Is Out-of-State Tuition Worth It?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Each college has a net price calculator that can be used to get an estimate that’s based on your own financial situation. Below is a link to UF’s (as an example):</p>

<p><a href=“Net Price Calculator”>Net Price Calculator;

<p>At 120K a year, need based aid is not likely at public schools, but that does change once you have multiple siblings in school. </p>

<p>You really should use one of these calculators, it will give you a good sense at what’s being looked at to determine aid.</p>

<p>Good Luck!</p>

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<p>Net price goes down a lot with siblings in college. It can change year-to-year if they go to college before or after you.</p>

<p>Merit aid is also a possibility at UM. If you can get enough aid definitely go, The U is amazing.</p>

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<p>OP, you are in luck. Stanford and USC give great need based aid and I know Stanford would be free for you. Also, USC has full tuition merit scholarships available</p>

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<p>You really think I could go to Stanford for free? Also, when you apply to a school do they send you a workup of how much aid you’ll get with a final price on what it would cost per semester? Assuming you’re accepted, that is.</p>

<p>Even if Stanford were free, it’s getting in that’s the difficult part… My grades have been a 4.0 GPA until last year when they slipped a little. My Biology professor was lame and I got a C in that class, but otherwise my grades were still 3.7-ish before the C. Not 4.0, but close.</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t think Stanford would be free for you…</p>

<p>Schools don’t like downward trends. Maybe this could partially be explained by taking lots of APs…? </p>

<p>You’re a good student. I think going to a good school would be worth it for you… Which makes it so convenient that there are good schools in Florida :slight_smile: if you do get into Stanford and can afford it that would be good too :slight_smile: or very top California universities maybe.</p>

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<p>I’m enrolled in a charter high school sponsored by the local State College (4 year school, one step up from a community college). We don’t have AP classes, we take straight up college classes with all the other college students enrolled at Northwest Florida State. So when I graduate I’ll have a full AA degree and a set of 60-80 college credits that are actual college classes, not AP.</p>

<p>Does anybody here have experience with this? Does it provide a better advantage over AP since mine are actually college professors with PhDs teaching and not high school teachers teaching what is essentially a “college-level” class? My school makes fun of AP saying that it’s silly, but they’re a bit biased since they’re the ones who are hurt by AP because they’re a college losing money because people already have credits coming in.</p>

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<p>Actual college courses can help if you take courses that are more advanced than AP courses, or other non-remedial courses not offered as AP courses, or courses where you can handle the normal college course pace but the AP course runs at a boringly slow pace. Because you are at a four year school, you may even have the opportunity to take college junior and senior level courses that are not available at two year community colleges.</p>

<p>Public universities often want students to use AP credit to graduate on-time or early, since most students are in-state students paying subsidized lower tuition. Extra courses or semesters costs the public university extra subsidy money. Of course, individual departments may have different motivations, and may dislike it when students skip their courses with AP credit, since the school would otherwise pay them to teach the course to those students.</p>

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<p>I have the same exact problem! I live in florida and want to go to to CSULB or CSUN but its so much money :(</p>

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<p>You have schools in Florida that are just as good or better. If you qualify for BF and Florida schools are what your family can afford, then that’s the reality of your situation.</p>

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<p>I would apply to private schools in places that you liked (like Stanford and USC) that are likely to give you some merit and/or need-based aid, and then to your local publics - especially UF and FSU, but also UCF and USF and Florida International or whatever other Florida state colleges/universities appeal to you. IMO UF and FSU (and UCF, I think) are such good universities that it makes no sense to pay OOS tuition at a UC or CSU to have a very similar experience.</p>

<p>But I mostly want to correct some misconceptions about grad school:</p>

<p>1) You don’t HAVE to go to graduate school somewhere besides your undergrad; if the place you go to undergrad is also the best place for you to do your PhD, then you go there. But most people do go elsewhere.</p>

<p>2) More importantly, you don’t select grad school by location - you select by fit with the department. If you’re interested in the aerodynamic properties of widgets and there’s no one at Stanford doing research on anything remotely close to that, it doesn’t matter how good of a student you are in college - you won’t get in, because Stanford wants students who want to work on the research their professors are doing and who they can mentor. You need to go somewhere at which there is someone (at least one, more ideally 2-3) who can mentor you in your research area of interest.</p>

<p>And this brings me to point #3, which is that I don’t really know what you meant by that “one of those people” comments but it can be a really good thing to take time off after college just for things such as this. Let’s say that you find out that the top schools for your research area and field are like UIUC, UNC, and Penn State. (All of those schools are actually in the top 10 for chemistry.)</p>

<p>But you still really want to live in California for a little while. So you go move there and work for 2-3 years doing research and development at some really cool firm; you save up some money, you party every weekend, you enjoy being 21-24 and then you go to grad school at 25. Big deal! 25 is still young (I know it doesn’t seem like that now, but trust me). Now you’ve lived a little and you can go to State College or Urbana or Chapel Hill having gotten that out of your system.</p>

<p>Now, it’s not that there aren’t great programs in all of those fields in CA (Stanford is, of course, one of the best, and there’s also Caltech and Berkeley and UCLA and a lot of other UC campuses) but it’s just the very real possibility that you may find that the #1 place where the guy is doing EXACTLY what you want do and his research makes you so excited you want to jump up and down…is in Hanover, NH (AKA Dartmouth, the #3 program in pharmacology). You don’t turn down an opportunity like that just because you want to live in California. You can always choose to live in California later, after you have gotten the PhD from the #3 program with the #1 lab in your subfield and some company in California has now hired you and is paying you $$$ to do exactly what you want to do.</p>