University of Alabama vs Indiana University (Business and Undergrad)

“The FAFSA” does not give aid to anyone; it’s just a tool to calculate your level of need. IU doesn’t give need-based aid to OOS students, so even if the FAFSA result says that you can’t pay as much as IU costs, there’s no funding source that’s going to fill the gap.

Does your dad understand that you cannot borrow that much in your own name? The maximum you can borrow, via federal guaranteed loans, is 27K over four years. Any additional would be in the form of parent loans. Even if you make the payments, it would legally be your parents’ debt.

And 100K is a lot of debt. You’re interested in the financial planning field, so think of this as your first case study: look up the interest rates for Parent PLUS loans and calculate what your payments would be, and how much total you would ultimately be paying by the time the loans were paid off. Also, if your parents were to invest the difference between UA and the first two years of IU, figure out how much that investment would earn over what would have been the life of those loans, and figure out the total difference: the eventual total cost of the loans plus the value of the invested savings.

Calling it “budgeting correctly” sounds nice, but we’re talking about major sacrifices. Make sure that your dad fully appreciates the burden he’s suggesting, and that he’s prepared to make the payments if, for any reason, you can’t. All sorts of things can happen in life that no amount of college prestige can prevent.

My opinion is that the difference between Kelley and Culverhouse is not worth that big a hit. You can be very successful with a 'Bama education, and an IU education is not a golden-ticket guarantee. Your success will be much more about you than about which of these fine schools you attend.

(Also note that it can be highly competitive to get into the IB stuff at Kelley. You would be pretty unhappy if you spent all that money and then got shut out of the elite opportunities. That can happen.)

'Bama Culverhouse debt-free sounds like the winner to me.
Good luck and congrats on great offers!

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