No one is being rude. The responses are dealing with the typical issue of an OOS student and lack of aid.
If they call the school, they’ll simply be told that the school doesn’t have aid to give. If they continue with issues like: we don’t have savings, we have to pay for two households, we won’t have enough to live on if we pay full cost, and we pay federal taxes, then the school is going to either give the same answers we are giving or simply brush them off.
The federal gov’t does not subsidize UIUC’s tuition. The federal gov’t provides loans for all citizens and some SMALL grants for low income students.
The parent appears to be foreign, but now a citizen. She may not understand that American schools are not a “free for all.” Privates don’t care where you’'re from, but state-owned universities do. A foreign-born parent may be simply looking at rankings, and then making their list. That’s fine if you’re prepared to pay.
If this student had applied to UCLA and Berkeley, the problem would be the same…no aid.
Does UIUC say they give no aid? Yes UCLA does not but does this school? When I looked into Michigan I think they did give some aid to OOS, at least according to their web site.
Can OP contact GT and appeal the admissions decision since there was a mistake in the paperwork? If OP’s son is in for CS at UIUC he is probably an excellent student.
I agree, call the FA office at admitted schools, worst case they will say no. They may be helpful. Last year I found the FA incredibly helpful and there were mistakes on our forms that when I spoke or emailed to them they were able to correct and it made a huge difference. For the record this was not with state schools but still.
Just go to UGA and transfer to tech. Going out of state to then transfer will only cause you to lose Hope. Also, the university system of GA has transfer agreements between schools so most if not all of the credits will transfer to tech.
I’m not sure how Hope works but in Florida for BF you have to start using it within 2 years so you can’t just go OOS and then transfer back. You have to watch the timing. Also no guarantee of being able to transfer.
I think this student should stay instate for GA, or take a gap year. Howevrr, there is no guarantee that he will be accepted at GA Tech next year either.
All their “grants” appear to be for Illinois residents (except the federal Pell, FSEOG, and TEACH grants). They do offer about “1500 scholarships”, but they use the FAFSA to award them based on the criteria above. I think if the college planned to offer this student any scholarships, they would have been listed in the financial aid package he received.
The transfer admission rates for CS at GT are very low. Most transfers into CS are coming from GPC or somewhere else with TAG or articulation agreement.
The OP has to look at the schools the student has applied to, and if the financial safety is as good as UAH (as an example). Since UAH offers good merit (chart describes combination of SAT or ACT and GPA) - eng/CS is very strong there. They may still have application for the merit scholarships available. UA (under the same system, UA, UABirmingham, UAHuntsville) closes the merit off with a Dec deadline. For eng/CS UAH and the engineering/CS community offer more IMHO than UABirmingham. I think UAB probably is also closed for merit opportunity with earlier deadline.
One has to look at cost/benefit.
Many parents don’t understand this whole process until their older/oldest child is in their senior year and then they may have missed some deadlines, test deadlines, etc.
This doesn’t help the OP and his kid, but for future reference, check the state schools in Texas. If you get a $1000 scholarship, which is not too difficult in some of the schools, you also get in-state tuition rate. Do you know if any other state has similar policy?
Don’t expect anything from UIUC. They are known for poor aid. They even put mostly parent plus loan in my D’s FA package. What a joke. They also dropped out from the NMS lust a few years ago.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek That is new to me and unfortunate. Texas A&M is still doing it as well as some of the UTs. A bit difficult to quickly verify if UT Austin is the only exception.