<p>I STRONGLY believe that unless you & your folks can come to an agreement about what THEY will pay and what YOU will pay (without any paying back), you need to choose an option that you can pay all on your own. CC and then transferring to an inexpensive in-state U, a full-ride at Alabama, or something, but as was posted by CF, do NOT agree to debt that will amount to $120K or more after 4 years. It is WAY too much and will be crushing for you to shoulder. You won’t be able to have a place to rent, have a vehicle to drive, consider getting married or anything while you have that millstone around your neck and it will take a while at a very good salary to pay off that amount that will keep accrue interest over time.</p>
<p>Please consider a gap year. Your parents insisting on you going to a school that will cost you $30K/year for 4 years is NOT a viable plan. Do NOT agree to this and seek an elder your folks trust to help you talk to them about all of this.</p>
<p>jiminycricketk, frankly, you should not agree to any student loans at either IU or Syracuse. Your parents cannot force you to take a student loan, and you should not agree to one for either university. If they will not pay for IU, but will pay – cash! – for Syracuse then you probably should go to Syracuse. But you should take no student loans.</p>
<p>It is unfortunate that your parents did not figure out a way to avoid this dilemma. Yet, here you are in a completely unacceptable situation. Stand your ground and make them pay cash for your education… wherever it is. Work out the repayment plan, if necessary.</p>
<p>"“Sheesh. I just want to smack these parents upside the head.”"</p>
<p>Hey, get in line. ;)</p>
<p>@NROTCgrad …thank you for your kind words. Yes, if the student has the stats for merit elsewhere, then a gap year and reapplying would be best. And if he does so, he can’t take any classes during the gap.</p>
<p>well, there is one decision that you can make and this is it: You can tell them that YOU are never going to pay back the part of your education that exceeded the cost of IU. They can either put up or shut up.</p>
<p>@happymomof1: They’ve already expressed their opinion of community college. One time my counselor mentioned the local CC over the phone to my father and he flipped out, saying no member of his family would be attending a community college. I know my parents and they would laugh in my face if I said I would work for a year instead of going to school. Also, I don’t want to take a year off and work. I’d like to be at school in the fall. My parents don’t care about how old I am. I’m still a child if I’m living in their house. I can ask and ask but I will get no kind of confirmation about how much I actually have to pay back. Even if they knew the numbers, my parents would be ambiguous about it.</p>
<p>@NROTCgrad: They were both really fond of UConn. My mother was very supportive of Tulane and we were expecting scholarships and a reasonable FA package, but received neither. I wanted to apply to Alabama, but my father was 100% against it for racial demographic reasons. He is half-Asian and went to schools in Virginia and Georgia. He’s been to Alabama before and had several unpleasant experiences because of the way he looked. He is generally not a fan of the South. Keeping me from going to UA was more of a safety concern than anything else.</p>
<p>@Cardinal Fang: My parents will be taking out all the loans and paying for my tuition. They told me not to worry about how they are paying at the moment. They expect me to start paying <em>them</em> back once I have a stable job as an adult. My parents will be paying out of their own pockets and when I am in a position to live on my own on a steady income, then I will start reimbursing them. I cannot agree or disagree to these terms. Even if I threatened not to go to any school, they would still find a way to send me. </p>
<p>I don’t mean to be rude, but I think a lot of you fail to realize that, for the most part, my hands are tied. Taking a gap year, working, going to a community college, applying to different schools…none of these are viable options. The only thing I can do is make a compelling argument and sway them with my words.</p>
<p>Given that you have already ruled out any of the options that you can do (move out and work while applying to full ride scholarship colleges, starting at community college, etc.), you have no power to sway them. You will lose the argument, because you have ceded all power to them, and they obviously do not hesitate to use it to bully you into submission.</p>
<p>Your parents’ plan will dig both themselves and you into a debt hole, since if they need to take out loans to afford Syracuse, they obviously do not have the money for your college or their retirement. So they are expecting you to both pay the unreasonable amount of loans and support them in retirement. It is not like Syracuse is on the investment banking and management consulting recruiting list of schools for jobs that will pay you $$$$ at graduation.</p>
<p>Please stop acting like you have zero agency here. Unless you think there is a chance defiance would lead to you becoming homeless - in which case the situation becomes much more complicated - you do have a choice.</p>
<p>You’re using the conditional tense (they “would be” ambiguous), so you clearly haven’t sat down and had a real, adult conversation with them. </p>
<p>This is no longer a matter of Indiana or Syracuse. This is a matter of you destroying your future over an oppressive debt burden. </p>
<p>Whether your parents think of you as a child or not, you need to be an adult and tell them "In order to make a decision about college, I need to know what my financial obligations are. If you are paying, you have the right to choose which school you are paying for. If this is a loan, and this is ultimately going to be MY burden, I have to have a say in deciding what level of debt I’m comfortable with. If you aren’t going to tell me what I you expect me to pay you back, I can’t be expected to honor an “agreement” that I don’t know the terms of. " </p>
<p>Frankly, in purely legal terms, if you don’t sign on to anything, your parents can’t possibly force you to pay them back - but obviously, you don’t want it to come to that. In the meantime, enlist an adult that your parents respect on your side, if you can. </p>
<p>“I don’t want to take a year off and work. I’d like to be at school in the fall.”</p>
<p>If you did not want that so much, you would be able to find other options for yourself. But the truth is that you do want to get away to college this year, and you are willing to go along with your parents’ plan in order to achieve that goal.</p>
<p>Please make an effort to find out what the deal is with reimbursing them once you have a steady income. Are they expecting you to pay back their cost with interest or without interest? Are they paying for your college education so that you will support them in their old age? Your repayment plan will affect your life after college in ways that are difficult for you to imagine right now. $150,000 paid back over ten years with no interest accrued would be $15,000 each year, which means that you would need to make something in the range of $20,000 before taxes each year just to cover the loan repayment. How much do you and your parents think you will make out of college? How little do all of you think you can live on? Will they let you move home (if you can find a job near there) so your housing expenses can be kept down? And what about your potential girlfriend/boyfriend? Will you have enough money left over to start a life with that person? Will you even find anyone willing to share a life with you if you have ginormous bill for your education and the need to pay that back somehow to your parents hanging over your head?</p>
<p>jiminycricket, your parents are, apparently, going to take out loans for a quarter of a million dollars. And then they are going to expect you to pay the loans back. This is insane.</p>
<p>Of course you have a choice. You are an adult now (or at least, you are rapidly approaching your adulthood) and you must now act like one. You can choose to accept your adult responsibilities and tell your parents that you do not agree to paying back a quarter of a million dollars.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, the $150-250,000 is as much or more than many mortgages. If you’ll be spending your money repaying that, you won’t be able to also have a place to live or many other things that you will need to spend your money on to be able to be independent and move forward in your life. </p>
<p>With your stats, you likely COULD get into a U that would give you & your folks MUCH less out of pocket. If the debt will be yours or it will be bankrupting your folks so they will need you to provide financial support for them in the future, it IS something you all need to talk about rationally. Get an elder that you and your family respect to help rationally discuss the finances so you understand what $150-250,000 in debt will be like to repay–with and without interest.</p>
<p>Seems like your parents have not read the many news stories about college graduates and their families being crippled in their life choices by high student loan debts. You may want to google a few stories…or look at this story:</p>
<p>I personally know many folks who are still paying back college loans 10+ years after graduation with some whose debt loads far exceed the one in that link above.</p>
<p>One friend whose debt is a combination of 2 years at a private college and a respectable law school has around a half-million dollars in debt due to compounding interest and the fact the legal industry imploded the year he graduated from law school(2008) so he ended up with a $30k/year non-profit legal job. Keep in mind he was one of the fortunate few to land a lawyer job when most of his law school classmates ended up unemployed or “no-offered” at the last moment. </p>
<p>A few others are still paying back undergrad debt 10+ years after college graduation…including some HS classmates who decided to load up on those loans thinking everything’ll be alright. Let’s just say they’re not happy campers now…even the ones who are still working in lucrative career fields. </p>
<p>In contrast, I turned down one of the schools many of them attended because of its stingy FA/scholarship package and lack of actual academic or other VALUE in relation to the money I’d be required to borrow and compared with other college choices I had. </p>
<p>After 10+ years, am glad to not have any college loan debt…much less one amounting to a quarter of a million or more hanging over my head. </p>
<p>
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<p>Don’t mean to be rude, but that’s 100% complete BS. As an adult or soon to be adult, you need to take responsibility for your decisions…especially ones which could affect you for years to come. </p>
<p>No one can or should compel you to mortgage your future through high debt being forced on you by your parents’ combination of demands and what seems to be foolhardy financial fantasy. Especially considering it seems they’re not accounting for the implications of having a quarter of a million dollars in debt nor are they accounting for the relative value of the college they demand you attend. </p>
<p>"“He is generally not a fan of the South. Keeping me from going to UA was more of a safety concern than anything else.”"</p>
<p>I don’t know when or where your dad was in the south, but its ridiculous to think that anyone who is Asian would be hurt at bama for being asian. Although bama’s reported asian numbers are low, there are more asian students there because intls aren’t counted and bama gets many asian intls. It sounds like your dad was either in the south a long time ago or in some rural city. There aren’t reports in the south where asians’ safety is at risk. Just nutty to think so.</p>
<p>OP, your parents sound very immature to me. You are actually the mature one in this situation (which is pretty sad). You need to inform them that you cannot make a commitment to pay them back for any amount more than the IU cost. Tell them now so they don’t say you are welshing later. That is still plenty (maybe too much) debt for you to take on. If they still want you to go to Syracuse, and they understand you will never pay them back for it, then I think you should consider it. </p>
<p>However… one thing no one else has pointed out is that psychology is the lowest paid major there is – literally, I was listening to a Planet Money podcast last week where they discussed the average earnings of various majors. And the average salary for undergrad psych majors was at the bottom of the list. Not only are you setting yourself up with a lot of debt and giving in to unreasonable demands by your parents, but you also are not positioning yourself to pay them back in the long run.</p>
<p>And these people live in NYC. Shaking my head.</p>
<p>I would just put your foot down and refuse to do it. Tell them you ARE worried about the “horrors of the real world” and because of that you think it is financially irresponsible to attend EITHER of these colleges if you will be required to pay them back. Say you will go to CC and transfer to a SUNY after a couple of years. Thank them for scaring you out of attending either of these expensive schools and becoming saddled with debt as a young adult in a difficult job market.</p>
<p>“Worst case scenario, I’ll just give up and go to Syracuse. If I stop fighting, there’s a good chance my parents will soften up and tell me I won’t have to pay back all my tuition, just as a reward for being obedient. I’m honestly very tired from all the arguing.”</p>
<p>This makes me sad. This should be an exciting time in your life, but instead it is a fight and a power struggle. A lot of it sounds like your parents want to be able to brag about where you are going to school, and they don’t think IU is “prestigious” enough for that. As a parent who is going through this college process for the second time, I have to shake my head at that. I understand some of the posters’ comments about how parents should have a say in the decision, but in the end YOU are the one who is going to school. YOU have to feel like a school is the right fit. YOU have to be excited about learning and growing in a new environment. Not your parents, not the CC posters --nobody else but YOU. You sound like a fairly mature kid who knows what you want and – more importantly – what you don’t want. I applaud you for that. I don’t know what kind of advice to give you, other than to say that my heart goes out to you and I hope your parents can see that they raised you to be a responsible person who is capable of making her own decisions. And then I hope they let you make them. </p>
<p>I always suggest this: join the army. No one takes me up on it, but it is a time honored way to get out of the house and be independent. Start with ROTC? That may have been suggested above. </p>
OP, print out or copy down these words. This is the whole thing in a nutshell. There is a reasonable chance that if you say this, they will admit that they don’t really expect you to pay the money back. If they really do expect you to pay the money back, you need to tell them that you won’t even consider it unless you and they meet together with a financial advisor.</p>
<p>First, not everyone necessarily qualifies to join due to physical/mental conditioning and/or other factors such as criminal record.</p>
<p>Second, not everyone is comfortable with the genuine potential risk of injury or even death from training to deployments due to the nature of what being in the military entails. Especially if one goes into/is assigned a combat-arms or other high risk MOS. </p>
<p>This is something everyone I knew who served in the military asked kids thinking about joining the military asked us to be mindful of so if one decides to join, one goes in with eyes wide open to the risks along with the benefits of joining. It also wasn’t meant to be nor was it necessarily a deterrent. If anything, this element of risk actually strengthened the desire of some to enlist or go into the Federal Service Academies/ROTC/OCS. </p>
<p>Enlisting or attending a Federal Service Academy would count as time in military service and thus, effectively serve as a means to emancipate the individual concerned from parents for college FA purposes.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, unless things have changed…ROTC doesn’t do that. If one ends up not getting/losing an ROTC scholarship or getting dropped from ROTC altogether, the student will still need parental financial info for FA purposes throughout their college careers. </p>
<p>There are few things I can think of that would sway me to comment on my child’s choice of a marriage partner but, after reading this thread, I think a quarter of a million dollars in college debt might be one of them.</p>
<p>OP, if I were you, I would go get a job. Go work for a year and take time to clear your head. Let the knowlegeable people on this site direct you toward colleges that will satisfy both you and your parents without costing you a fortune. Those loans will limit your choices for a large portion of your life and you don’t want to agree to that because it’s easier than fighting with them. I think you can take a gap year and still qualify for the wonderful benefits Alabama & other colleges offer to freshmen with high stats (as long as you’re not in college someplace else). Do you think your parents will kick you out if you take a gap year?</p>