If I understand correctly from your other thread, your three cheapest options are three SUNYs (Albany, Buffalo, Stony Brook) at around $17,000 per year, which is more than the approximately $10,000 that you can realistically self-fund with federal direct loans and a realistic amount of work earnings.
Start looking for a job that you can support yourself with until you are 24 (when you become independent of your parents for college financial aid purposes).
Of course, there are many other reasons to want or not want to enter military service.
Until you are 24, married, or a military veteran, your parents effectively have complete veto power over your college plans, unless you get a full ride merit scholarship, because college financial aid is based on their income and assets until then. So your choices are get a full ride merit scholarship (but that means taking a gap year and working or something other than school), take multiple gap years working until age 24, serve in the military, get married, or submit to your parents’ control.
That is something you would have to ask the colleges. Be frank and tell them why. Try not to sound too nasty or entitled, though. What about the totals?
Generally, enrolling in a college will disqualify you from deferred frosh admission offers you hold (there may be exceptions for spring admission or other admission deferral programs at the college’s choice). You would have to reapply as a transfer (usually with fewer merit scholarship opportunities, meaning that it is even less likely for you to get a full ride to escape your parents’ control).
I have a financial aid meeting at Northwestern next Monday. I will surely update you all and tell you what they said.
And you know, it’s weird. My moms alma mater is about 20 min away from my house, so I wouldn’t be dorming. Even if I were to go there. BUT my mom has started buying stuff for a dorm and talks about roommates and getting a frequent flyers card. So I am going to college. I just need to get it into my parent’s head that it won’t be free She acts as though I am going away, but speaks as if she won’t way for any school because she’s hoping for more aid. Crazy, huh?
@gearmom That’s the million dollar question. I wish I knew, but they won’t give me a straight answer about anything. Obviously the $0 budget is not realistic. They won’t be straight with me and that’s part of my frustration.
Pick up some pamphlets on various branches of the military and just scatter them around the house, @gearmom? And what is she supposed to say when mom finds one, “Just checking out some other options that have a more than $0 budget for college.” That is probably a tempting thought, but it could only make things worse…
I don’t mean to be rude - and this is not in any way to be taken as an attack against your ethnicity, but just a random thought - does your mom expect more aid because you are an URM?
@calicash Is it possible that your mom can’t face her child leaving home and everything she is saying about finances is just talk?
She encouraged you to apply to these schools, but now only wants you attending school where you would live at home. Sounds like she doesn’t want to lose you since what she says and what she is doing are completely different?
If those numbers are right, all those schools seem quite affordable. You could offer to take $5500 per year in personal loans, and see if you parents will pick up the rest. This really should be very do-able for them, and I bet they will come around if presented with a low-cost scenario like this. Just pick the school that’s farthest from home and you’ll be free of them for the most part, living in a dorm with friends. I know it’s not your ideal outcome, but you’ve really got to scramble now to make something work.
@albert69 No, I don’t take offense to your comment. I don’t believe she does. She is under the impression that if a school really wants me, they will make it so that I can go. Northwestern has been sending me little gifts in the mail and is flying me out for free and and students have been calling me, so she’s assuming that they would be able to budge to give me some more aid.
@CaliCash I see. Is she going along to the Financial Aid meeting at Northwestern? If so, try to get her to bring up those lines in front of them and see what happens. I’m not sure how, since I don’t know your mother, but really try hard to have HER do that so that she can see the reality.
@Chris17mom I spoke to a professor at Buffalo today and he basically told me not to go to the school and that it wouldn’t be a good fit for me and that I would struggle to get internships with the resources on campus. He said that he saw my application and said that I will have a promising career as a journalist and that Buffalo would not foster growth in that department. He encouraged me to pursue an education at Syracuse, which is not even in the conversation because of the price, and at NU.
I don’t understand this thinking. If she’d spent the last six months reading this forum like the rest of us, she would realize that for the most part, the schools don’t “want” anyone that much. Maybe a star quarterback or something, but not your average honors kid. There are just way too many of you and not enough spots at the schools. This topic has been discussed at length ever since Ivy Day last Tuesday. Are any of these schools way, way below your academic level? That’s the only way they’d be aggressively recruiting you, in my opinion. Their financial offers are usually pretty set, although I’ve heard that you can appeal and/or ask for more money. But it’s highly unlikely that you are going to be able to come up with a free-ride.
Or you could try saying “Mom, you must know so much more about this college process - could you talk to [insert school] and see if you could get them to raise my aid to what I deserve?” And give her the information for financial aid numbers and such. I’m not sure how you would do it so that she doesn’t think you are mocking her, though.
