<p>Thank you Jazmine. Post was much appreciated. I feel exactly as you do and I am glad you were able to articulate what I meant when I failed to do so myself.</p>
<p>I think we need to be careful about judging someone’s ability to pay simply based on their income. We don’t know what people are dealing with financially- they may have high medical bills, or dependent parents, or any other amount of grave financial struggle. So while it is easy for some who don’t make as much to say I would love to be able to afford it, the fact is the only people who can answer that is the family themselves.</p>
<p>To the OP our dd can’t go to her #1 school and she is soo disappointed. They changed their merit aid package this year and with the increase in tuition it just isn’t doable. Our EFC indicates that the school should be within our reach but due to some circumstances beyond our control and the fact that my income will be drastically reduced this year we just can’t make it work.</p>
<p>I’ve tried to focus on the positive with dd, that she gets to go to a great school and debt free if she chooses! That will open up many doors for her that would have been much harder to walk through with a lot of undergrad debt.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you!</p>
<p>There are families that live on 100k a year… 60k a year… 30k a year… Your family makes 200k. Surely there’s some room to find college funds in there! If you took an entire 50k a year out of your family’s income for college, you’d still have more to live on than like 95% of the US. Just sayin.</p>
<p>Do you go to private school right now? Would you expect any private boarding school to fund you to go there? Was that even anything that was considered? I ask this, because many families and students who fully understand that Expensive Academy costs $30K a year and to got to any of the New England boarding schools can cost $45-50 a year, but somehow they get the idea that college same sort of colleges cost less. </p>
<p>THose schools that you applied to are private and they are there to make money. They get what they can from those able to pay to pay for the top students whose families truly cannot pay even if they salted away a quarter of their income for the last 10 years and are willing to borrow the same for the next 10. Your family did not do that , and are not willing to do that, so…you are asked to pay.</p>
<p>COngratulations on your acceptances and UNC-CH is a great school right up there with those privates. My son would love to go there but it is way over our price range being an OOS school for us.</p>
<p>UNC in state total COA is about 22k. So if your parents are willing to pay that, then Northeastern might be viable with the 12k merit aid. Northeastern has coop program so you don’t pay the full 53k every year plus you could make upward of 10k+ a year doing coop.</p>
<p>Ah…I think NEU students actually do pay a full years tuition each year…they don’t coop every term and don’t do so until they are juniors. In addition, NEU coop students still have to pay for housing during their coop term. The money quoted above would cover the tuition costs only.</p>
<p>No, NEU does not charge tuition while they are on coop, but it is a 5 year program with coop. And most kids live off campus after Freshmen year and the cost is comparable to living on campus for a whole academic year (9 months) because you can get a little cheaper apartment off campus.</p>
<p>[Tuition</a> and Fees | Admissions](<a href=“http://www.northeastern.edu/admissions/costs/tuition.html]Tuition”>http://www.northeastern.edu/admissions/costs/tuition.html)</p>
<p>Just do what I did, move to Boston after college, get a job and have a blast!</p>
<p>You are lucky that your in state public has such a good reputation and is such a good school. Cheer up!</p>
<p>Ttparent…no, they do NOT pay tuition during the coop term. But they DO pay tuition for the remaining two terms in the year they attend classes. My kid lived off campus in Boston. I want to add, for the cost, it was really substandard student housing. The cost per month was cheaper, but he had a 12 month lease instead of a 9 month college contract. Truthfully, it was a wash financially.</p>
<p>The take away from this thread is an important one for juniors and younger in high school. Discuss the finances with your parents BEFORE you start crafting you college application list. Certainly you can apply to some reach schools both academically and financially but if your parents have a price point, you will need to believe and understand that your college choice will need to adhere to their financial guidelines.</p>
<p>A big city is not that much fun when you don’t have money to spend. My kid originally wanted to go to college in NYC, but ended up at a small college town. She loved her college experience and now she is working/living in NYC. UNC is a great school. You are lucky to have such great option.</p>
<p>@ the OP, I feel for you. I’m sorry people have felt the need to give you a hard time. My D is in a similar position, while I expect she will get over her disappointment that she didn’t win the fantastic merits scholarships necessary to attend her top choices, she is still sad when she sees friends excited to attend those schools. FWIW, One of her desired schools was your state flagship.</p>
<p>I love UVa, but I would not recommend anyone pay $120,000 more to get a UVa undergrad degree instead of a UNC-CH degree. Save your money and debt capacity for a great grad school (maybe in Boston). </p>
<p>With the money you save, you could afford to spend your summers in Boston doing unpaid internships (when the weather there is much more pleasant than in NC).</p>
<p>There are tons of students who would kill (or at least maim) if they could get into UNC-CH.</p>
<p>The only thing Northeastern and Boston College have in common is that they’re near Boston. Two completely different feels. If you think you’d be happy at either, then you’re either completely flexible and will love UNC or you are fantasizing about your life in Boston. Waiting for a bus on Mass Ave on a dark, 9°F morning is no picnic.</p>
<p>I go to UNC, and a good half of my friends ended up here for financial reasons. Many were very reluctant. But they all ended up loving it anyway :)</p>
<p>Buildadog, my son would love to go to UNC. Between that school and your choices, maybe BC would be a contender for him, but if UNC were the cost to him as it is to you, there would not even be a thought. Not even one.</p>
<p>“Ttparent…no, they do NOT pay tuition during the coop term. But they DO pay tuition for the remaining two terms in the year they attend classes.”</p>
<p>But they don’t do two terms every year, there will be years where they do just 1 semester. Or if they really want but usually not preferred, they can go straight 4 years and pay full tuition every year. The students are in charge of when and what schedule they follow along with their coops. My point is that it spreads 4 years tuition over 5 years, and you sort of get some money that would have been your first year salary sooner. It might be somewhat zero sum game but timing of when the money has to be dispensed and when income starts to come in could be huge for some kids.</p>
<p>I knew kids that couldn’t afford to pay the next semester and elected to keep doing coop to make more money. He might have to stay an extra semester to finish school or he might have to do some overloading to catch up. But that is a little bit of flexibility that NEU has that many other schools do not by having coop as integral part of the program. Granted good coop job is not guaranteed, so that is definitely a risk.</p>
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<p>I apologize, I should have expressed some condolences about the injustice done to you. But, not by the school. My sympathy to you for having parents that do not value their children enough to share in the blessings they have been given. Blessings in having children smart and driven enough to get into elite schools, and blessings in wealth.</p>
<p>“My sympathy to you for having parents that do not value their children enough to share in the blessings they have been given. Blessings in having children smart and driven enough to get into elite schools, and blessings in wealth.”</p>
<p>OperaDad, did you just go on record as saying that the OP’s parents are bad parents simply because at the present time they are unwilling to shell out more than 1/4 of their combined annual incomes for the OP’s college education, without ever having met those parents or having learned anything about their individual family financial circumstances?</p>
<p>Where the OP’s parents failed (if indeed they did fail) was perhaps in not making it perfectly clear to the OP that the aid packages were not likely to prove affordable for them, and/or refusing to pay the application fees for institutions that they knew fully well would prove unaffordable. I am not going to fault a high school student for dreaming about studying at X, Y, or Z and thus applying to X, Y, or Z. Dreaming is something that high school students are supposed to be doing. </p>
<p>OP -</p>
<p>If you have what it takes to get into the institutions that you liked so well, you have what it takes to make a success of your college years wherever it is that you study. It is perfectly OK to be sad for a while. You can even use up a box or two of Puffs Plus (they really are the softest) if you need to. But when that box (or two) is empty, kick the unaffordables to the curb, and go out and make an even better future for yourself at one of the excellent and affordable options that remain.</p>
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<p>This!! Op has stated that his parents are divorced. This means that each person is running his/her own household vs having $200k to run one household.</p>
<p>I agree with happymom that just because parents are not willing to shell out 200K for an education does not make them bad parents (especially because we do not know what other things they have going on). Unless OP is willing to support his parents well into their old age, they should definitely not take on massive debt trying to pay for a 200k education.</p>
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<p>Blessings is right because OP was also smart enough that he got into a top tier school that is an affordable option for his family</p>