Cost of Attendance.

LucieTheLakie
Sat, 08 Nov 2014 19:39:39 +0000

Yes, @pilot2012, I did post those things. And I was grateful to hear that the cost of attending PSU wouldn’t be anywhere near the $34,000 the net price calculator was telling me . . . Only to discover a few months later, after we got our final numbers from Penn State, that the NPC was in fact much more reliable than the collective wisdom of a handful of posters in these forums.

In the end, who are you going to believe, the university itself or anonymous posters on an Internet forum?

Once we overcame the shock and accepted that number, we could make an informed decision. It’s still a good value, in my opinion, if you have the money saved or can finance it with Stafford loans and are choosing a major that will enable you to start paying off those loans after graduation.

I have no desire whatsoever to mislead anybody, despite what you may believe. My intent is to warn naive students who think PSU is going to provide a lot of financial aid to out-of-state students to think twice before they waste an application fee on a school that is very transparent about their NOT offering any such thing.

And stop claiming that my son chose another school “based on cost.” Yes, cost was a factor, but I made it clear to him if Penn State felt like the best fit for him, we’d make it happen. He simply preferred another school over Penn State. The fact that it is costing us half the price is just icing on the cake.