Where do you get student loans, where parent does not cosign?

Parents Forum
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<p>I am looking back over the offers from this past year. Our EFC is closer to $6000. Yet, even the state schools gave nothing except a $3500 student loan and then huge parent loans. If we cannot afford to pay, a loan will not change that. How would we pay back a loan for something we could never afford in the first place? To add to it, I have always always gone without. I own a couple pairs of shoes total, and they are old. My wardrobe looks like I took hand me downs from my own mother-which I did. I never take vacations except to visit relatives. We have been saving for years to pay for college. So we can pay the EFC and actually a little more.</p>

<p>My daughter wants to go on to one of these schools. She is now offering to take out student loans to help pay-above and beyond the $3500. I refuse to take out parent loans. I would not be able to afford to pay them back without losing my home. And she has younger siblings so what would I do then?</p>

<p>I notice that none of the Texas schools offered Perkins loans. The one MN school she got in to did offer her Perkins loan. Is there a reason no Texas schools gave Perkins? And how can she get the additional loans without me cosigning?</p>

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<p>perkins loans are very limited at each school, so some can’t give them to everyone who wants one. that is why your D didn’t get one.</p>

<p>Is your D on a gap year?</p>

<p>Did your D qualify for any Texas aid? Are you TX residents?</p>

<p>Your D should have been given $5500 in fed Direct Student Loans. She has a right to that since she wasnt given any aid and you were gapped. </p>

<p>Beyond the $5500, she can’t get any other loans w/o a co-signer (unless a school offers her some Perkins…but even those aren’t big…usually only 1500)</p>

<p>Did your D apply to any safeties?? What happened?</p>

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<p>This poster’s daughter decided to leave her college after a very short time. See other threads for details.</p>

<p>Regarding loans…if your daughter does not have a qualified cosigner, she cannot get loans in her name only.</p>

<p>The only guaranteed loan she would get if you complete a FAFSA is the $5500 Direct. Loan all freshmen can take.</p>

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<p>Not everyone has financial safeties. I know a mom, who I am close with, who is a public school teacher. At the end of the day and on Saturdays, she also works a part-time job. Her husband is a maintenance worker. She has two children and her child qualified for nothing. Her child cannot go. In my daughter’s case, she was even in the top 10%, and was not given the top 10% scholarship. She was told she would receive some sort of honors scholarship at the one state university where she got in to the honors college, but got nothing. That was her top choice school and we had put down on everything from the housing, the registration deposit, and orientation week. But then she could not go. She took a backup school where we were paying 1.5 times our EFC. Many parents cannot do that. There are a lot of people out there who do not have financial safeties. They do not exist for everyone.</p>

<p>Our background story is on other threads. But I am hoping to keep this one to the issue-which is ways to finance college when you are already capable of paying the EFC and cannot afford PLUS loans.</p>

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<p>She will either need to find a college that costs $5500 (direct loan amount), or she will need to get a merit scholarship someplace to cover her costs. </p>

<p>She will not be able to get a loan in her own name without a cosigner.</p>

<p>If you apply for and are denied a Plus loan, she would get an additional $4000 in Direct Loans. But really, most folks qualify for Plus Loans.</p>

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<p>We will qualify because we always pay our bills and live below our means. But, we cannot afford to pay them, so it would be horrible if we took them out. We would have to sell our house to pay them. Then what do we tell the rest of the kids about college? Sorry kids, we sold the house to pay for your sister to go to college, so you can’t go, we have nothing else to sell. Now get back in your tent.</p>

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<p>Sounds to me like she should go to community college for a couple years to grow up before you spend any more on a four year school for her…</p>

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<p>She has too many AP credits for community college. Even if she went there for the 1 semester she can go there, that puts us back to trying to figure out how to pay for state school.</p>

<p>BTW, please stop acting like she needs to be punished and needs to “grow up.” She was not the meth user. She did not rip her roommates stuff up. I have seen college students. They are not magically so much better than her that she needs to be kept out over maturity.</p>

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<p>Sorry… I haven’t been tracking the saga and don’t know about the meth users and roommate issues. I had roommates sophomore year of college (roomed blind) who were dealing drugs from our room. What did I do? I put in for a housing transfer and moved ASAP. You COULD call back the school she withdrew from and ask if she can be reinstated with a different housing arrangement (sounds like you regret allowing her to leave to start with). If that is what you can afford, then maybe that is the choice you should give her. Obviously no one out here is going to tell you to sell your house to allow her to switch schools.</p>

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<p>If you are living below your means, is that money perhaps in a college savings account?</p>

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<p>Really, it is no different than anything else she wants to buy but can’t afford. If she wanted a car, she could apply for a loan but they’d want to see how she could pay it back - a job, down payment, etc. A home mortgage? Same thing, but a better job, more savings. A student loan is an unsecured loan, so they won’t just take her promising to pay it back. She needs a co-signer.</p>

<p>She had an opportunity but didn’t want it (the school she left). She now has fewer choices.</p>

<p>About half the college students in America go to community colleges, live at home, work full or part time jobs. They pay as they go. It may take 6 -8 years, but they don’t have other options.</p>

<p>Most schools don’t beg you to take their money. You have to work work work to get all the little pieces to come together. My daughter had 5 different sources for her COA this year, and as late as July I was calling and following up on them. I thought she had completed everything for Bright Futures, yet all the stuff from the school didn’t have that award listed. I called them. Not on the list. Had to call BF. On the list. Called school. Not on list. Asked them to look on the MASTER list (no idea what it was, just told that by BF). School then says they don’t have daughter’s SSN (really? because you awarded her a Stafford loan). When all this was going on, I yelled at my daughter. She said ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said ‘FOLLOW UP’ because it was a lot of money. She did, I did, and we found the error. The school would have been just as happy to have me pay that money as to get it from BF, but either way it needed to be paid for her to go to that school.</p>

<p>You have a year. Have your daughter find scholarships, work, talk to the school she wants to go to. My other daughter got a talent scholarship from her school. Small, but it helps. Next year she needs even more money, and she’ll have to work on it. She’d just borrow the money if she knew she had that option, but I told her she doesn’t. Work for it.</p>

<p>Also will add that even though I had the numbers for their tuition/r&b payments, in the end it cost me almost $5000 for the two of them to get started at their schools. Two new computers, thousands in books for the engineer, transportation (airline tickets, gas, hotels, meals), dorm set up (and we kept it cheap), toiletries. It was much more than I expected and I’m really a cheapskate. They used bedding and supplies from home, but they still needed a few things each, dorm sheets, towels that we hadn’t brought, hooks to hang things. It just added up fast.</p>

<p>Op, your daughter can do it, but she can’t do it through loans. She needs to get to work. A job, scholarship apps, FA apps.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read any of your other threads so I’m not privy to any of those other details that are out there, but would she ever consider joining one of the branches of the Texas National Guard? They’ll cover tuition and the guard is a great gig.</p>

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<p>Yes, we have an account with the money we have saved for this.</p>

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<p>“Even if she went there for the 1 semester she can go there, that puts us back to trying to figure out how to pay for state school.”</p>

<p>My math says that paying for 4 semesters at a university is 20% cheaper than paying for 5. If I were struggling to pay for a purchase, I wouldn’t spit on a 20% up-front discount.</p>

<p>“please stop acting like she needs to be punished and needs to “grow up.” She was not the meth user.”</p>

<p>I’m confused. Whether a child is mature enough for college isn’t a relative question. Other kids being even less grown up doesn’t make her more grown up. Nor is it a punishment to go to a school your family can afford, especially after you walk away from a scholarship.</p>

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<p>…“Our EFC is closer to $6000…” </p>

<p>This is the daughter who walked away from Freshman year? I hope she knew you don’t really get a second chance at merit aid. Where we live community college is only $4k/year. If she’s too advanced she can work and earn the tuition to her dream school. </p>

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<p><<<<
She has a serious boyfriend and only wants to go to his college, even though we cannot afford it. She got in there and got scholarships, but it was still above our EFC, by a lot, so we could not afford it. Basically, the school expected us to take out $20K in parent loans on top of paying the EFC. No way. Especially when she got better scholarships elsewhere as well as got in to the state flagship.</p>

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<p>Are you serious???</p>

<p>Are you seriously looking into finding loans for your D so she can borrow $20k per year to go to her BF’s college? Is that what is going on here? If so, then I think you all need a reality check. </p>

<p>and now she blows off working so she can video chat with her BF? (guess what? if they were in college together, she would blow off a class to spend an hour doing mattress gymnastics.)</p>

<p>Your D is not mature enough for college if what you wrote in that other thread is true about “not wanting to major in chemistry”…but then suddenly claiming chemistry is a life dream because BF is majoring in that…(so essentially she is choosing a major so she and BF can be in classes together.</p>

<p>I can almost predict a few likely scenarios that would happen if she and BF were at college together…and most the predictions are not pretty. </p>

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<p>No judgements from me. </p>

<p>There is a list of private lenders on this page. </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.finaid.org/loans/privatestudentloans.phtml”>http://www.finaid.org/loans/privatestudentloans.phtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Some require co-signers. The ones like Commerce bank that say that a better interest rate is available with a co-signer seem to imply that a higher interest rate is available without a co-signer. I’m not sure that is true. YMMV</p>

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<p>To answer your question, there is no place for a kid with no collateral and no job to get a substantial loan besides the direct student loans without a co-signer. This is not a viable option for your daughter and the sooner she realizes that the easier it will be for her to entertain realistic options for the spring or next year. Totally agree about parent loans; if you can’t afford to pay them back you can’t afford them. And it is not fair to your younger kids to over-extend now. </p>

<p>One of my kids talked about taking loans for his dream school over the school that offered him great merit aid. We showed him how much it would cost to pay back those loans compared to a starting salary. He pretty quickly realized this made no sense and made the choice to go with the merit money. We wouldn’t have co-signed so his dream would not have been possible anyway, but this way he understood why it made no sense. Kids have a hard time really understanding the implications associated with loan re-payment. </p>

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<p>LMK- I get it, you are frustrated, but it won’t help to lash out at posters trying to be helpful. I realize this is a tough spot for you and your daughter- but there are some very expert financial aid parents on here (I am not one of them) who can give you some specific assistance to get a plan together.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, I don’t think the suggestion of community college was off-base. You have posted that your D has swing back and forth with what she wants to major in; you have indicated that the BF issue seems to be clouding her judgement right now. So I think the suggestion of community college was made to accomplish two goals- get your D a semester of college type courses under her belt without costing you a fortune or incurring debt, AND allow her to get some clarity on what she wants to study. The community college close to my house, for example, is not a great place for in-depth study of the humanities, but it happens to have very well regarded programs in pharmacy, nursing, a bunch of other allied health fields, etc. So if I had a kid who wasn’t sure they wanted to major in chemistry, our own CC (cheap, on the bus line, close to lots of shopping malls for after class employment) would be a fabulous place to take a college level chem course (or two) to figure it out.</p>

<p>Your own CC may vary of course. But nobody meant offense by the comment. Just trying to help you problem-solve around the finances, the ambivalent D, etc.</p>

<p>Agree that parental debt doesn’t seem like a viable plan. You are not the only parent in America right now having to tell a kid: You either get enough merit aid to make it feasible, or you join ROTC and get a military scholarship, or you self-finance (by working for a year, living at home, saving every penny) to bridge the gap between financial aid, your own loans, and what the school costs. Surely she realizes that you cannot put the entire family at risk in order to pay what you don’t have???</p>

<p>Sounds like you guys are back to communicating- which is fabulous. Big hug to you- this is surely where you earn the parenting badge (but obviously you’ve been earning it for the last two decades every day!)</p>

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<p>

If money is the only reason for getting an ROTC scholarship, then you probably won’t get it. The military can smell the search for cash from a mile away. They are looking for people who want a military career, not just a college degree.</p>