I agree with OP, there was no need to be condescending, and there is nothing to indicate OP could be a sloppy coder. College FA is not easy to understand. I don’t blame a 17 year old not to have a full grasp of it. There is no need to call him names. I think it is admirable he is coming to CC for help. He is doing quite a good job of listening to all advice that’s given here.
Do you have an acceptances yet, and any financial aid packages?
Your first choice, Colorado, will cost you every bit of the COA listed on the web. At some schools you can find a cheaper housing arrangement after the first year, but that’s hard to do in Boulder. Everything costs a lot there.
You are also unlikely to get much aid at Boulder. You will get the $5500 loan, and $3500 will be subsidized (based on your EFC)
No, most of the colleges I applied to release acceptances(and I’m assuming, FA packages), in March or April.
I’m hoping that I will be able to get a significant amount of money over the summer, working in various jobs that I’ve mentioned before. Maybe that will give me a better chance of getting a loan? I’m not sure…
I’m not a banker…but usually to get a loan, you need a couple of things.
- A consistent income and work history...not summer jobs, not internships, not seasonal employment...but a real job...that you will continue to have.
- Some kind of collateral...meaning something the bank can foreclose upon if you can't make the pay,wants. With a car or house...or furniture or some other item..it's the item itself.
You have neither of theses things.
That’s why you need a cosigner.
Has the way federal loans work drastically changed from when my parents were in college? My parents graduated high school in 1988 and 1980.
As I’m telling them what I’ve learned here, they are dismissing it that I must be receiving the wrong information. They said that they just got a loan, and then paid it off after they graduated college. I’m confused as to how they got through college, unless something has changed in a major way since then,
Have you seen your parents 1040? Amazing after 13 pages, it seems like we still don’t know if the OP is full pay.
The loans process hasn’t changed much… it the cost of college has gone up…a LOT.
I paid for college by myself also. It was not hard to do at a public university back in the 80’s or 70’s. And I loved on campus.
The costs of even inexpensive public universities is much much higher than when your parents went to college. It is very possible that a government loan, and a part time job could have covered their costs at an instate public university…especially if they commuted from home.
My public university cost $900 a year…and that was tuition/room/board. The same college now costs $21,000 a year for instate…and more than double that for OOS.
The costs have gone UP UP UP.
Betting your parents did NOT go to an OOS public university or a private university either.
@project21: Yes many things have changed since your parents and including myself went to college in the 1980’s like the tuition costs which are considerably higher.
I went to a California state school. Tuition/quarter was $60, books around $50-100 and parking $15. I commuted and lived at home. The same state school now costs $2500/quarter tuition, books $200-400 and parking $65. If you want live on campus, you add another $14,000 to the costs.
You and your parents cannot use college costs from 20-30 years ago. The reality is that most students stay in-state, attend their local college and commute if they are limited by costs.
I haven’t seen the form physically, no. Combined, they make between $70,000 and $99,000, (Sorry, I don’t know how specific is too specific).
I see…I’ll try and convey that to them somehow.
@project21 a lot has changed in terms of how banks give loans as well.
Ask your parents how much they took total on loans. Ask them how much college cost them per year. Ask them if their parents helped them…at all.
My dad has a BA, he said his parents helped him with like car insurance, other than that he just worked. He said total in loans was like $15,000(iirc).
I just googled…College tuitions have gone up on average 3%/yr in the last 30 yrs, and median incomes have gone up around .6%/yr, both inflation adjusted. So do your math.
So essentially @project21 you’re proposing to take out loans that are 2-3X what your dad borrowed for his WHOLE education, and that will just get you through 1 year of college… put it to him that way and see what he says
And ask him how long it took him to pay off that $15k.
^^Yup. In 1980 my state flagship cost less than 9% of what it costs today in tuition and required fees.
project21,
To answer your original question, I’m doing for my kids what my parents did for me-paying for college and leaving grad school up to them to finance.
Why? For one thing, they’re attending schools that cost over $60,000 a year in all. That’s a quarter of a million dollars in debt they’d be carrying if we didn’t help them. It seems terribly unfair for them to be saddled with so much debt because we were saving cash instead of paying for their college expenses.
To me it feels like a real gift for me to be able to pay their way through school. They’ll have plenty of time to eat mac and cheese live off milk crate furniture, but I know too many people still paying off their own student loans while trying to help their kids pay for school for me want them to try to pay their own way through. I also want them to have the freedom to take some detours and explore what they really want to do, not end up in a job they hate but can’t afford to quit at 22 or 23.
Also, get a copy of your parents’ 2015 taxes, bank statements, mortgage statement, etc., and run the numbers for real. You really don’t know anything until you do that. And apply to an in-state financial safety asap just to have all bases covered. A lot of the financial aid is first come first served. Right now, “first come” peers filed in Oct. It’s now January so you’re pretty far back in the line. Every state is different but in my state we got quite a lot more being first in line than we did being last. AZ probably has some grants that are as much or close to what you could get from the Fed govt.
Ok ok ok. I’ll admit I applied to ASU back in November, with FAFSA and everything. But they are literally dead last option, like, armageddon option.
I grew up in New York, and Arizona is literally sucking the life out of me. I WILL find a way to pay for an OOS college.
(to answer the tax question posed to me, I may be confusing it with my daughter’s taxes. But we did have to enter her amount of grant monies she received on one or both of our tax forms, and we received a form from the college to do the taxes. i don’t have the papers here to look it up exactly, sorry–i can’t remember the name of the form off hand.)
What doe the NPC show for ASU?
@project21 OK GOOD! At least that base is covered. Good luck pursuing your other options. You might find some private schools to be more generous than OOS publics. OOS publics seem to be the most expensive in a lot of cases.
ASU NPC is $16,000