<p>I don’t think anyone here suggested your kids commute to a SUNY. And personally, I think a one hour each way is too far. But as noted…a SUNY instate costs a THIRD of one year at Union.</p>
<p>If you work 25 hours a week at minimum wage, for ten weeks, you will earn at least your spending money for the year. My kids also worked during college. </p>
<p>Sounds like rugby is the driving force here, not the family economy. </p>
<p>Again, this is YOUR family decision. Does your husband think you will actually qualify for a huge loan? Maybe you ought to take yourselves to the bank and apply and see. Or is he planning to withdraw more money from retirement or put more living expenses on the credit card.</p>
<p>Folks around here would likely think my husband and I are of modest means. We paid for both of our kids to attend expensive private universities. One got a decent merit award, and the other got a teeny merit award. I worked FULL TIME, and my whole salary paid college bills for seven years. My WHOLE paycheck…every nickel.</p>
<p>There is absolutely no way we could have paid these costs and our living costs solely on my husband’s salary, which BTW is higher than yours. </p>
<p>We also did not have any credit card debt, no car payments, and a very low mortgage payment. </p>
<p>If we had felt pinched, we would have put some financial constraints on the college applications. My working full time was what made our situation possible.</p>
<p>Parent PLUS does not ordinarily require a cosign and does not permit one from the student. If you get TURNED DOWN for a Parent PLUS loan, and only ONE parent applies for it, you can try to get it with a cosigner if you can get one, but not your student. Your student automatically gets $4K more (soph year) of allowable Direct Loan if you are turned down for PLUS. </p>
<p>Read the whole thing about the PLUS loan so you understand it thoroughly. You’ve said this several times about your student cosigning it THat is NOT the way it works. THe PLUS loan can be for as much as the official Cost of Attendance of a school less any aid/scholarship, other loans already taken out. The interest rate is a little under 7%. The loan is disbursed directly to the college by semester, with interest accrual beginning as soon as funds are released. Any excess can be returned to you. Payment CAN start immediately or be deferred until l6 months after your student ceases being a full time student. There is flexibility in payment which is probably the strongest pro of this loan, and if borrower OR student dies, loan is forgiven. The credit review is a bit easier on the borrower in that you have to have no 90 day or more accounts due on your credit report, so you can clean those up before trying to borrow.</p>
<p>Wells Fargo and numerous other lenders have every kind of loan imaginable and you have to to know the specifics of the loan. It can be anything. The problem with cosigned is that you’ve just linked your teen or young adult daughter into a heavy duty debt until it is paid. I seriously advise against that. You want to put yourself or your husband in debt. you should know better what the ramification, risks etc are. Your DD is too young to wisely make that kind of decision. All she is going to see is that she wants to stay at Union and by signing on the dotted line she can. She’d sign her life away, and yours too and deal with it later. YOU and your DH should know better and only borrow what you can repay.</p>
<p>Frankly, if you borrow $20K from PLUS instead of pulling out he pension money, you’d owe 7% interest but that might be less than the taxes you pay from drawing out that pension money, plus you would then bring down the income for fin aid consideration the next year. You need to do the math on this. You can also deduct the interest of a school loan if you pay it, and you can make just interest payments on PLUS. </p>
<p>thumper, sybbie suggested the commute to NP and alluded to it in a second post. And BRAVA to you for making such a tremendous sacrifice for your children’s education. I admire you tremendously.</p>
<p>New Palz doesn’t do much in the way of merit awards, but Stonybrook does give merit money. They are always looking for smart science/mathy girls. They have the WISE program and honors college-you choose one. They take the kids over to Brookhaven to do research. I know people say they are a ‘suitcase’ school. But if you want them to be or they want to be close to home and you can’t find an affordable LAC in NY, so that SUNY is the way you are heading, D2 may get a good enough scholarship that she can afford to dorm at Stonybrook. My D (OOS) received full tuition/fee offer from them last year and it was not based on her NMF status, just on grades/test scores. You know your D2 will not be NMF in NY, but that good PSAT means she can study up to a very high SAT. Stonybrook has val/sal scholarships, honors college scholarships, scholarships for WISE, etc. If they like you they’ll put these together to give you a nice package.</p>
<p>"cpt, which do you think is better, sleep away at Stony Brook or N Paltz with loans, or commute to New Paltz from home? Of course they would rather live at school… "</p>
<p>Of course, the kids would rather live at school, and at the expensive private school, They would like all kinds of things that they have been raised to expect. Who wouldn’t? That you and your husband paid and cared for the elderly parents, helped out relatives, even with a job loss is all well and good but you did not face the hit all of that entailed, nor did your kids. They did not get it. Nor did you. When you lose your job for all of those years, when you take care of your parents, when you lend money to your relatives, when you get sick and have medical expenses, you PAY. Instead, you took money out of the pension and let life go on as usual You got an exception from the college, and all was good. Now we are coming to the time to pay the piper and it is painful… </p>
<p>I am talking as one who has two elderly moms here with me close to their 90s. We’ve had issues too and had to PAY, kids and all so that they knew what the direct consequence of any of these things were. My kids could NOT go to any private school they chose, no living high on the hog, no vacations, dumpy cars, watch the money. They know to the marrow of their bones that we had some close years. There was no surprise or even a murmur when we gave the college dollar constraints, and it hurt something inside me very badly. It’s not like we are going to have a wealthy retirement either, but we are doing what we can to avoid doing what our mothers did to us. My mother is flat broke, and my MIL has all kinds of problems with her money, that may or may not work out with messes galore that need to be cleaned up. The kids see all of this and know that we are not up there in terms of money and are grateful for what we can get.</p>
<p>I don’t blame your girls one bit for being upset about this school thing. Dashed expectations have shards that hurt terribly. But better than horrible, permanent damage.</p>
<p>OP, I have been following your thread, I really feel for your and your Ds in this difficult situation. You have rec’d some excellent feedback (from several very wise CC experts) and I think your sharing what youyr family is going through is very brave on your part. </p>
<p>My two cents is simply that New Paltz is a great college in a great college town. Your Ds may get used to the idea of going there, even though at first it sounds so very painful…but it has an honors program which is easy to get into, and a lot of activity, and a vibe in which it would bre hard to stay unhappy for long.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, New Paltz is a SUNY college and therefore around $5k cheaper than Stony Brook, which is, like Binghamton, Buffalo and Albany, a university center. Half the cost of living on campus.</p>
<p>OP, it’s funny that you and your daughter thought that Binghamton was ugly. My kid thought Stony Brook was ugly (also too close to home for us in Brooklyn). Buffalo also has an engineering school.</p>
<p>For your dd2, Geneseo, also a SUNY college, is a very selective LAC.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear about the mothers cpt, and do I understand you correctly that they both live with you??? What a terrible trial, if I may say so. I am my 87 yr old mother’s slave–she and my late father moved to live a few doors down from me–and she is a difficult person. But thank God she can live on her Social Security. But enough about that. My husband and I have been married for 35 years and he is a wonderful person and we have three really tremendous and accommodating girls (getting more accommodating by the minute…)</p>
<p>For the 2014-15 school year, the difference in COA for on campus kids is $2300. Half in rm/bd and the other half in tuition/fees.
Stonybrook: 8430 + 11820 = 20250
New Palz: 7410 + 10540 = 17950</p>
<p>celeste, your post just popped up as I was reading your earlier valuable post. I was so impressed with Stony Brook when we visited after D1s junior year, the WISE program, etc. Thank you for providing the valuable comparison which I was just about to do by going to the websites. And you did it, thank you! As a pt of interest, the girl who beat my daughter by a minuscule point to be valedictorian is now at Stonybrook. They were friends in Middle School, but this girl in HS was only nice to my daughter when she was “ahead” of her rank-wise etc. </p>
<p>CT, that my be one reason why your D1 doesn’t want to go there. Complicated dynamic. If she has lots of HS acquaintances at the 2 SUNY schools, there will be all the embarrassing explanations about ‘coming down in the world’ once she transfers. She’ll have to develop a positive narrative to make that easier.</p>
<p>I have only one more suggestion. Before you discuss this any further with your daughter(s), I think you and your husband need to come to an agreement. As I read this, right now he is still saying your daughter should return to Union and somehow you will scrape together the money to make that happen. You are still looking at options.</p>
<p>and before you talk to your H, do your homework. Explain to him that Parent Plus loans are YOUR loans, and they will still be outstanding (and hurting your credit) when the other girls go to college. </p>
<p>He also needs to understand that co-signed private loans will still be “on you,” if your child can’t pay…
God forbid, but D1 could become ill, disabled, or worse…and the debt will be YOURS to pay. Parents have sadly found out that they still have to payback the cosigned loans of their child who died. There is a student here on CC whose parents are in painful shock because their D is missing (likely from an angry estranged boyfriend) and the bank is expecting them to pay her cosigned student loans. </p>
<p>I’m not sure when the H plans on retiring. It sounds like he is in his 60s. There have been dollar amounts thrown around as being the future retirement income, so I’m not clear what it is. I would be very concerned about that.</p>
<p>The H may be experiencing some male-ego bruising. For many years he probably expected to make good money, have lots of savings, and be able to send his Ds to the best schools. He may be having a hard time swallowing the fact that it is just not affordable anymore.</p>
<p>It sounds like the younger Ds will have the stats to get huge merit at other schools, so look into those. For instance if D2 is an engineering major and has a 1400+ M+CR SAT, she would get free tuition plus 2500 per year from Alabama. If she makes NMF, she’d get a lot more. There are other schools as well that give large merit.</p>
<p>We have cosigned private loans with our older daughter. We also made sure that we are named on her life insurance policy so that if she dies we will have money to pay off that those loans.</p>
<p>Her original lender had a policy that if the student made two years of on time payments the cosigners could be dropped from the loans. Unfortunately, the loans were sold and in the process a payment was sent to the original lender (before notification of the transfer) and did not get forwarded on time to the new lender. That was enough to keep my husband tethered to the loan until it is paid in full.</p>
<p>I know very little about engineering schools, but I did have 2 daughters who went to SUNY schools. Both have full-time jobs in their chosen fields and they have no undergraduate debt. SUNY is a bargain and by no means an inferior education. Both girls were accepted to all the graduate schools they applied to and never found their undergraduate preparation lacking in any way, shape or form. OP, your daughters will do just fine if they attend a SUNY school and they won’t have a boatload of debt to deal with when they graduate. As a few others have suggested, your daughter should also consider the University of Buffalo when it comes time to choose a SUNY. It is actually ranked #60 by US News and World Report for engineering. Stony Brook is # 69 and Binghamton is #124. Not sure where New Paltz ranks. My youngest applied to Buffalo as a Math major with stats similar to your daughter and was awarded a scholarship and invited to join the Honors College. Although she did not attend, we were very impressed with the school and the Honors College included some really nice perks. Good luck to you all!</p>
<p>DH has been listening as the drama unfolds. Absolutely, we will have a full agreement before we talk (again) to D1. No question about that. My stress now is that I have decided it is vital not to upset D1 while she is in school. As I wrote earlier, we (I told DH) should not talk about a change until she is away from her school and friends and back home in the familiar nest and better able to absorb the change. I think it would be damaging to tell her now while she is at school and expect her to continue on with her day, her classes, her friends, her sports, her school spirit, etc. The drawback to this is she is not immediately applying to SUNYs for Sept. I guess she can work summer/fall and start in Jan. Oh, she was incredibly cool and not put out by the competitive friend who is now at Stony Brook. I think she will be okay with that. Yes, DH is already 62. We adopted our three girls from China when we were rather old. D2 is interested in English and French, not engineering!</p>
<p>OP, have you seriously considered going to work and becoming a two income household? It sounds like you would likely have a commute someplace, but it is another possible component to this. I know some people just won’t consider this, but we were a two parent working household (and now I am a single parent putting my last one through college). It certainly can be done – it is a different kind of sacrifice for your family, but just another thing to think about.</p>
<p>Thanks for thoughts. Oh God, I didn’t think of course sequences. I mentioned earlier the nicest thing. My D2’s piano teacher’s husband is head of the Eng dept at N Paltz and he is the dearest man. I will ask him.</p>