Consider the commuting costs as well and the extra food bills from him being home (they are more than you would think) before making a final decision - would he need a car to get to the BART lot or at times when the train wouldn’t work? IMO whether he loves it or not, that’s not the college experience he will have if he is a commuter.
Looks like CSU net price calculators are a mess since CSU dumped the CSU Mentor web site in favor of its current web site.
CSU Mentor had a relatively detailed NPC that showed that most CSUs had similar FA and net prices for similar situations (but living expense estimates varied). What it did show was that CSU FA did not change for living with parents versus living on or off campus. So if he attends a CSU out of commuting range, be prepared for needing to pay the full extra cost of living on or off campus. I.e. SFSU living on or off campus is probably in the ballpark of other CSUs where there is no commuting possibility.
UCs do adjust FA for different living situations, so there are some situations where a UC may be cheaper than a CSU if one cannot commute from living with parents. UCs appear to have functional net price calculators on their web sites.
Note that because the commute is relatively long and expensive, the savings for commuting may not be as much as assumed. Commuting costs will probably be $2,000 to $3,000 per year (depending on what additional costs there are beyond BART tickets); then you have to add whatever food and utilities he will continue to consume at home (SFSU assumes $6,786 at https://financialaid.sfsu.edu/coa2019-2020 ) to get a number comparable to living on campus. So instead of about $8k savings, the savings for commuting would be more like $6-7k, at a cost of 450-600 hours spent commuting.
So if he lives on campus and finds a part time job, that may neutralize the cost, plus give him work experience that can be useful later.
@natty1988 yes, it is on his list and we are visiting there on Tuesday next week for a tour. Definitely an easier commute if he actually wants to live at home. We actually live right next door to their Concord campus and he could possibly even take a few classes there (especially if he goes the business route).
I think SFSU is a little better known in the Bay Area, but the educations would be pretty similar I think.
@ucbalumnus thanks for the responses!
Yes, the UC Merced net price calculator showed us as eligible for about $10K in grant aid which would bring their cost down to same level or a little less than SFSU. I couldn’t even get the SFSU net price calculator to work, but our EFC is going to be about $15-16K so I doubt much help from the Cal States unless we get anything from the CA Middle Class Scholarship.
Students at SFSU do get a 50% discount off BART and he does have his own reliable car in case BART is down or delayed. I also work from home and could drop him/pick him up from BART easily if parking there was an issue based on timing. But commuting would still not be cheap and he does, of course, cost us on the food front here at home. It would be more doable if he decides on Cal State East Bay.
I think with perhaps some student Fed loans and him working a bit, we can make a live away situation work with our current income. My husband and I are just not willing to take out large parent loans, and we want to save the current equity in our home for our retirement.
Does he have any realistic chance of admission to UCB, and does it have the academic programs and majors he wants? Commuting there from Concord would be easier than to SFSU or CSUEB, and FA would be adjusted for living on campus.
@ucbalumnus no, I’m afraid not. He has an unweighted 3.66 GPA and only 1 AP class. His first SAT was a 1090 (although he didn’t study for it at all). He is taking a Kaplan SAT prep course through his school next month and will retake the SAT in August. He’s looking to get it up over 1200 which is definitely doable for him. That should make UC Merced a match for him.
He is also looking at University of Nevada, Reno where he could get WUE tuition and room and board is cheaper. He has 2 good friends targeting Oregon State, one of whom comes from a wealthy family where the Dad said he would rent them a house/apartment to share (although Freshmen are required to live on campus). He qualifies for some merit at Oregon State based on GPA but it would still come in around the $20-25K mark with room and board (might drop after the first year if he can live with friends off campus at a decent rate).
We did discuss Saint Mary’s in Moraga which would be a pretty easy commute, but even with decent merit (which he should qualify for with his GPA), it would still be north of $20K a year just for the tuition. He also doesn’t like how small the campus/classes are there.
Any way we slice it, looks like we need to plan on $20K per year which is kind of what I figured unless he did community college at DVC. If he takes the student Fed loans and works a bit, I think we can cover the rest from current income (just means sacrificing things like vacations, etc.). My middle child has autism and won’t do college, and then my youngest is an 8th grader, so she won’t start college until S20 is graduating (assuming he does it in 4 years).
@ucbalumnus You beat me to it! I was gonna suggest UC Berkeley as well. Definitely within easy commuting distance from Concord, especially in comparison to SFSU!
@thedreamydaisy How about the Cal State East Bay Campus in Concord? Are any of his classes offered there? He could take prereqs and get classes done while being close to home then transfer? By then he will have the college thing down and it will be cheaper to you?
CSUEB’s Concord campus has four undergraduate majors where all upper division course work can be completed, and four where some upper division course work is offered:
http://catalog.csueastbay.edu/content.php?catoid=19&navoid=12588
Otherwise (if his major is not offered there), if the goal is to prepare for transfer starting from a local college, the community colleges are much more aligned with that goal.
We are visiting Dallas for a graduation and met three undergrads who commute 1-2 hrs from UT Dallas and UT Arlington to different suburbs, it was a unanimous consensus that it’s a horrible experience and they wouldn’t do it to their own children.
Even though these schools doesn’t really offer much to make dorm life too valuable, just scheduling conflicts and commute congestion makes it difficult to take courses they prefer, have a healthy social life or to hold part time jobs. If it was due to financial hardship, it would be justified but they are doing it is because of frugal and enmeshed families who aren’t ready to cut umbilical cords.
I felt sympathy for these kids, they are missing out. You only experience college once.
The CSUEB Concord campus is very limited. If he decides he WANTS to live at home, then he will likely look at DVC or possibly commuting to the main CSUEB campus in Hayward.
If he wants to live on campus somewhere, we will wait until we see his acceptances and bottom line cost for them all and go from there. I do believe we can give him the living on campus experience if he really wants it. We will just need to adjust some things financially to make it happen.
Ahh @thedreamydaisy I see. Well you have options and your strategy to weigh it all after acceptances and costs is sound. Good luck
Commuting from Concord to CSUEB (Hayward) using BART is not significantly quicker than to SFSU. CSUEB is more drivable than SFSU, but commute traffic can make the time variable enough that he would have to leave plenty of buffer time (plus there would be car, insurance, fuel, and maintenance costs).
The least annoying commute if he lives at home and commutes is start at DVC, earn a 4.0 college GPA and write good essays, and transfer to UCB.
lost in all this is is what your EFC is - has that been calculated? It’s certainly possible that school aid can cover enough to include housing, or at least partially.
More likely at UC than CSU. For commuter students, CSUs are commonly less expensive than UCs, but residential students getting significant financial aid may find UCs to be less expensive.
EFC is estimated to be $15-16K so not sure we would qualify for much aid from CSUs - UC Merced NPC shows about a $10K grant. I do think we qualify for the California Middle Class Scholarship, but it doesn’t seem that it always pays out as it depends on state funding.
We will consider DVC with transfer to UCB as a possibility if finances just don’t work elsewhere.
I think his GPA is good enough to get him in the running for entrance into UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz as well. Also, Concord to UC-Davis is a one hour drive, opposite commute, though UC-Davis will be a reach.
Commuting for work and for college are not at all comparable. Commuting to college means missing the evening and night experiences, even if it is a less than half hour walk. A college campus is a world apart.
OP- no matter which school your son attends I would hope living on campus as a freshman is the expected experience. You can never replace that. I was so lucky to have enough scholarship money to avoid the 8 miles (googled it decades later) that involved over an hour with bus transfers. My college friend within a ten minute walk missed out on all of the evening discussions (where we solved the world’s problems sitting around in dorm rooms) and travel on foot. Ten pm was not the time to knock on her parents’ door to see if she could join us…
Your son will have to decide if his dream school is worth giving up other important learning aspects of college life (all learning does not occur in the classroom) when it comes time to crunch numbers. Students always have to compromise but do not underestimate the loss of study time and interactions with a commute.
Thanks again for all the feedback - we visited Sonoma State today. We had horrible traffic getting there and arrived a few minutes late. I could tell S was grumpy and he said he had a headache. But I could see his demeanor change almost instantly as we started walking around campus, and by the time we left, he was completely animated and smiling. He loved it!
He left saying he could see himself there and that it was a “cool school”. We also got to see inside the Freshman living space which is more apartment style (no tall dorm towers), and he was very sold.
Definitely seems like a great fit, and it would ensure he gets to live on campus if he goes there. So for now, it is top of his list.