Decision Time: UNLV, SDSU or UNR?

DjBoom777
Sat, 22 Mar 2014 21:20:24 +0000

@MYOS1634 UNLV (on-campus): $18,500. UNLV (off-campus): $6,500. UNR: $19,000. SDSU: $34,900. UNLV and UNR include very vague “personal costs” which totals almost $3000 a year. It’s not books, transportation, housing, board or tuition since they are in their own categories. If I ONLY include tuition, housing and books: UNLV (on-campus) is barely over $15,000 but I’ll just go along with their estimated cost of attendance. Now for the scholarships I already calculated into those totals: Millennium Scholarship for Nevada which is $1920 a year. UNLV didn’t give me any freshman scholarship since my FAFSA was 18 days pass the priority deadline but UNR offered me an additional $1500 a year since they have no FAFSA deadline (ugh, come on UNLV). Besides for these freshman and Millenium Scholarships, the rest has to be opened to loans. I’ve applied to roughly 20 scholarships which require essays but no yield as of yet.

@BrownParent I’ve slowly been approaching them about it but they seem to be avoiding the topic or discussion. I have a feeling that they think that this whole idea of college is something you plan for the month before it starts which is completely wrong. I’ve been planning and searching since October 2012. For UNLV, I was given $1000 in ‘Federal Direct Subsidized Loans’, $2000 in ‘Federal Direct Subsidized Loans’ and finally, $13000 in ‘Parent PLUS Loans’. I’ve taken about 15 minutes reading up on these loans and I’m still clueless on how they work and how they are all different. I assume the parent loan is the one requiring a cosigner… My family is planning to take our annual summer vacation and since Asia is on our minds this year, I could potentially be out of the country for a month this summer so the earliest time I could get a part time job would be this fall once college starts.

@ucbalumnus Refer to what I replied to BrownParent and MYOS1634^^^