Hi all. I am attending Loyola University next year and my friend is thinking of too. She is an Illinois State Scholar, in the top 10% of our school, and received a pretty nice scholarship from Loyola. She says that if she goes to Loyola she will be my roommate, so of course I am biased when she asks where she should go because I want her to be with me. It is between Loyola and Triton, a local community college. She is an undecided major so she thinks it would be a waste of money to pay so much for Loyola if she ends up not knowning what to do, can anyone offer any advice?
I don’t think it makes sense to give up a good scholarship to Loyola in order to attend a CC just because she’s not sure what she wants to major in. Whichever school she starts at, she’s going to be taking mostly GE classes for the first year anyway. Many freshmen have no idea what they want to major in — that’s one reason for the broad GE requirements, to expose kids to lots of different subjects and see what sparks an interest. If she does a year at a CC and then tries to transfer, she is much less likely to get a good scholarship, since there’s generally more money for freshmen than transfers. Assuming her freshman scholarship offer is renewable, the CC route could actually cost her more money in the long run.
This is your friend’s problem, not yours. My advice is to find a roommate at Loyola.
She can run her numbers here: http://www.finaid.org/calculators/ She should think about how she will pay for all four years of college. The CC and then transferring in-state and paying the full in-state cost might work out to be less money than Loyola for four years with the scholarship. She needs to find out if she has to keep a certain GPA for that scholarship at Loyola.
If you both end up at Loyola, you should not be roommates your first year. You will meet a lot more people if you don’t live together, and you will probably have better relationships with each other because you can just be friends for that first year. After that, you can decide if you want to room together.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Closing thread. For privacy reasons, among other reasons, “asking for a friend” posts are not allowed. If the friend wants opinions, s/he should open an account to ask.