Now here’s something interesting I’ve just stumbled upon while poking around a local university’s website:
[QUOTE=una.edu]
Through a commercial provider (see the website at www.afford.com/una), the University of North Alabama provides a monthly payment plan that enables students and families to spread all or part of annual expenses over equal monthly payments, eliminating the need for lump sum payments at the beginning of each term.
This interest-free monthly payment option is designed for students and families who do not want or need a loan to pay for tuition and other expenses, but who are interested in spreading payments out prior to and during each semester. This payment plan is available to all students and families for a small annual up-front service fee.
[/QUOTE]
I haven’t checked into it thoroughly yet, but it sounds like a perfect option. I’m planning on enrolling there in the spring for an eventual Master’s in Spanish language, and if I could manage to not take out any more loans than I’ve already got then everything would be just gravy. Actually I don’t like gravy much, so everything would be… cake? Cake is good. You might call around and see if any of the schools your daughter has applied to offer any sort of option resembling this one.
I’m sorry. I didn’t read the rest of the thread, so woops on me if this was already addressed.
But MAN! You’re already living your life just to raise your child. Now you’re pulling double duty and living your life also to raise enough money for your child to attend school in the future when tuition rates will likely be high enough to require community effort just to send one little youngster.
This just feels like feeding the system and I for one will never take part in it. My kids can scrounge like I did. Not because I believe it builds character. Mainly because I believe life is more about living than running on that hamster wheel. There’s too damn many stories about people doing great without a college education for me to adjust my entire course of life and saving habits just so the little guy who may or may not turn into a college-worthy student can have an opportunity to spend 4 or more years of his life training for something he will never be able to get a job doing. :rolleyes:
No, we have been in financial trouble much longer than that, the latest recession just finished us off. We have had Democrats running the show for far too long, and we have a shit ton of welfare problems with all of the illegals here. (And before you say it, I have no problem with illegals per se, but they are getting services without paying it the system to help out.) We have the highest percentage of people on welfare here by far, which has led to this entitlement attitude. It’s no wonder we can’t support our colleges the way we did in the past. Then there are the more “minor” things like laws that are driving businesses out of state and our horrible public school system (well maybe things are better up north, down here almost all of the public school high school graduates have very poor reading and writing skills). Our taxes go up and up, and there are fewer and fewer people capable of paying them.
The really sad thing is, no one in power seems to figure it out. Governor Moonbeam wants to extend the raised excise tax on car tabs, which was supposed to end this month, and the legislature won’t approve it unless he funds more welfare programs! It always seems to be short sighted patch jobs and never any real relief.
Apparently, the OP’s daughter is going to school on a federally funded aid package, so it doesn’t appear this applies. Nor does it address room and board. As for programs getting cut, I still think it must be cheaper to stay home and take that chance and if it happens, then going to school for an extra semester or year should still be cheaper than being out of state.
Why is it that people always assume that anyone who tries to push back on the entitled ones must be bitter?
Oh please. I’ve heard this so many times and no one seems to see the reality of what is going on around us here. You went to college and yet you ended up having three kids you couldn’t afford and are now upset because the state won’t help you send the eldest to college. So the state’s investment in our higher education didn’t pay off very well, did it? We are drowning in debt here!
I have no problem with accessible higher education, but that does not translate into a free ride, or even the student just getting a part time job. Just because the state paid to educate her from kindergarden to 12th grade doesn’t mean it’s going to keep it up thru four years of college - and these days, it just can’t. You chose to have children, it is up to you to be responsible for them - the state is there to catch those who have had disasters or saved almost enough, not those whose whole plan was to get financial aid.
Please don’t make these sorts of assumptions - I do not fit into any slot.
Well, since I haven’t been given any numbers, I can’t do any math. However, I am given to understand that out of state tuition tends to be twice or three times that of in state, and 25% lower cost of living than here is still more than what she would be paying if she lived at home while in school. I also said one extra semester or year, not twice the number of years.
I also don’t believe that the SC system is going to go completely into the crapper - I believe someone mentioned UCSD as being one of the best for what your daughter wants to do, so do you really think that all of the classes she will need will suddenly become unavailable there? If it turned out that some classes she needed near where ever you are disappeared, she can finish up at UCSD. Of course, you’d have to get a loan to pay for it.
I also don’t get the hurry. Why does she have to be done with college in the next three years?
I have an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and the only way I was able to swing it financially was to live at home, car pool to school, work part time and stretch the last two years into three.
The reason for the extra year is that the school I attended had a co-op option where they got you a job with an engineering company and allowed you to work three months and go to school three months. I didn’t make a ton of money but I was able to pay for my tuition and textbooks.
I don’t know if any schools still offer this type of deal, but I couldn’t have made otherwise.
No, they don’t tend to pay taxes other than stuff like sales tax. Many don’t speak English, many or most don’t have any skills other than doing landscaping, being a maid or crop picking, so they have low paying jobs with no benefits. They have & raise their children on MediCal, and any left over money they have goes back to Mexico. They work like hell, and unlike many groups, their children do tend to take advantage of opportunities to get ahead - as long as they don’t end up in a gang. But unfortunately, the barely checked flow across the border is just too much for our economy.
Nope, we’ve had a Democrat since the first of the year, and our legislature is almost always a Demo majority.
I really don’t know how long we’ve had a Democratic majority in power up there in Sacramento, but I’m pretty sure it’s been at least 15 years.
I don’t know about Alice…but yeah, for right now I’m living my life to raise my children - I faced that when I had them. My dad paid for my college, I had no student loans (I had a scholarship my final year). This meant I got out, got my low paying right out of college job and bought a house. Invested. Put money into my 401k. I didn’t have kids for another ten years, so I had plenty of time for myself, during which I built a fairly successful career and a decent financial foundation.
My husband had loans. They forced him into bankruptcy because he got out in a recession and his low paying right out of college job wasn’t sufficient. He wrecked his credit and had large loans hanging over his head for years.
I’d much rather my kids NOT scrounge. If they don’t go to school, the money is fungible.
The savings is that she’s not paying full tuition for those theoretical 6 years, or kept from doing internships and working. And you don’t really know that it would be 6 years, if classes are on a 3 year cycle and she’s ready to take classes in her major, well, it’s not impossible that she could finish in 3 years.
You also don’t know that it will be only 3 years at the private school. Honestly, I would put that at lower odds than the whole of the California university system falling off into the ocean, which seems to be the basis of your OP. This is the state that has some of the best engineering departments in the nation. If you want to make that assumption I’m not going to argue with you, but I am surprised you’re so confident that you’re ready to send your kid deep into five-figure debt over it.
We had a Republican Governor for 8 years, the budget got no better.
Illegals pay taxes- lots of taxes. They certainly pay Sales taxes, they pay liquor and Tobacco taxes, DMV fees, and the like, and those are 56% of the budget. And by and large they pay Income taxes- most all Illegals file and pay income taxes -and even if they don’t file, the withholding is taken out. Few illegals work under the table- a employer needs plausible deniability in case of a ICE raid, they need to show they got some sort of docs and were treating the illegals just like every other employee.
And, your sources of highest welfare is a right wing blog, and he’s lying. http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_wel_cas_tot_rec_percap-caseloads-total-recipients-per-capita CA comes in 5th. Still too high. Not to mention, there’s no real ‘welfare’ anymore, what dudes are calling welfare are various aid programs such as Food Stamps, AFDC, Sec 8, and so forth, many of which are Federally funded.
In CA, Health & Human Services makes up 26% of the budget. Most of that is health care. Welfare itself is $11 million or about 7% of the budget.
FWIW, at the CSU I went to (less than two years ago. . . and I have many friends graduating literally this weekend, too), most of my friends graduated in 3-4 years. The ones who took longer didn’t take longer because of lack of classes, but more because they were failing things, not taking a full load, etc. This isn’t something unique to the CSU system, as you point out.
You know the biggest difference since the whole financial crisis hit? I had to add more classes on the first day, rather than ahead of time (and was never not added). I also had to take more online classes. So? Did I mention I have zero debt? That’s totally worth the headache of having to get an add slip signed.
I just wanted to point this out as the reality for so many kids coming out of high school now, and it isn’t the end of the world. So your kid doesn’t just go to school and do nothing but study (not like that’s what they do, anyway); so they have to work harder to get the same result - I sure hope you didn’t raise them to expect the world to just hand them stuff, because they’ll have a big eye-opening coming to them.
Seriously? You come in here and snark at everybody under the sun to bitch about how hard your shit was to get through, how nobody pays for you and you have to work so hard and it’s miserable and you’re miserable, and someone commiserates with you, and you can’t help but continue to be a bitch to that person? Yeah, your life does sound miserable, and you sound like a miserable person.
FWIW, I attend college tuition free @ Berea College. BC does not charge tuition, as it’s a work study school. All students are expected to work 10 hours a week and that is our sole contribution to our tuition. Students may be required to pay room & board (some don’t even pay that) depending on their circumstances. I pay very little for r & b. There’s loans for those who don’t have scholarship money to pay for r & b.
And the work itself isn’t “hard”. I’m a tour guide for the college. Other jobs include working in the cafeteria, bookstore, library, etc. It’s a pretty good deal. You should look the school up.
If it hadn’t been for Berea, I’m not sure I could have gone to school. I’m a nontraditional student (older than 23) and didn’t qualify for a lot of scholarships myself (average intelligence here-- only a 23 on the ACT). Berea has given me an opportunity to earn a B.A. that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have had.
