S21 choose the more expensive option due to location for his engineering career goal. The entire time I said if it were a teaching degree he was going for, it wouldn’t even be a question. In every school I have worked in, teachers have come from all different routes - some starting in community college, some taking an alternate route after careers. As long as she can see herself at the less expensive school, she should take the money. Starting her career debt free with a 529 for masters, will afford her many opportunities.
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Congrats to your daughter! Can relate in trying to convince her to accept-- similar situation here. My D received tuition exchange (free tuition) at Pitt yesterday and was super excited after being accepted to UNC OOS last week, one of her top choices. Costs at Pitt would be @ 15k a year compared to @ 53k at UNC so a little less dramatic but still a significant difference. The negotiations have already begun:) Good luck!
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My friends got their DD to take the Instate plus honors college and she got a car in return to stay instate. They have 3 other kids to put through college and it was getting expensive since oldest was already out of state. Many of our friends here try their best to cover tuition as much as possible without taking loans since that is burdensome for both the parents and students.
That’s awesome! Congrats on getting TE at Pitt! How do you negotiate? Do you reach out to financial aid dept via email? phone? Or is it better coming from the student?
Sorry-- the “negotiations” I was referring to are with with my D, not with the schools:)
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Ah, I see!! 
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Show her this 
Pittsburgh vs. North Carolina - Men's College Basketball Game Recap - February 1, 2023 | ESPN
It’s a sign!
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interesting thread on FB paying for college about colleges being TO, and relying on the essay, and now with open AI & Chatgpt essays could be really well written and doctored. I wonder how colleges will get around that? A friend talked to her kid’s HS teachers and they are worried about kids using this way too much. . . . anyone here tried it? uses it? seems like just another compounding issue for school admissions.
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What are those programs? Never heard of them.
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I think that concern is overblown. Kids could have had other people writing their essays up to now, and I don’t think many people worry about that as a pervasive issue. And from what I’ve seen, Chatgpt works about as well as the self-driving mechanism on cars currently.
Also, I don’t think TO really has anything to do with the essay being more or less important. Ultimately, the biggest part of an application being evaluated is the transcript.
Basically, I think this is some minor fear-mongering/panic without a real basis.
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its using Artificial Intelligence to answer pretty much anything; to write essays, do coding, poems, etc. The results are pretty amazing. My friend above is actually using it to do some writing at her work, and the results are good! I was impressed. For work, wth?! why not. But for kids in high school and college, still learning the art of writing, it worry a bit about it all. here are two articles on it.
My kids and I have played with ChatGPT a lot. We were impressed when we first experimented with using it to write essays. It’s surprising that it can write as well as it does. However after generating and reading a few more, all of its essays began to seem very similar to one another and we were less impressed. Its essays are competent, bland, and formulaic. Good for something where you just need some competent writing… grant proposal, customer service email.
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Thanks for sharing the articles.
My S24 uses it a lot. I mean ALL THE TIME. Anytime we are having a discussion about anything, he will say, “Let me see what Liam thinks about that.” (Yes, he has named his chat GPT interface Liam and trained it to respond to that name. 
)
But, mostly he uses it to create absurd things: the lyrics to a song about Mario falling in love with a mushroom; riddles that don’t make sense; instructions for building a boat out of spoons, and then a synopsis of the plot of a novel about a boy who does it. He has learned that it is terrible at math, and that its writing is (as someone else said) quite formulaic.
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Yes that’s my kids’ favorite use for it… diary written by the leaky kitchen faucet, love letter from one eyeball to the other, etc. The poetry and song lyrics are fun, too.
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My better half and I already discussed the car option as a possible sweetener.
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The new law allowing you to transfer $35K from a 529 to a Roth IRA tax free is also a big benefit if you have leftover money in a 529.
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U have to pay tax / penalty of some sort ? If not that’s awesome. Thx
No, not under the new law. But the Roth IRA has to be in the same beneficiary’s name. And you cannot exceed the yearly contribution limit (currently $6,500). So for example if you have $26,000 in excess contributions that you want to roll over, you’ll need to do that over 4 years.
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No, but need to stay under annual Roth limit.
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