Penn State and Loans

happymomof1
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:05:34 +0000

I would suggest looking at community colleges in your home state, and investigating the transfer agreements that they have established with private colleges/universities and with your state public universities. You can also look at community colleges in Pennsylvania to see what kinds of transfer agreements they have with Penn State.

For example, my local community college is Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. It has formal transfer agreements with the public universities in Maryland, as well as with several private colleges. This means that a student who wants to study Engineering can start out at MC, and after completing a two year sequence of courses with a specified grade point average will be automatically accepted into the Engineering program at the University of Maryland at College Park. There are similar transfer agreements for many many fields of study.

Our community college even has an Honors Program for smart, hardworking students like your daughter! Every year about a quarter of the students from my daughter’s high school choose to start out at the community college because it is so economical. Some turn down great out of state schools like Penn State to do so. About a quarter go directly to the University of Maryland at College Park, and the rest of the students go to all sorts of other colleges in other places.

It is really, really tough when we don’t have the kind of money we’d like to be able to send our kids to the schools that they really deserve. I’m going to be in a tight situation in two years when my daughter goes to college. I am so very happy that we have a good community college where she can study for her first two years.