I’m at a dilemma. I’ve been accepted to Tulane University, and I was planning to go, but there’s a catch: I would need to come up with about $25k-$30k a year to go there. This means $120 max in debt after four years. Now, I also want to go to graduate school. Is this amount of money for an undergrad degree worth it? At Tulane, I really want to go into their Neuroscience program, but I wouldn’t even be able to start this until junior year. I’ve also recently applied to a local school, the University of South Alabama. Comparing stats, Tulane is far better, and I have no doubt that I’d get a great education there, not to mention opportunities. However, if I went to South, I’d save a lot of money. So I need some opinions and thoughts on this.
Oh, and I was thinking, what if I went to South for two years to get basics and requirements, and then transferred. Thoughts?
That would be in federal loans. I could also get a private loan from a bank, but these have much higher interest rates. Many students go to college having to borrow more than 5,500.
No debt is not worth it, besides you won’t be able to borrow that much on your own without your parent’s help by consigning. It is too much debt anyway.
It is, but it isn’t affordable for you. The primary goal is to get the education at a cost you can handle. This is a hard reality for many students. You can still get a good education even if it isn’t Tulane.
OK, a few things. But the first two (and they are not all that related)
I would never recommend someone go $100,000-120,000 in debt for undergrad, no matter their future plans. That is just too much.
I strongly suspect grad school would not cost you any more money, assuming you really mean grad school as in Ph.D. and not professional school such as med school. Most hard science grad programs waive tuition and pay a stipend for being a TA that is generous enough to cover room and board. It isn’t life in a luxury condo and dinner at steak houses all the time by any means, but you are in the lab and grading papers 14 hours a day anyway. Now maybe things have changed in the last few years, but I don’t think so. You should be able to check this out fairly easily for neuroscience. I know it was true for chemistry and most of the other hard sciences.
So with those two things being said, I will not bother to ask if you have gone to Tulane to see if the financial aid can be improved, or about your parents ability to pay, etc. I am going to assume you have covered all those bases and have maximized whatever non-loan resources there are available.
Certainly your plan that would have you at USA for two years and then transferring to Tulane is logical and seems reasonable. I guess a question is how much are you saving a year by attending USA? Is it essentially debt-free? Also, in those Tulane costs was there any merit aid at all? Because if there was that will not be reinstated if you get in as a transfer. However, there are merit scholarships for transfer students that I think are up to $20,000. You should be able to look it up on the Tulane web site. So if you do go this route, it would be imperative that you completely kick butt at USA. If you had no merit money now and qualified for that kind of money in two years, it would make this plan totally brilliant. But the flip side is that applying as a transfer student is generally riskier for acceptance than as a freshman. However, at Tulane it usually isn’t too bad, nothing like Harvard and similar schools.
Of course you might find USA to be a great place to be an undergrad and just stay there, only applying to Tulane for grad school. Always a possibility, I have no idea how good the neuroscience program is at USA or what the research opportunities are.
Bottom line, if you really cannot do any better than borrowing $25K a year going to Tulane, I would say don’t do it. That is a mountain of debt with which to start your post-academic life.
I have a 20k scholarship to
Tulane, but financial aid covers very little, and one of my parents, non-custodial, refuses to give up financial information; so the document is incomplete technically. Either way, this is all they can give me. USA is much more affordable and I can get in state tuition, about $7000 a year. It’ll give me a chance to get on my own two feet, even if I do decide to transfer. Thanks all!