I wouldn’t be surprised if UAH’s eng’g dept ADDED more merit on TOP of that award. UAH wants more high stats students and wants more OOS. Their Eng’g dept is well funded and they have NEW facilities.
Have your son apply NOW…he will get accepted very soon and the merit offer will come quickly.
Yes, this is for Fall 2016. UAH is very generous with merit and has late app and merit $$ dates.
@Wien2NC @ucbalumnus @mom2collegekids and others…
First off, thank you all for the time you spend to listen and understand my situation. I really need it. Not only you’d listen, you also helped me understand the whole picture and suggested options. Thank you!!!
Now, UAH is very promising. This means I need to convince my son not to accept UCI or UCSD, and that UAH is a better choice. I think deadline is next week to accept or decline UC. I am in a very tight situation.
Well, since you did say that your contribution will be $15,000 per year beforehand, you can show him the math:
https://www.ofas.uci.edu/content/costs.aspx?nav=1 is UCI’s cost of attendance. $30,380 (off campus) to $33,220 (dorm) total. Maybe frugal living can cut some of the personal and books expenses to save $2,000 to $4,000. But that still leaves a cost of $26,000 or so even in the most frugal off campus case. $11,000 is a fairly large stretch to cover with $5,500 of federal direct student loans and $5,500 of summer and part time work earnings. May be doable, but not comfortable (especially fitting work around a rigorous major like chemical engineering), and he will have no room for financial error. And if he is not naturally super-frugal, it may not be doable at all.
https://students.ucsd.edu/finances/financial-aid/budgeting/undergrad-2015-16.html is UCSD’s cost of attendance. $30,135 (off campus) to $31,365 (dorm) total. Similar calculation as the above.
Ok, after I showed him the math like above. Three options:
Should I leave it to him to choose and let him take responsibility for his decision?
well, what’s there to discuss? you can’t afford UCI or UCSD and that’s that. period.
just tell him the truth – you cannot afford a UC but you just found out that he has won a full-tuition scholarship to a great engineering school in a great engineering city. tell him you are so proud of him that his hard work in school has paid off and his efforts have secured a scholarship worth over $80,000, with the possibility of winning more $$$. tell him this is great news for your family’s financial future and he has done a great thing for your whole family by winning this scholarship.
hey we need to get @UAHAdmissions involved in this discussion. i think the housing is a four-bedroom suite – each student has a private bedroom – with two shared bathrooms. a private bedroom in a suite is way better than a regular dorm room.
go to the UAH thread
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-of-alabama-huntsville/
and you will read about other UAH students who are glad they chose UAH.
In principle, letting him choose would let him own the decision and the consequences.
However, there is the risk that if he is not naturally frugal, he may not have a good sense of how much work it will take to earn the needed amount (after taking the federal direct student loan of $5,500); the non-frugal budget is probably not a realistic expectation for him to self-fund. Has he had jobs before and known the amount of work it takes to earn $X?
If he is naturally frugal, he may be attracted to UAH (or FAMU, etc.) with no debt.
he’ll have to work a LOT to make UC work financially. that will adversely affect his ability to succeed in his ChemEng courses. that curriculum will be hard enough to pass even without a job.
if he is serious about ChemEng then he needs to focus on the option that will give him the greatest chance to succeed in those courses without added pressure or distractions. clearly the best option most conducive to him successfully earning a ChemEng degree is UAH.
in all of this discussion i forgot about the full-ride FAMU-FSU option. but we have not established if this scholarship offer is available to him for Fall 2016.
I hope it’s that easy to take UCI and UCSD out of the discussion. He applied for it and got accepted. I am not trying to defend or side with him but he’s in that position right now.
I guess my question really is, is it my choice or his? He knows the options already. I cannot take UCI and UCSD out of the table and say that’s not an option, or could I?
If it were me, I would have chosen UAH, but it is his life.
bribe him with $1000 spending money per semester. tell him it’s his reward for getting that massive scholarship and by the way you just want to tell him again how proud you are of him. you will still come out ahead $$$-wise.
oh and i think UAH lets you stay in your dorm room year round. better check to make sure.
honestly i don’t think it’s as easy letting him choose because he does not yet have a definite strategy for how the shortfall is going to get paid for. what if he cannot get a job? what if the job does not pay enough? what if ChemEng is so difficult that he has to quit his job to concentrate on studying?
@ucbalumnus is right. he will have to work a LOT plus saddle himself with $20K+ in debt.
do you know if he has the work ethic or commitment to pull this off?
why would he want to work and take $20K+ in loans when UAH will PAY him over $80K to attend their school?
i don’t even think you should leave the decision up to him. i think you should talk excitedly and enthusiastically about the GREAT offer he earned from UAH like it’s obviously the right choice to make – because it is. talk up UAH and talk HIM up for being so smart that he earned an $80,000 solution to your financial worries.
I hope it's that easy to take UCI and UCSD out of the discussion. He applied for it and got accepted.<<
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CC is filled with threads about students who applied and got accepted to schools that their families could not afford. He would not be the first kid this happened to by a long shot.
I guess my question really is, is it my choice or his? He knows the options already. I cannot take UCI and UCSD out of the table and say that's not an option, or could I?<<
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I think you can take them off the table. You told him you could only pay $15K per year. He applied to two schools that far exceeded that. You are holding up your end of the bargain and he is not. It does not matter if they accepted them. They were unaffordable based on the financial parameters you established. He should never have applied to them in the first place. He is the one who wrongly put UCI and UCSD on the table in the first place by ignoring the financial parameters you established. You have every right to take them out of play.
If it were me, I would have chosen UAH, but it is his life.<<
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Has he found a pot of gold and using it to finance his own education? No? OK then, it is not his life – it is YOUR life too because he is expecting you to pitch in $15K per year that you could be using to build your nest egg. His college choice is a decision that affects you and your whole family. This is a family decision, not his alone, and honestly since it affects Son # 2, he should probably be brought into the loop on this.
You know your son better than we do.
If he is naturally frugal, it probably will not take much to convince him that UAH, FAMU, etc. low cost no debt no paid work needed options make sense.
If he is not naturally frugal, then UCI and UCSD go from extreme stretch to unrealistic. In addition to the college cost math, you may have to show him the math on how much work it takes (perhaps with stories about “remember when before I got the oil job how little money we had”). Remind him that college school work is nominally a 45 hour per week job (especially with a hard major), so adding lots of work to earn money is not realistic.
Frugality – yes, he is so frugal that I’m even worried about it. I gave him money to buy food whenever he goes for group studies, community service, or other school activities but he doesn’t spend it. He saves the money. I think he has about 3 to 4k saved up in his drawer since he was 9 or 10 years old.
Work ethic – I can’t say anything. He does his chores at home but there are times he needs to be reminded. I wouldn’t count on it.
Ok, I will try to talk to both of them tonight and maybe over dinner. I will try to follow as you say and see what happens. I need to arm myself with knowledge about UAH so I can tell more good/positve things about it.
here is another factor – your job is not secure. you just mentioned earlier about the possibility of getting laid off. if something happens to your job, the UC plans fall apart like a house of cards in a tornado.
the UAH plan can absorb a big financial hit much better than the UC plan. he can take out his $5500 loan, and the rest can be paid for by your savings, him working a campus job, or a generous co-op. if he stays on campus in summer, he has the option of working all summer and covering the remaining $5000. the UAH plan makes a good engineering degree much more attainable in case of a job loss.
if you lose your job while he is at UCI, that’s it – he’s done, plan B.
the $80K offered by UAH would make it possible for him to stay in school.
Do not sit on this any longer - if son hasn’t applied to UAH, have him do it online, send the test scores, and call - let them know his stats, etc. Everyone knows about the deadline looming.
I would not have my son take the kind of debt lined out at the other two schools at this point, when you have a better 4 year scholarship option.
As Mom2, I know UAH, and if he doesn’t like it, he can always go back to a UC school down the road. However UAH is ABET accredited with students that he will fit in with.
Don’t even throw MS State into the picture - it is a ‘rural’ campus setting. He will be much happier at UAH.
Good luck and let us know what transpires.
And remember most of these merit scholarships are offered to freshmen only. So if you do lose your job or have to take a big pay cut or get injured, (the house of cards mentioned above) and your son has to transfer those options will no longer be available.
Now, I’ve done some reading about UAH…we’ve seen the positives and it’s time to look at issues…one issue is low graduation rates, another is “weed out:” classes…it seems I need to understand more about these issues as well.
It appears that some classes are difficult so some students were not able to maintain GPA to keep the scholarship. So, with ChemE, will that be an issue?
Remember, many of the automatic big scholarship universities are not that selective (probably like CSUB). So it is likely that weaker students at those schools will find that courses for a difficult major like chemical engineering are difficult for them. Graduation rates generally track admission selectivity.
On the other hand, a stronger student who could get into a more selective university like UCSD or UCI is more likely to do well in those courses, whether s/he attends a more selective university of a less selective university like UAH, FAMU, etc…
What math and science courses has he taken in high school, and how well has he done in them (and any associated AP tests if any were AP courses)?