list, with affordable options and places you were actually willing to attend if accepted. A private prestigious school isn’t the place for you if you can’t afford it. Private schools are businesses, and they price themselves at the highest price they feel the market can bear. Families are willing to go to extraordinary sacrifices to put a child through Caltech or Brown.
Your only options now are to take the loans or to take a gap year and reapply to schools you can afford with merit aid that you are actually willing to attend. (Turning your nose up at Georgia Tech because it’s southern? Hey, they didn’t suddenly move it after you applied. Was Georgia or Stony Brook worse than a five year commitment to France?)
How do people afford these places? Poor students take loans and then get aid. (Really poor students often have to take Perkins loans that go above and beyond the standard federal loan program.) Rich students pay cash. Those in between have to shop carefully.
If you take the loans, plan on working to pay them off before applying to grad school.
If you will stop your railing at the injustices of the world- and quit talking about Americans as if they have nothing to do with you!- I will be encouraging.
I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t know more about you, your family and finances can say what you should do. So, I will just offer 4 possible paths.
if you are pretty sure that you want to do your PhD in the US then the next one I would suggest is CMU. Reasoning: 1) it puts you on the right schedule to get summer REUs- paid summer research internships- which will not only generate some income but get you experience - possibly including publications- as an undergrad. The U.K. and French schedules don’t fit time-wise with REUs and summer research work is less common there. 2) it is very realistic for you to get TA work during term- again, extra cash and good for grad school apps. Cambridge has short terms and long vacs, so you can get temp work between terms but working - at anything- is not possible during term.
CMU isn’t Cambridge, but there will be lots of very smart people there.
If you want to do your PhD in the UK, then Cambridge is, of course, amazing. For you, though, it would be slightly more precarious financially, as the funding mechanisms are not as clear cut as they are in the US,
As for moving from one country to the other, that is not always as easy as it might seem- I know a Cambridge student who was disappointed in his PhD options in the US. That is a random sample of 1 person, so shouldn’t be over-read, but you might compare the Cambridge course with the expectations of a couple of US grad schools that you are interested in.
Moderator’s Note: I deleted a post that was over the top and at least one response to that post. The OP has received lots of feedback so I’ll let the OP digest that and close the thread.