With an ACT score of 30, she’d be a shoo-in for an honors scholarship at the university where I teach. (Which probably wouldn’t be a good fit for her, since we’re a small school with no engineering programs, but I think the basic principle applies: her best bet might be a mid-tier state university, not necessarily in your own state, that is trying to raise its profile and is willing to give out scholarships to strong-ish students to make that happen.)
I’m sorry that you’re in this situation. But as I keep saying, you can get your daughter into college. Just not her dream college and her (and your) dream way of financing it.
I think most Dopers know how it feels to be your daughter and have their dreams deferred either through flat-out rejection or because of finances. Very few us of went through education without making some tough decisions.
So what’s the worse case? Taking out the tremendous debt. OK, I totally understand not wanting to rock that amount of debt. So we go to plan B, which is to send your daughter to one of the cheap schools. You said it didn’t sound like a good investment to send her there, but I say she’s better off there than flipping burgers. It may not be as bad of a place as you think it is. Even if everyone there is illiterate, her professors will not be. If she maintains her greatness, she might be able to find a professor who will take her under his/her wing and help her fly out of that place. Perhaps by writing her a stunning letter of recommendation so she can transfer somewhere else. Or maybe she’ll stick it through the whole 4 years, get a fellowship to a great grad program (she’ll have to bone up on her test-taking skills), and end up studying side-by-side with students that went to more expensive schools. My workplace is full of smarty-pants engineers and scientists. I can count on one hand the number who went to Ivy League schools. Everyone else either went to schools that were solidly good but also solidly public (like yours truly), or went to schools that you’ve never heard of. There are a few who had circuitous educational paths as well.
All the great effort you went into parenting this kid is your investment. Not the non-existent savings account. If she’s got what it takes, she will make it somehow. At this point, your job is just to advise her. Because the debt will not be your responsibility, but hers. The college she goes to will be her college, not yours. The path she takes into adulthood will be paved based on her own successes and failures, not yours. You gave her what you could and now it is her job to make do with what she has. And what she has I’m sure is good enough.
Along these lines, it’s not always better to be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond. Wherever she goes, there will be smarter, harder working students than her. There will just be more of them at the top schools.
Granted, the guy who graduates from Harvard in the bottom 10% is probably going to get a better first job offer than the one who graduates in the top 10% from someplace else - but after your first job, nobody gives a shit where you went to school. Ability will tell.
Can’t get a good scholarship, boo fucking hoo. I’m not eligible for Pell because I make too much money (last year I made 24 thousand dollars, I’M RICH!) and I haven’t spawned, and I’m not eligible for scholarships because I’m a plain-Jane white girl, so I’m up to my ears in student loans and I’ve worked full time, sometimes *two *jobs full time, since the day I graduated high school. I drive a car that was made in 1993 and I don’t own a fucking couch. It’s taken me 7 years to graduate doing two classes a semester, but you know what? I’m doing it, and I have a minimum of complaints about it because I’m not a stuck-up whiny bitch who has to have everything just perfect in a world where I know I can’t afford it. I’ve got the solution to your daughter’s financial troubles right here. She can suck it up like the rest of us and do what she’s got to do to get by, and she’ll be fucking fine.
Good thing you’re not the complaining type!
Good thing I’m not afraid of work!
Working while in college fucking blows. It isn’t a flaw to want to avoid it if possible.
I didn’t say it was a flaw, and yeah, it sucks balls. I’ve been doing it for years. But it certainly is a flaw to be stubborn and obstinate to the point of refusing to take out loans when you’ve exhausted all your other options and are dead set on going to a big, expensive school that’s far from where you life. She could get a job, pay for a couple years out of pocket at a community college and get her basics or even a transfer degree, and oh look, she has Pell and she has a Stafford loan too–great! She’s set compared to a lot of us, and bitching about it gets her exactly nowhere. A good solution would have been a part time job starting a couple of years ago, with all her earnings going into a savings account. But since clearly nobody thought of that, the best she can do now is get herself organized and get a job and Just Do It ™. Nobody is entitled to a free ride, you get what life gives you and make what you can of it. Now STFU and take a walk down to McDonald’s.
Having started off as a very small fish in a big pond and growing into a bigger one as I moved through my undergraduate studies, I agree with this. What happened to me was that I managed to grab a nice gig working in the lab of one of my professors (there goes luck again). I started off as a test-tuber washer, occassionally flooding the floor of the wet lab with my crazy shenanigans. (As many times as I rag on my school, I have to say I did have some good times there). Profs started seeing me on the floor at all hours of the day and learned my name and suspected I was intelligent. Probably helped to get my sis get a job (hired by the department chair, who worked right across from the lab that I was always flooding :)). Got the keys to the building (came in handy when I wanted peace and quiet on the weekends). Got to be co-author on a paper. Graduate school? I only had to send out one email to a potential graduate advisor before I got an offer. Not because of my grades or test scores. But because I had a golden halo and she could somehow see it all the way from New Jersey.
Lab jobs are easier to get at a big research institution, I’ll grant you, but the competition for those slots is fiercer and you really have to stand out. Where I went to school, my undergrad program (biology) was the small fish in a big pond (engineering), and the professors who were in my area of study (ecology) were still trying to get their shit together, research-wise. All the other students in my major were trying to get into med school, which I knew I didn’t want to do. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and a professor just happened to pick up on this. He needed a committed worker, and I needed a place in society. So all those things combined made for opportunities for me that may not have existed if I had gone to a school with a bigger biology department and a better ecology program.
I remember how inadequate I felt as a first-year. By my senior year, though, my classmates were bugging me to “hook them up” with jobs, expressing envy that I had a key to the building. I tried to make it up to them by autoclaving the various objects that went into their navel and tongue piercings. My way of giving back to society. 
So absolutely. Sometimes smaller and less impressive IS better, if you play your hand well and the timing is right.
To be fair, the daughter isn’t complaining. For all we know, she could be out there right now, stoically working and saving her pennies.
No one should ever enter into ANY debt with any expectation of being able to escape it. Unfortunately, this seems to be an antiquated way of thinking.
It is if you are expecting someone else to pay for you to go to college.
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To be fair, the daughter isn’t complaining. For all we know, she could be out there right now, stoically working and saving her pennies.
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True, but how far from the tree does the acorn fall?
Hey, starwarsfreek42, where have you been?
Yo curlcoat! I’m a Lurky McLurkerson, but I’ve been around. This thread just happened to strike a chord with me today. Exciting story. I took off of work for a week because I was very sick, doctor wouldn’t let me work, and I am now even more broke than usual. Meanwhile, the bookstore at school failed to have either book I needed for my classes this semester, and the deadline to charge them to financial aid was yesterday at noon. So I couldn’t buy it from the bookstore because they don’t have it, and I can’t buy it from them if they get it next week because my loan is off-limits until the school decides to release the funds, and I’m riding on a one day paycheck thanks to being deathly ill. I just ordered one of the books from Amazon because we’re already two weeks into the (very short summer) semester and I can’t afford to fall further behind. I do hope it comes by Tuesday like they say it might. This leaves me with eight dollars in my checking account. Eight. Dollars. Until next Friday, when I’ll have to pay the utilities and buy the other book, and I’ll be back down to about twenty bucks. Guess I’d better go get a pallet of Ramen this weekend. Thanks ever so much campus bookstore, for fucking me over on my very last semester. Also I still feel like refried shit from being sick. So for anybody who wants to complain about how much they’ve suffered because of hard times finding money for college, I say to you today, shut the fuck up.
This lie from hell needs to go away yesterday. Come off of it. You qualify for every general scholarship, you qualify for woman-specific scholarship, you qualify for every scholarship for whatever your “white” ethnicity happens to be.
This “I’m white so there’s nothing for me” lie is just damned offensive. And ridiculously ignorant for someone alleging to be interested in educating themselves.
Okay, let me rephrase that. I am eligible, but I didn’t get picked, and I won’t. I graduated from high school a long time ago. I do not have a lot of volunteer work or work-study or dual enrollment on my resume. My grades in high school were above average except in math, my college grades are good but not spectacular because hey, work work work. I have an F for a sociology class that I dropped out of too late in the semester that will hang over my head for the rest of forever. And before you berate me for that, my grandmother was dying that semester, and fuck you. There are a few scholarships for people with associate’s degrees that I’ll be eligible for in August, but you have to be under 25 for them and I am not anymore. So no, I will not get any scholarships. I am not eligible for Pell because I make too much money and I do not have any dependents. There are lots of people in my exact same situation, because they are average students floating right on the poverty line, and they are not minorities they will have a harder time getting aid than others. No, I don’t have a cite for you. Fuck off.
Exactly.
Maybe starwarsfreek42 is a stupid white girl. They often find it hard to get scholarships.
So it has nothing to do with you being white. Thanks for clearing that up.
I suppose you could say that by “white” I sort of meant average, vanilla, unremarkable, rather than actually being a white girl. Although if I were about 2000 dollars a year poorer and black, I’d get Pell. Go fig.
Scholarships aren’t supposed to be for average, vanilla, unremarkable people.
There are loans available for average, unremarkable people who want to go to college. For average, unremarkable people with a demonstrated financial need, a portion of those loans will frequently be subsidized. A subsidized student loan is financial aid.
What if you were $2,000 a year poorer and white? Could you get one then?
What i’m asking—and because i’ve never applied for a Pell grant i don’t know the answer to this question—is whether race is one of the criteria used in determining recipients of Pell Grants.
According to this page:
I see nothing there to indicate that a white applicant and a black applicant with identical financial need would be treated differently.
Are you sure you’ve applied to college? Pell grants are for anyone who (financially) qualifies.