I’m sure this has been posted a thousand times, but I’m just curious. For those of you who can’t afford to spend a ton of money on college, what do you think is the best choice: Average school with big scholarship or a good school with no scholarship? For example, I can go to an average state school like KU or UNL or ISU and get a scholarship (KU offers a minimum of $10,000 a year!), or I can go to a better school like UIUC or Minnesota Twin-Cities and pay the full tuition. I’m just curious to know what some of you guys who have been in the same situation have picked.
Is this a logic test? If you can’t afford a ton of money on college then you can’t pay full tuition OOS. Do you know that you are limited to borrowing $5500 as a college freshman? That you max out at $7500/year as a junior and senior? How will you pay the OOS freight?
WHAT are your parents saying? How much will THEY pay? That will likely determine what your choices are.
Are you instate for KU? What are your stats? You might be able to get other merit at other schools.
what is your major and career goal? Most careers do not require a so-called “better” school.
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GPA: (expected to go up at the end of this year (I’m a junior))
uw: 3.6/4
w: 3.7/4
ACT: 26 (also expected to go up, I have regularly scored 29’s on my practice tests but as of right now it’s a 26)
EC’s: (I strongly lack EC’s and I think this might be what kills me the most. How important are these in college admissions? I only figured out how important they are at the end of Soph. year. )
Gymnastics (Only freshman year due to injury)
Volunteering Club (Community service) (2 years, junior and will also do it senior)
I spend most of my extra time doing yoga, whether it’s going to classes or just doing it alone. I hope to be a yoga instructor in the future (on top of whatever job I have), so would this count as an EC? I would think no, but my college counselor said yes because an EC activity is whatever you spend your time outside of school doing.
Where I live, you don’t need to go away to a $30,000 a year school to get your BSN, but with education you kind of do because of the competition.
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That last part is soooooo not true. Schools that are hiring teachers aren’t going to care whether you went to KU or UIUC. It would be an absolute waste of money to pay OOS for UIUC, Purdue, or the others for an Education major or BSN.
In the first place, what you do with your college education, whether it be at an “average state school” or “a better school,” ultimately is what you choose to make of it.
Second, “average state schools” may have certain colleges or departments that are highly ranked; and if your academic interests are in those areas of academic strength, then attending such an “average state school” might actually inure to your benefit.
Third, “average state schools” often have honors programs that can improve your educational experience; you might want to investigate those at some of the “average state schools” you might be considering. Here is a website that might help you in considering such programs: http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2014/03/25/choosing-an-honors-program-twenty-questions-to-ask/
Finally, if your ultimate career goals will include graduate of professional school, then save the money on the front end and spend it on graduate/professional school – which will be of more benefit to you in the long run.
Just wanted to add that this is a hypothetical question! Yes, I qualify for scholarships at KU and UNL but that doesn’t mean I’m already thinking about how I’m going to pay for it. I said in the question that I was wondering what any of you thought about the situation and if you have been in it before. Thanks for all the help though!!
When I said I can’t afford a lot of money for college, I meant how some schools are $40,000+ like IU-Bloomington and such. UNL, KU, Minnesota, etc. are all very affordable OOS options. I am paying for college through getting financial aid, borrowing from my parents, and I have a job that I’m using to help me save up. But this wasn’t even really the point of the question. I was asking what you would do if you were in the situation, that’s all.
I’d go for whatever is cheapest and will limit debt. College graduates are having problems getting jobs, or so I’ve heard, so if one has to go through that, at least it’s better to start with $0 rather than owing large amounts of money.
I’m going to be attending Wichita State University, by the way.
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am paying for college through getting financial aid, borrowing from my parents, and I have a job that I’m using to help me save up.
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sounds like your parents’ income is too high for financial aid. Unless your family is low income, you won’t qualify for federal aid. Those schools aren’t going to give you need based aid.
Keep in mind that teachers start at rather modest salaries, so you should borrow as little as possible. It really won’t matter where you go to college. Education is a staple major, nothing unique about it. Tons of schools have very good programs.
To not address the financing aspect when making an extremely expensive life decision is foolish. In my company we automatically reject people who think they can just figure it out via borrowing since it is very rare those people can. The questions about how you’ll finance your education are absolutely critical to ascertaining what I would do in your situation.
The answer is not go into deep debt for a degree with potentially marginal benefits, especially if the eventual career goal was in a field which is about to experience a major contraction in the number of students and is well known for both poor initial prospects as well as a low starting and average mid career salary.
Ugh, okay I’m not saying that I’m not addressing the financial aspect, but that is not the question. I don’t have to make this decision until May and I haven’t even began my applications yet, so I’m not anywhere near the financial aspect yet. I was just asking what other people would do in the situation where a school could potentially give them money and so they’d have to pick between cheaper tuition at an average school or go for the nice brand name. That. Is. All. I’m. Asking.
" I was just asking what other people would do in the situation where a school could potentially give them money and so they’d have to pick between cheaper tuition at an average school or go for the nice brand name. That. Is. All. I’m. Asking."
In the end, most students choose the more affordable school because the truth is that they can’t afford the other one(s).
And yes, you need to be thinking about this now so that you can plan your application strategy. Sit down with your parents and run the Net Price Calculator at the website of each of the schools that are currently on your list. Find out which of them can be made affordable, and eliminate the ones that can’t be.
If you are thinking about teaching, you need to know that if you want to work in a specific location, graduates of nearby education programs often are the ones who are most likely to get hired. So pay attention to that while you make your list.
I think you have your answers.
@whenhen In my company we automatically reject people who think they can just figure it out via borrowing …
What does this mean? Your company admits students and considers if they are borrowing to finance it?
@kaytee98 It is a perfectly normal question to ask when you are first starting to figure out how it works out for people. As you see most do not have the choice because the funds are just not available. People paying up usually have parents willing to foot the bill. Those that do have parents who cosign on large debt put themselves in a miserable position for a decade or two to come. There is reasonable debt and there is ‘too much’ debt so the amount matters a great deal. You can run a n online calculator to see what payments have to be made for various debt amounts.Using your student borrowing capability puts you at about $300 a month.
Thank you guys!
@BrownParent my company doesn’t allow undergraduate students financing their education via loans to use our services. We have years of data showing these students are at an incredibly high risk of breaking their contracts and costing us thousands. These are often those most likely to drop out and/or transfer to cheaper schools.
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I can see that!
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I don’t have to make this decision until May
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I don’t think you understand. If you don’t consider finances NOW, then you might end up applying to the wrong list of schools and then in May, you may realize that you only have one school or no schools that are affordable. And at that point, you might realize that if you had applied to A B and C, then you would have had better affordable choices…but, at that point, too late for a do-over.
If you don’t plan on considering the financial aspects of the hypothetical decision until May, you are setting yourself up for a lot of stress and possibly even disaster. Think about the financial aspect early. Finances are often what decided where people attend college.
A better strategy is this…
Identify 3 schools that you know FOR sure that you can afford, will accept you, and will work out well for your career goal. Those can be your financial safeties.
THEN…apply to a variety of schools that just interest you.
THEN…next spring, if your safeties are the only affordable schools, then you’ll still feel that you got to make a choice. Choice is good! As Americans, we like choice. It’s bad for morale when we only have one school that will be affordable and we feel we’ve been railroaded into that one school.
I’m obviously not going to wait until the night before decision day to talk about the financial aspect. When I said I’m not considering that right now, I simply meant that right now I’m just focused on looking at schools that interest me, and then I will review all the financial aspects (obviously before applying lol). No school I’m applying to besides 2 are financially out of reach for me, and those two are at the bottom of my list for that reason.
BUT, I have currently been working on finalizing my list of schools that I’m applying to, and when discussing this topic with my mom, I wondered what other people have done in this situation. Cheap tuition vs. brand name. Trust me, my parents wouldn’t let me apply to a bunch of schools that we can’t afford. My mom told me to get a list together and then my parents will sit with me before I begin the application process and talk about the pros and cons of each school (including finances) to decide which schools are too out of reach. Hope I clarified a little more. Thanks for all the info, I appreciate it! 