I Pit Lack of Finacial Aid for my Kid's College Education!

Yes, and I deployed 4 times to the Middle East, Haiti in 2004, and myriad other places for varying reasons. All told, I have been on the road no less than 2 years of my 10-year career on deployments. I earned it.

As was said above, the military is a perfectly viable way to help pay for your education. I still had to hold down a job at a restaurant and had to take out a fairly small amount of student loans. It can absolutely be done.

I never said you didn’t earn it. I think the GI Bill is awesome, and a perfectly fair reward for service.

But it’s still not exactly equating apples with apples to say that you got through university so other people should be able to do it too.

The fact is that, once you started university, you didn’t have to cope with the same pressures of finding tuition money as other people did. I’m not arguing that your experience was unfair or anything, but it is different, and to pretend that it isn’t, as you are doing here, is disingenuous.

I disagree. I alleviated the pressure you refer to by making a decision that comes with plenty of other pressures. The Middle East is no garden spot, and I doubt very much that the average student gets shot at with any regularity.

My experience is indeed different, and I’ve made no attempt to pretend that it isn’t. However, it is factual to state that it is a way to pay for college when you previously had no other way to do so. I made a decision, and everything has a price. If that’s not your particular brand of vodka, feel free to go another way. Nevertheless, the point stands that if you want it badly enough you’ll find a way to get it done.

Because there isn’t a social contract that allows the government to pay to send every child to college and there certainly isn’t a specific tax one is forced to pay to support it. If the government paid to send every child to college, then I’d have gone and maybe not have ended up disabled, at least not this early. But that wasn’t happening in the late 70’s and I have to assume that it wasn’t happening when the OP was of college age either. So why did she just figure that money would come from somewhere to pay for her kids’ college?

We aren’t talking about K-12 - despite the abysmal “education” kids are getting in CA public schools these days, I still figure it’s better they go there and get some book learning. Tho something really needs to be done about the amount of money the schools get vs the poor quality product they turn out.

Probably just as well since you can’t seem to stay on subject, nor answer direct questions. As I said, if all you bring to the table is emotion, why do you even come?

I haven’t done anything wrong, yet you all continually invade and degrade my standard of living to support these kids. And not getting a college education is not a substandard life, even if it did turn out that the OP’s daughter doesn’t make it there.

What you all don’t seem to see is all of this “think of the poor innocent children” business just makes for more and more chucklehead parents - the more you rescue them without making them earn it, the more they feel they are entitled to it. Such as the OP who had a second child knowing she was going to apply for WIC, apparently doesn’t work herself and is now mad because no one is going to pay to send child number one to a four year college. Does anyone here feel that any random child has the right to a free or heavily subsidized four year college education?

Actually, it’s 65 and all they do is change the name of the benefit - it’s still the same money.

Hence the surprise when Fear Itself said his wife was on SSDI. OTOH, I’ve only been on it since 2007 so things may have been very different prior to then.

I’d have a bit more sympathy for this argument if there were other ways, aside from joining the military, to get equivalent assistance.

The idea that military service, and only military service, is deserving of reward with a college education is a rather backwards notion, IMO. If there were a civil equivalent that didn’t require people to sign up (a) to possibly get killed in (b) a ridiculous and dishonestly-engaged war, i’d accept the equivalency you’re trying to draw here.

And this is the Curlcoat Show problem in a nutshell. The pot calling the kettle black yet again. When there is not a single other person on this board who ever speaks a word in your defense or even in defense of your positions, that might be the point at which you might want to step back and think. And that’s the last I’m ever saying to you.

No, joining the military is a perfectly viable way of joining the military. Given the current status of American armed involvement, it’s also a good way to get maimed or dead. And if you have a moral objection to killing people, it’s not a good way to try to earn an education or anything else.

I get that you’re very proud of your military involvement, but I agree that this is remarkably disingenuous. We’re a nation at war. Signing up for the military is not a benign choice for college financing like getting some other job. It comes with a distinct risk of life and wellbeing. Suggesting that can just be handwaved away because oh yay, limited funding for higher education is ridiculous. Maybe you should save your recruitment speeches for people who have indicated some interest, not a teenaged girl with a dream of being a microbiologist.

Therefore everyone should manage?.
Tuition goes up 10 to 20 percent a year. It is getting far more expensive than it used to be. You get a diploma and an educational mortgage when you graduate. Grants are scarcer and smaller.
You sound like an old man telling about his problems before cars existed and how he managed to get around.

Nowhere did I say that it was.

I couldn’t care less about your opinions about the wars. That’s not what this is about. It never was.

OP, good luck to you. Sorry for helping to hijack this into irrelevancies. With that, I’m out.

In the MA system, you need to have a certain (high) GPA to be allowed to take more than 15 credits.

Dude, do you really need to quote the entirely of an 11-paragraph post in order to add a total of 21 words to the conversation?

You are just going to have to take my word for it.

My wife became disabled and began collecting SSDI in 2008. She died one month ago. You don’t know what you are talking about, or you are deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.

Thank you. And besides which it’s not necessarily an option even for those who are willing - my little brother, for example, is asthmatic (not exactly a rare issue), so they wouldn’t have taken him anyway.

If someone joins the military simply to go to school and not for love of country or willingness to kill the enemy, I really don’t want them serving. At least not on my behalf.

I think the OP should sit down with the daughter and just lay out all the facts.

She could go to her school of choice and deal with the debt. If she goes this route, she better make sure her school has a very solid program in microbiology, that she snatches ever internship she can get, and that she knows exactly what she wants to do with that degree. So that when it’s time for her to graduate, hopefully she will have a job or a graduate school lined up for her, and the debt won’t be a problem. She will not have the luxury of being starry-eyed and not goal-directed. She will have to have a ten-year-plan.

Option 2: find a more local university in the area where she would not have to take out quite as many loans, if any at all. California’s got a ton of schools. Surely there is one that would meet both her intellectual and financial needs. If she really is a good student, a lower-tiered school may find her more attractive than a higher-tiered school. She would just need to bust even more to get internships during the summer (Howard Hughes is a big one). If you go to an obscure institution but can say, “Hey, my name’s on a paper in a peer-reviewed journal!” by the end of your 4-year education, then that can overshadow any perceived weakness of an institution.

Option 3: find a cheaper school (let’s make it a 4-year institution), fulfill all the basic requirements there for a biology major (calc, chemistry, physics) and then transfer to a higher tier school. This way, she can still make use of the scholarships she has now, have time to secure some more, become the big fish in a small pond hopefully and get stellar recommendations from her profs there, and then be able to go to whatever school she wants to go to, with any monies that they may provide her (or bite the bullet and take on debt, but it would just be for a couple of years rather than four).

Option 4: Think out of the box. Find a school where your daughter will be a racial or gender minority. Schools like that tend to have scholarship money for students like that. Again, even if she just stuck it out for just two years, that’s two years of education that could very well be free. And she’d have some interesting stories to tell.

Your daughter can go to college and it doesn’t have to be so stressful. She does not have to risk going to Afghanistan and getting her head blown off either. She just needs to prioritize. I wanted to go to Cornell, and I got accepted and even offered a scholaship. But while the scholarship amount would have been generous if it had been offered by another school, it was paltry compared to the cost of tuition. So, since my parents didn’t have anything saved either, I had to make the tough decision and forgo expensive Cornell for free Georgia Tech. As much as I hated my experience there, it has gotten me where I am today…among the professionally employed. And without debt. Your daughter is discovering the uncomfortable concept of “trade-offs”. Sometimes it’s not about what you want or think you deserve. It’s about what you can afford and what you can make do with. With your help, I’m sure she will do fine.

I think universities share part of the blame. While most other industries in the United States have been forced to make significant changes to their business model in order to compete in a dog-eat-dog world, universities are still living in their 1950’s bubble. Tuition has outpaced inflation for the last 30 years because they don’t want to adapt and actually reduce benefits and pay for their professors. And they are pricing themselves out of reach for a lot of middle income families.

My daughter’s boyfriend’s parents are both college professors. His mother lamented to me that her increase this year was only going to be 2%. No one has taken away her pension or forced her to pay more for health care. She’s just going to have to somehow make due on 102% this year.

Oh, and his father just started a one year, paid sabattical to do “research.” So far that research has consisted of traveling through Europe with his new bride.

So, yeah, I don’t mind taxpayers subsidizing education when it is needed, but I also fail to see how a college can ask for subsidies when they are charging such an astronomical tuition.

Yeah, SSI and what you receive are wayyyy crazy two totally different things and a complete smear job as compared to what you actually get.
Oh, wait, you mean it’s not? It’s just SSDI? Well thanks for clarifying, that’s not at all receiving public benefits and then crying about people who can’t pay their own way.

That’s your problem right there- 25th percentile is probably enough to get admitted to most good schools, but I’d be willing to bet a large sum of cash that 25th percentile gets an instant circular-file for scholarship applications.

So suck it up and get a Stafford loan like everyone else, or pay for her to go to whatever your local college is, and have her live at home.

That was my choice back when I was a sophomore in high school- either get a scholarship somewhere, or live at home with Mom and Dad and attend U of H (which while not a bad school overall, was not high on my list)

There are other programs. Americorp and the Peace Corp both forgive or subsidize. There are programs for people getting education degrees willing to teach in urban areas and programs for medical professionals in rural areas. There is an entire program for loan forgiveness for people working jobs in the public services sector.

Then there are private programs. Many employers provide some tuition reimbursement. A lot of the students I went to school with had their employers paying for at least part of their degree. A friend’s PhD was funded by her employer (I cannot imagine working full time and getting a PhD, but she did it - it took forever). My company’s tuition reimbursement WAS cut for about eighteen months when times were tough, but has been reinstated.

They may not be as good as the GI Bill (although at certain times they have been way better), but there are other options.

Will you be able to major in what you want - probably not? Someone wanting microbiology might need to get a four year RN or an education degree and teach high school Science and work for two or five years to have their undergrad paid for, then do microbiology as a masters program. Will you be able to work the job you want? Probably not. The whole idea with a lot of these programs is to incentivize people to do jobs that aren’t really wanted - at least for a few years. But then, I doubt Iraq was a picnic.

Nonsense.

From your cite:

By using only the numbers for private colleges as a source, the figures are weighted too high for this discussion. If you wanted to make the general point that across the board, tuition has climbed that high, you’d be better off; since this is a discussion about how to handle things cheaply, the relevant figure is the in-state cost for state four-year colleges, ONLY.

In 1982, the ninimum wage was $3.15 per hour. Today, it has almost doubled – certainly it’s increased much more than tuition has.

Moreover, I have just confirmed that my alma mater’s cost has not gone up anywhere near that much: for the 2009-2010 year (PDF), in-state tuition to Virginia Tech was about $14,629 per year in-state, to include room, board, tuition, and fees.

And the Virginia Tech National Merit Scholarship provides, as of 2009-2010, almost precisely the same percentage of tuition as it did back in my day – nearly covers tuition and fees.

So please explain to me how, today, someone cannot do the same thing?

By the way, here is a list of schools that give a completely full ride to National Merit Finalists who declare that school their first choice.

Can’t be done today? Bullshit.