<p>AHHH I’m in between a rock and a hard place. Do I go to GW with the 19000 scholarship, or American with the 18,000 scholarship and honors invite, knowing that GW will still cost 8,000 more a year…</p>
<p>Or do I sit back and wait to be taken off the waitlist at Johns Hopkinss where I will have no financial/merit aid haha.</p>
<p>Please, someone give me an earth shattering reason why I should pick GW over AU or vice-versa. Or does it really even matter? Hahah I’m so confused.</p>
<p>$8,357 a year x 4 years = 33,428 * 4 yrs of interest at 8.5% (PLUS loan) = 36269.38 (remember that the FG only compounds interest once) + interest on that loan while you are paying = easily over $42-$43K depending on your payment plan. You're even paying about $9K in interest for the average loan payment plan. If you're taking private loans, your interest rate will be even higher. </p>
<p>I just noticed that you could go to AU for 6 years at the same cost (not saying that you would need to, lol). </p>
<p>If I were in your shoes, I would consider travel abroad, summer internships, summer travel abroad costs that you can pay for with that extra $8K. Those are very important to employers these days. I haven't seen one person who goes to AU or GW say that any objective difference in career opportunities or academics exists between the two schools. </p>
<p>Even if you have the money, I would save the extra $42K and put it down as a nice down payment on a house after graduation and/or paying in full for your car. Talk about saving thousands more on interest. </p>
<p>I'm sure you've read the AU vs. GW thread. There's a good discusion there. I would only go to GW on two considerations: you must be around a highly urban and noisy campus all the time (not that hard to get there from AU), or you would stake $42K on the USNews rankings. By the way, GW has a much larger endowment than AU (much of it because of real estate purchuses in recent years), which factors in hugely into the USNews rankings. So if you go to GW, you can rest assured that GW has a lot of money in the bank while you're paying your $32K a year. AU's endowment, while smaller ($314 million), is growing at one of the fastest in the nation (other than the Harvards, etc with multi-billion dollar endowments).</p>
<p>For some reason that paragraph sounded more one-sided than I wanted it too. I guess it should be because I'm going to the AU this fall. </p>
<p>There's just too many people that are held down by college costs later in their lives when they could of gotten just as good an education and gotten just as good of a job at a cheaper school. Again all of that is hypothetical. I don't know your financial situation, so all the financial stuff I've said is hypothetical as well.</p>
<p>Good Luck!</p>