How do you intend to pay for those schools? Be realistic. The total cost of ASU is about $50,000 a year. You will ONLY be able to get a loan for $5500. So your parents are going to take out a private loan and expect you to pay it back to them? The average starting salary for an ASU grad is $42,000 a year. Let’s say you get to go right into a lucrative CS job. It’s still going to take decades to pay back that kind of money.
How long will it take you to pay back $200,000 of debt? Assuming you have to eat, pay bills, pay rent, buy a car, gas, insurance, a sofa maybe. Your plan WILL NOT WORK and it will destroy your credit rating in the process. You are getting a crash course in how to budget for life.
@cshell2@Lindagaf I have checked the RAI score and so far I can get it but again the challenge is finances. I’m going to fill out FAFSA this week and ask my parents for solid numbers on if they’re going to contribute or not and based on that will I make the decision of attending those colleges (if accepted). If not, I don’t want to dig myself into a hole just to satisfy them.
I gather that you have immigrant parents. If so, they grew up in an educational system where a 1 point difference in secondary school graduation exams could mean never leaving their village or getting a university education, and a 1 point difference in a placement exam score could mean being admitted to a highly ranked university that put the student onto a direct pathway to success or being rejected by that university and thus being forever blocked from certain life pathways. It is really, truly difficult for parents from systems like that to wrap their brains around the US system. There is no one university (or group of universities) that guarantees lifetime success here. There is no one major (or group of majors) that guarantees lifetime success here. And there are many, many, many people (my own daughter included) who start at community colleges because of grades, money, family responsibilities, fill-in-random-reason-here, and go on to lead hugely successful lives.
There are some excellent community college options in Minnesota that have formal articulation agreements with the University of Minnesota. One of those could be your safety. You would be guaranteed admission to U of MN provided you meet the requirements of the articulation agreement. https://admissions.tc.umn.edu/transfer/mncap_intro.html There are other pathways to transfer into the U of MN system. Start reading about them here. https://admissions.tc.umn.edu/transfer/index.html
I know my previous message is long but please read it carefully and show it to your parents (except the part about CA costs ).
You have many paths forward. Many.
It may be hard to let go of Iowa State, of ASU, but really it wouldnt be the best for you.
No one cares that a university is known in another state. Who cares that a university has a name your parents have heard of.
What matters is what YOU do at whatever university you attend.
As a fellow poster says, the only name that matters at college graduation is yours.
Private colleges such as Augsburg, etc, offer discounts for students from the Twin Cities, so you wouldn’t be full price. A benefit of private colleges is that they offer more support to help you achieve your goals.
Btw you’re more likely to get an internship from a CC or a small college in the Twin cities than from ASU simply because there are fewer students and more opportunities.
If your parents won’t talk about money your safety is a school you can pay for on your own with only the $5500/year federal student loan + whatever you can earn from working. In NY, that would cover the tuition at a 4-year SUNY. If parents can pay commuting costs (car, insurance, etc) and are willing to let their child live at home it’s a good option. Students who don’t get into the 4 year school right away (or who want to save money) go to a cc first (tuition is half as much). Would your parents let you live at home and do that?
SUNY college tuition isn’t less than $5500/year either. It’s ~$10k. The federal student plus work earnings would cover it, but not the loan by itself.
I see that Univ. of MN is $14k/year. If the parents won’t contribute to tuition then OP would either have to start at a cc (~$5k/year) and work to save enough to transfer, work full-time to earn enough to cover what the student loan doesn’t at the Univ. of MN, or take classes as s/he can afford them. If the parents can pay $5k and OP can earn $3-4k over the summer then the federal student loan would be enough to cover tuition at the Univ. of MN.
“…the challenge is finances.” This is an understatement. This is more than a challenge. With at least $150,000 of debt fresh out of college, you will have no life. And don’t forget interest either.
@MYOS1634 said this earlier: “Don’t count on private loans to pay for 100% of college. That is crazy. This amount of debt would preclude your being hired by most tech companies because it’d make you such a security risk.“
Is your goal to eventually have a job in CS? Then you need to get on the right path to reach the goal. Create a timetable for you and your parents of how you can get to your chosen path using viable options. Advocate for yourself, or enlist the help of a trusted family member or your guidance counselor.
Give your parents irrefutable facts: you cannot afford those loans; you probably can’t get into Iowa or ASU, and even if you can, you cannot afford those loans; UMTC is pretty highly ranked for CS (#20, just below Rice and Harvard, and ABOVE Yale, ASU, Iowa and Iowa State. Google Great Value Colleges) and you CAN afford those loans. You can afford CC. Maybe the other options MYOS1634 mentioned are affordable too. You’re still going to have a lot of debt, but it will be manageable, hopefully.
I do feel that you want to hear what you want to hear. You asked for help and we are trying to be helpful, but you are hung up on “prestige.” Your parents might have mistaken beliefs, but they 100% cannot force you to take out private loans that you do not want to pay. So stick to your guns and say no.
Best of luck to you. I think I’ve said all I can say.
MN is really more like 18K/year for tuition and fees when you add in all the surcharges for the college of science and engineering. (My son is there now, so I have a fresh bill to go off of. ) The bigger problem is, the OP would never get in right now. The acceptance rate for CSE was something like 16% last year. He HAS to bust his but at CC for a couple years first for financial AND academic reasons.
It seems like it is the parents are hung up on prestige, since the OP is willing to start at a community college, but the parents are opposed to that (see post #0).
The parents need to make accounts, ask the question, and see the responses. They probably won’t listen to anything we write here if the OP is the messenger.
).
) The bigger problem is, the OP would never get in right now. The acceptance rate for CSE was something like 16% last year. He HAS to bust his but at CC for a couple years first for financial AND academic reasons.