Basically my parents are willing to give me around $10,000 a year for college so i would only probably have to pay around 9 thousand a year at Stony brook and i will hopefully get summer internships to cover some of the cost.
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Stony is a well respected school. You’ll have plenty of opps thru that school.
With your parents’ $10k, and a student loan of $5500, you’ll have most/all of your direct costs covered.
GET a JOB this summer, and work/save to cover other costs. Then get a part time job during the school year (8-10 hrs a week) for pocket money.
A 200k loan w a 10 yr term, @4.5% interest, translates to over $2000 per month payments.
Think of how hard if would be for your parents to put aside $2000 every month. And think of all the things you’d rather be doing straight out of college with $2000 a month. A lot of people don’t spend $2000 per YEAR for a vacation, mortgage or car payment, but you’ll have to cough it up every MONTH.
Stony Brook is pretty good for engineering, no? I guess you could stretch for GWU and UMiami, but I don’t think they’re better for engineering.
UIUC is unaffordable. You don’t want to take on a crazy amount of debt.
The problem with the 3-2 program is that admission to the second part at Columbia isn’t assured (you can’t get a single grade below a B in the required classes to get in to Columbia; even one B- would disqualify you).
I suppose that you could start off in Queens and then (assuming that you don’t bomb your classes), if you get a grade below a B, transfer to Stony Brook instead. Or just get the Queens degree and if the transfer to Columbia falls through but you have a high enough GPA, get a masters from Stony Brook or somewhere in EE (some STEM masters programs are funded, including UIUC, I believe; at least they fund some masters CS students). Those are also viable options.
@mom2collegekids you and I sometimes differ because I think that sometimes taking on substantial debt is a good investment. It’s all in the numbers and the circumstances. There are no rules of thumb. How much do you need to borrow, how good is the opportunity, how much are you likely to make, and how unique is the opportunity. I like to do the math.
This proposal is so far over the top that no rational person could possibly endorse it.
Stony Brook engineering is excellent. Highly regarded by area firms, and the ABET accreditation is a seal of approval nationally. My son is in EE at a southern school, landed an internship with a major Long Island defense contractor thanks to his school’s accreditation and his own resume. That company had never hired anyone from his school before. His co-interns included several from Stony Brook, a frequent target for the company. It works both ways. Stony engineers are recruited locally, but employable everywhere. Same for every ABET accredited school. This coming summer, my son is interning for a big company in Maryland. Again, they hired him from his southern school, caring more about his resume than the school. He will be working with 80 other interns from schools all over the country, from the prestigious to the obscure. By and large, the engineering world is more concerned about what you can do than what school you attend. To go into massive debt for a perceived (though not necessarily) better school is a move that can literally ruin your life.
Here is what you need to ask yourselves: are you going to go to grad school ? If yes, the undergrad won’t matter. Choose the school you can afford, do excellent work there and get into most prestigious grad school you can. Grad school tends to give more scholarship or even full ride. Employers only looks at the latest place you’ve been. If you just want to get a job and don’t want to go to grad school or not sure, choose the school that have the best networking. Nowadays job is all about the networking, even the top 30 schools won’t help you a lot if you don’t know how to network. 200k+ debt is simply not worth it, especially for undergrad. Remember, the starting salary of newly engineering bs graduate is about 60-70k per year, depending on your major and your undergrad you go to. Definitely not enough to pay all bills and the loans.
Disagree about both networking and about your school affecting your starting salary.
Getting a job is about one thing: do you have the skills, knowledge, and capabilities an employer needs to meet his current and future clients’ needs? A hot computer programmer will get work with no college whatsoever; a lousy one will not. Period.
Networking, and the name of your school, can help you get an interview. They can get your resume looked at. They won’t get you the job, and if you do get the job offer, they won’t affect your starting salary. You will be paid whatever your employer thinks you are worth, adjusted for demand (if he has trouble finding people to do the work, he may pay you more to start so as not to lose you to competition, and then try to keep you on the job longer; if he has many qualified people applying for each opening, he can pay below market rates to start and be confident someone hungry will take it.)
Internships and work experience in your field will give a better idea of what you can actually DO outside the classroom. That’s where you should focus your efforts.
Go to Stony Brook, and get the best summer work experience in your field that you possibly can, regardless of the pay.
Have your GC contact your Cuny rep and ask about getting your admissions changed to city college. Or contact City college directly to ask about having your admissions switches to them.
Or go to Queens for a year, take the gen encourages accumulate 30 credits and a 3.2 goal and then transfer to City college
Are you eligible for TAP or Pell
what is your class rank? Are you graduating in the top 10% of the class ( if yes, the NYS STEM initiative will cover your tuition at CUNY or SUNY).
It your parents are paying 10k and you are eligible for a $5500 loan, where is the balance of the money from stony brook coming from?
Please, don’t think about taking so much debt on. Engineering is not one of the those fields where the school you attended will make a huge difference in your salary after graduation (not with the schools you listed, which are all excellent schools).
Stony Brook at $20,000 per year is your only realistically affordable option that does not involve transferring. You would have to take a federal direct loan of $5,500 and earn about $3,500 from work to cover the $9,000 remaining after your parents’ contribution. But Miami at $28,000, GWU at $30,000, and UIUC at $50,000 would require parent cosigning loans or parent loans, generally a bad idea for both you and them. And Stony Brook is a well respected school anyway.
The Queens-Columbia 3+2 program may be affordable at first, but admission to Columbia requires meeting strict grade and GPA requirements, and Columbia does not promise as good financial aid (need-based only, no merit) for 3+2 transfers as it does for frosh and other transfers. However, if going directly to Stony Brook is still too much of a financial stretch, you can start at Queens and attempt to transfer to Stony Brook (or other SUNY) as a junior to finish your engineering degree. But that entails the added risk of not being admitted to an affordable school as a transfer student.
