Help A Prospective Student Afford a U.S. Education

collegemom3717
Wed, 23 Mar 2016 04:13:05 +0000

It is very tough to discover that you can’t afford something that you have fallen in love with.

I am especially sorry that you don’t seem to have gotten good advice about your application strategy. From your other threads it looks as if a lot of your ‘top choice’ colleges either offer little or no aid to international students (or aid only through a small number of highly competitive named scholarships) or for which you are not a very strong applicant (for good merit aid the general suggestion is to be in the top 10-20% of the grades/test scores for accepted students, but for most of the ones that I saw you were in the middle 50% or in some cases even lower).

Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars- per year is an exceptionally bad idea- even if you can find somebody to lend it to you. You are unlikely to be able to stay in the US and work, so will most likely be back in Pakistan, paying back loans on local wages.

As for finding a way to afford college in the US, go back and look at the colleges that you have yet to hear from: are the fees for any of them low enough that you can afford to go there? if not, do any of them promise to meet need for international students? if not, what is the maximum merit aid available- and are your grades & test scores in the top 10-20% of admitted students?