<p>Your friend must live in California. Tuition is more expensive for OOS, and out of state students don’t get financial aid.</p>
<p>I may have missed it, but did you post your GPA? The UCs only use sophomore and junior year grades, and weight them according to the calculator on their website. The CSUs also go by a grade/SAT(ACT) formula.</p>
<p>My friend’s situation was very similar to mine, actually. Lived in Cali most of his life, and moved to India around High School. So yeah, he counted as OOS.</p>
<p>Nope, I didn’t post GPA. I’m not really sure what it is, in my case. We don’t calculate that here in India, so I wasn’t sure what to add.</p>
<p>Did his parents maintain a house in CA? or pay taxes there? Because that’d qualify him as in-state. Since you live abroad, you’re out of state everywhere unless your parents still pay taxes in CA (or another state). :s
As a freshman, he can only get $5,500 in loans. The rest must be from his family (who took on the loan for him) or your friend may have confused “student contribution” with “student loans” - student contribution is typically loans + work earnings but it can be entirely made of loans if the student prefers.
It’s also possible your friend didn’t tell you the whole story accurately, not maliciously but simply because many award letters are complicated to read and make sense of.</p>
<p>Unless your parents own a small business, Net Price Calculators are fairly accurate about how much you’d be expected to pay and how much financial aid you’d receive.
They’re compulsory on each website (it’s illegal not to have them).</p>
<p>Right now we’re talking in a vacuum since you haven’t run the NPC’s. Go do that and then we’ll talk on a concrete basis.</p>
<p>Nope, he didn’t. And according to my dad, we still “file” for CA taxes, though I guess we are exempt, due to our low (Indian Rupee) income. I don’t think I am considered in-state.</p>
<p>Yeah, I guess that would make sense.</p>
<p>Alright. I’m checking out CollegeAbacus.com</p>
<p>If your parents still file in CA, then you could be considered in-state and that changes things a lot because it means you have access to Cal Grants, etc.! That would totally change the cost of college for you and reduce it from about $50,000 (OOS COA) to about $20,000 and under depending on what grants you qualify for (+ In state tuition which is so much lower than out of state). It’s a HUGE difference.</p>
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<p>They will be a lot more accurate than just applying blindly and hoping. In general, they tend to be more accurate for simple common situations (parents have mainly wage and salary income that does not vary much) than for complex situations (parents have a small business or variable income, or there are parental divorces or remarriages involved).</p>
<p>For California state residency, you need to read the residency rules.
[Residency</a> for Tuition Purposes - Office Of The Registrar](<a href=“http://registrar.berkeley.edu/prospective_students/residency.html]Residency”>http://registrar.berkeley.edu/prospective_students/residency.html)</p>
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Repeated because it bears repeating.
Your strategy only works if there’s institutional aid available.
Applying to a lot of schools when 2/3 will only admit you as a cash cow isn’t a strategy, it’s worse than pointless since it’s also wasting your time and money (ie., out of state students are admitted to bring in money to slashed budgets so since the point of admitting you is to get your money, they’re not going to offer you money that’s earmarked for in state students… unless you qualify for merit aid, the links for which UCBAlumnus gave you the links to.)
You could apply to a lot of schools that offer varying degrees of aid, but applying to schools that aren’t affordable isn’t a strategy, it’s a sure recipe to be among the many students who come to CC in April to post that they can’t attend any school.
There are lots of possible schools for you, good schools too, that would admit you with financial aid packages.
And whether you’re in-state for CA would totally change things.
So what do the NPC’s on each of the schools on your list indicate, and which schools are affordable?
According to the Residency for Tuition Purposes link above, would you be considered in-state or not?</p>
<p>I get what you’re saying. Thanks a lot!</p>
<p>Thanks to the link that ucbalumnus gave, I found this: [Establishing</a> Legal Residence - Office Of The Registrar](<a href=“http://registrar.berkeley.edu/Registrar/establish.html]Establishing”>http://registrar.berkeley.edu/Registrar/establish.html)</p>
<p>IF I’M NOT WRONG, it seems like there’s a way for me to establish In-state residency after the first year. Maybe the fact that I’ve lived in CA for over 10 years might aid that process. What do you guys think?</p>
<p>By the way, sorry I haven’t been doing the NPC yet. There’s a lot of details I need from my dad, and he’s busy right now, so yeah. I’ll get it done ASAP. :)</p>
<p>What ucb said.</p>
<p>The question isn’t whether you can be considered instate next year - if you can’t be considered instate this year, you shouldn’t apply (you’ll have to prove you have $45-50,000 available for your education and you obviously don’t).</p>
<p>The fact you’ve lived in CA for 10 years doesn’t matter if you haven’t attended high school there. If your parents have filed taxes in CA, then you may be considered instate, but you shouldn’t be asking us, you should ask your parents.</p>
<p>Come back with the NPC results for each university on your list and tell us which ones are affordable so that we can make helpful suggestions. NPC’s won’t necessarily require a lot of details - start by the simplest ones and do the other ones with your dad ASAP.</p>
<p>Alright, so I just did one NPC at the moment. It didn’t require any figures that I didn’t know.
UBuffalo says estimated cost of attendance is 30k, minus 3.5k grants and scholarships, minus 8k in loans, which comes to 17k out of pocket.</p>
<p>UCs are usually saying somewhere around 22k in scholarship and grants, and then around 8 or 9k in loans.</p>
<p>So, are these 17K for UBuffalo and the cost of the UC’s (in-state or out of state?) affordable for your parents?</p>
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<p>It doesn’t matter one bit that you lived in CA in the past. Not one bit.</p>
<p>If it were so easy to get in-state residency for CA, every single out of state kid attending the UC system would figure out how to get in-state residency after the first year and the UC’s would lose all that out-of-state tuition.</p>
<p>If you REALLY need financial aid that much, you can’t be as picky about the location as you want to be.</p>