First off I am currently a 16 year old (17 in a month) junior in high school at an all girls prep school, and I am not on financial aid so the cost is 41,000 with no board and this is my third year. I am the youngest of 4 but my oldest brother is 32 and out of college, and not important to this. I have an older brother (lets call him G) who is 18 and a senior at a coed prep school for kids with ADD/ ADHD and his costs about 60,000 with no board, it is much more expensive but this is only his second and last year. My other older brother (lets call him D) currently is he’s nearly 21, a junior in college, which costs about 36,000 I believe and keep in mind NONE of us are on financial aid and my parents have paid for all of this so far which is starting to really tighten up our budget. So the problem is that my parents are quite old, my dad is 60 and my mom is 52, so they plan on retiring soon and this leaves me in a tough situation because they say I have to get student loans for my ENTIRE college experience while my brother D who is in college will probably never pay for his college. So I’m upset because I am very hard working, I have about 3.0 which is good especially at a hard prep school, and since day 1 at my school I have been constantly getting better with academics, while on the other hand my brother G who is at this extremely expensive school, plays video games all day, does no chores, and did not even get accepted to a college with a 96% acceptance rate because his academics are that poor. My parents may pay for a little of his college, but in 2 years when I am in college they don’t want to spend anymore money on our schooling so I am left here, the most hardworking one, having to get student loans that will put me in so much debt while my parents make enough a year and could pay for all of us no problem, but they want to have a nice retirement. Also things like scholarships are really out of the question since my academics aren’t amazing and I’m not a star in any sports. So I understand where they’re coming from but they don’t see how this is so unfair and also to add my older brother D is a pro skier and the amount of money it takes to compete and get gear for skiing is insane even with sponsorships and my parents pay for that, he has no job, none of us do but they always compare me to my OLDER brothers saying I should have a job and all of this but they forget that I am only 16 and it is not fair to compare me to my 20-21 year old brother. I also will add I am very grateful for everything and I do many things around my house like dishes and laundry and I plan on trying to get a job over the summer to help pay for things, and overall I try to help my parents with things but they just threw this big news on me today and I don’t know what to say to them.
Why would they spend so much on high school? Are you in the US?
You need to thank your parents for letting you know about this while you still have time to pull up your grades, prepare for your ACT/SAT exams, and look around for places that can be made affordable.
Then you need to find out if your parents will be willing to file the FAFSA every year so that you qualify for student loans, and you need to tell them that when they do file the FAFSA, you will be able to borrow $5,500 for your freshman year, $6,500 for your sophomore year, $7,500 for your junior year, and $7,500 for your senior year. That’s it. If they want you to borrow one cent more than that, they will need to cosign the loans, which will make them responsible for paying back those extra loans if you either can’t or just plain decide not to.
You also need to find out what, exactly, your parents mean by not wanting to spend any more money on your schooling. If you live at home and commute, will they cover your meals, car, car insurance, gas, etc? Or would you need to chip in for those things? Will they help cover the cost of your books? What about health insurance if they retire while you are still in college?
If they really, truly can’t/won’t pay a cent, you need to take a long hard look at this list, and figure out how to get your grades and test scores into the range that will guarantee one of the scholarships listed:
http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/
If your parents will pay something, just less than what they are spending now for your high school, take a look at the public colleges and universities in your home state, and consider the places on this list too:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1651944-very-low-cost-oos-coa-universities-less-than-25k-coa-for-everything.html#latest
Well, I don’t know what to say about your parents favoring your brothers financially. If I were you I would think about that for a couple of days and make a counter proposal, which includes spreading the help and debt among the children.
About paying for school. You as a student can only borrow:
freshman 5,500
sophomore 6,500
jr 7,500
sr 7,500
So any other funds will have to come from your parents borrowing for you. I would encourage them to take out parent plus loans and then you can stick it to them and walk away after you are finished with school, leaving them with the debt and you with only your own student loans. Whatever you do you should not cosign on more loans than your student loan above.
Can you switch to a public high school for senior year and ask them to put the 41K in a college fund for you. Put money from summer jobs in your college fund.
I’m still getting past the “my parents are quite old…my mom is 52!” LOL.
But i’m sympathetic too. I was 4th of 5 kids and all of us were sent to private school so by the time college came around, my parents literally had no money left for college and I had to put myself through. Which i realize is much harder now than when i was in college. it also taught me to not waste all of the money in high school…my kids are in public schools so college will be the first time we’ve paid tuition.
that said, it is good that they didn’t tell you senior year and you have some time to prepare…you sound like a hard worker and there may be ways for you to pull up stats and consider merit aid at schools like UA.
Does your school weight GPAs at all?
While I’m not in the exact same situation as you, I can probably somewhat relate - I’m not getting any help from my parents for college either, while my step-sister has a trust fund and is currently going to private school. (I had to go public school my whole life and would have absolutely loved to go to her school.) I will get federal aid my first year probably, but due to a change in our family situation, that’s going to end soon.
Anyway, there’s two important lessons I’ve been learning. The first one is that life isn’t fair. Is it fair that you’ll have more debt than your siblings? Absolutely not. Is it fair that people like you and me are going to have to pay for our education while other students get a free ride? Nope. But not being fair doesn’t change anything. I know from experience that it’s hard not to compare yourself to others, and especially to siblings, but try to focus on just you.
The second lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t control anybody but yourself. It’s a good idea to try talking to your parents again, but in the end, you can’t make them help you. So focus on yourself and what you can change.
For instance:
Get your grades up if you can.
If you haven’t taken your SAT yet, study like heck. If you have and didn’t do well, study like heck and take it again.
Look at colleges that give automatic scholarships.
Start applying for outside scholarships.
Consider community college.
Take AP classes if you can to get some college credits out of the way.
Apply for a resident assistant job your sophomore year to get free room and board.
Think about joining ROTC. It can cover both tuition and living expenses.
Take a break from school to do Americorps. A couple of years will give you $10,000 for school.
You might be surprised at what you can qualify for. My local state college offered me just shy of a full-tuition scholarship, and I didn’t have any extracurriculars. It was an automatic scholarship, so they have the stats listed on their website. Do you know what the minimum GPA was to qualify? 3.0.
@gearmom Yes, we live in Connecticut where a LOT of people are in private schools.
^^ And there are a lot of people in public schools, too. Going to a private school is a luxury…not necessary.
@mom2collegekids I know this very well, but it was mainly my parents who put me into private school as they did for all of my brothers… And just for perspective, Connecticut is a tiny state (3rd smallest state) but has the second largest amount of private schools in the whole country (27) aside of MA (34) so as I said, it is very common for people to be in these prep schools and I even live no more than 20 minutes from 5 prep schools.
@SouthernHope I know my mom is not very old, it is mainly my dad who is nearly 61 and makes the majority of the money in the house who is thinking about retiring soon. But when my dad retires my mom most likely will too.
@irlandaise Yes, the GPA’s are weighted.
I live in CT. There are plenty of very good public schools in this state as well. Your parents have chosen to pay for private school for all of you. Choices choices.
This is amusing. Your parents are choosing to retire very early. If that is the case, my guess is their retirement is very secure, with appropriate investments, and retirement earnings to support this very early retirement. For the record…neither 60 nor 52 is “quite old”…in fact, that is quite YOUNG for retirement these days.
As noted above, you have been given some advance notice. If your SAT or ACT score is sufficiently high, and so is your GPA, you could garner significant merit aid. You could also work full time and go to school part time. You wouldn’t be the first student who needed to do that.
The loans you can actually get are listed above. Your parents need to understand that any loans above the Direct Loan amounts will need to either be taken by them or cosigned by them. With older sibs in college, surely they know that…unless they have just been paying the bills.
my guess is there is more to this story than you have written.
Are sure about those numbers? I know in my city at least prep schools range from $5,000-$20,000 no where near $60,000 a year I find it hard to believe a highschool would cost that much!
@thumper1 I am 16, my parents who are 60, and 52 are much older than my friends parents who are all mid 40’s, this is the only reason I said they were quite old, and the average retirement age is 66 which would give my dad about 5 years to pay off 9 years of college and 3 years of high school if he were to pay for my brothers and I, and this is where the problems are coming up. So instead he is going to pay for my brother in college for 1 more year, pay for my last 2 years of high school and my other brothers last year of high school.
There is way to much missing detail here. Your parents would waste 41K a yr on private HS but not pay for college? CT will have some great public high schools, do you live in a nice area? If the school is so great you should have stellar stats as you have a lot of advantages to work with. If your parents are refusing to pay any more based on not seeing the ROI of paying for education you could hardly blame them.
@Adominic8 Feel free to search the school, it is the Forman School in Litchfield Connecticut where it is ONLY for kids with ADD/ADHD and the classes are very small. The tuition is about 56, not 60 (sorry, I just asked my parents), but I don’t know how much that would change the overall picture.
Take the $41,000 a year, and put it in a 529 for college. Go to the public high school…which is free.
Well I do stand corrected that’s quite a school. The once piece of advice I can give you is to study extremely hard for SAT/ACT in an effort to get good merit aid. What schools were you interested in attending?