<p>I posted a thread about whether I should live on campus or commute. And I confused a bunch of people, so I will be more descriptive.</p>
<p>I will be going to community college in the fall and want to transfer to a private college in the spring. The college is 38 minutes away WITHOUT traffic, etc. I would rather just live on campus instead of commute because I really wanna get involved in the college and not just go for my classes. But the college is expensive. Tuition and fees + room and board = $37,165. I will hopefully have a job because I am currently unemployed but looking for a job, I hope to get some kind of academic scholarship, and I want to do a work study.
Should I live on campus, or just commute?</p>
<p>I want to get an apartment in my sophomore year so I can be closer to the college, and hopefully that will cost less.</p>
<p>The reason I want a private college is because there are only 5 colleges in my state that have my major and only 2 of them are less than an hour away(one of them is the one I'm talking about in this thread). The other college is also a private college.</p>
<p>Well how much is the cost without room and board? Would it be too much debt to live on campus even for just one semester?</p>
<p>I think the cost without room and board is almost $30,000.</p>
<p>If I were making the decision, I would figure out how much more it would cost me to live in the dorm than to live at home. How much would my parents expect me to contribute to the household? Would I be responsible for gas/insurance/parking/maintenance for a car if I lived at home but not if I lived on campus? Are there some meals I would be buying on campus either way? How many meals a week – week after week after week – would I be willing to eat ramen noodles or some other very inexpensive food? How many meals a week would a mandatory dining plan require me to spend a certain amount of money on?</p>
<p>Then – if possible after I got a job and knew my hourly wage, but I’d try to get an accurate idea of what my hourly wage was likely to be if I needed to make the decision before getting the job – I would try to figure that in terms of how many hours I would have to work to pay for it. That’s take-home pay, not the amount that they actually tell you you’ll be making. Even if I intended to take out a loan and pay it off later, I’d still put it in terms of my earning potential right now, because as we all know, nobody is guaranteed a good paycheck later. I’d figure out how long I was willing to keep paying for it – up until you need to start saving for first and last months’ rent plus security deposit? – and how many hours a week I would have to work in order to pay it off in that amount of time. I’d subtract the number of hours that living at home would cost me (the time I’d spend commuting, including the time I’d add on so that I’d be on time even if I hit unexpected traffic) and then I’d ask myself whether living in the dorm was worth that much effort.</p>
<p>Of course there are other things to factor in. If you’re an introvert you might value a couple of hours a day of solitude in the car. If you’re willing to do difficult work in order to make more money, you might not have the energy to study or socialize much after you’re done working for the day. But that’s where I’d start. It would put both the advantages (which are not only social: you’d also have better access to the library, tutors, and extra study sessions your professors might offer before exams) and disadvantages (which are not only financial: you might end up not being able to study in your own room, and you might find that it’s hard to get enough sleep, especially if you tend to go to bed and wake up early) of living in the dorm in concrete terms for me.</p>