I’ve looked over the list of scholarships for transfer students, and it looks pretty grim. Do most transfer students stick it out for the first year until they get in-state tuition? Or am I just being ignorant and USC tends to give generous scholarships to students transferring? Also, ill probably be receiving financial aid money as well.
USC is private. There is no in-state tuition. Not sure about transfer students and scholarships though. I do know however, USC gives financial aid and for some students meet 100% need.
Please remember that “meets 100% of need” also includes Parent plus loans to carry any remaining balance outside of the university grant and federal grants and loans. Those loans can sometimes be substantial.
Just be prepared and have a back-up plan.
Sorry Im confused:
So are you saying that you are from an OOS university and wish to transfer into USC? And you hope that USC will provide you with financial aid?
USC is extremely expensive. $67K this year.
When they generate their financial aid packages, they tend to include a lot of loans. Their best financial aid, goes to incoming freshman, especially National Merit Winners.
http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/firstyear/prospective/needbase.html
Some California residents are able to fund a part of their costs at USC through their California-based grants.
As an OOS transfer student, you wouldn’t be eligible for those grants, no matter how long you lived in California.
You need to contact the school’s financial aid office to get more information on how to fund your education there, but be wary of loans.
It seems, OP, that you may be confusing USC with a state college where in-state tuition is much lower that OOS. As mentioned above, USC is an expensive private university. The FA will be fair for transfers (meaning, calculated in the same manner as calculated for Freshmen admits), so please run the FA calculator on the USC FA site to see what your family’s EFC will be. Any merit grants you may receive (and the major grants are reserved for entering freshmen), will in any case be SUBTRACTED from your FA grants. You do not get both. So at this point, I’d recommend figuring out what the FA would be and deciding if your family can afford to send you to USC. Best of luck.
USC was pretty generous with my aid package, but I still had to take out loans. The damage was minimal compared to my peers. That said, it’s not cheap. And apparently I am an outlier–lots of transfer students kind of get screwed.
USC is one of those schools where the FA is very hard to predict. Despite their claim to “meet full need” they tend to define “need” narrowly. Most students with “need” will find substantial loans, including Parent loans, in the package. USC expects parents to invest in their kids’ education (and rightly so IMO). So, you need to approach the school with these things in mind and brace yourself. My advice is to apply for the transfer and see what you get.
Unless things have changed, USC FA does not include parent loans in the FA package. They include grant aid (the best kind), work study (an amount the student is expected to earn working a school job), State Grants and Fed Grants if applicable, Fed Student Loans (up to a cap of about $6500/year), and of course the rest of the EFC is the responsibility of the family. For student who earn merit scholarships, those will count as “income” so will negate some/all of the Grant aid, a big wake up call for many parents and not a good one. Some family’s find the sum they are expected to pay impossible, so they may choose to take out parent loans. (Of course, they may say, no way! And send their student to a more affordable school.)
But parent loans are just one way a family may choose to meet the EFC, and is not part of a FA package. These are words that mean different things to different people, but this is the way all FA offices define them. It’s easy to misunderstand. Some posters report that USC counts all parent earnings/assets from divorced families, multiple properties owned, and self-owned companies, which often makes the EFC USC calculates for them seem unexpectedly and unreasonably high. But for those without those issues, the calculator on the USC site seems to work fairly well.