I'm in a somewhat similar(though far less tough) situation. I am currently paying for my school myself and I simply was not going have enough to afford it even after my paid internship. So I opted instead to take a leave of absence and work for a while. I think this option is making more sense as the overall value of a degree declines, especially in fields like CS where a degree is not necessarily a requirement.
This is broken, and it shouldn't be this way. There are far too many broken bureaucracies in modern society, both governmental and corporate. And most of these impede those with the fewest resources or capabilities to work around them. Just because we've been trained to think that government or corporate policy is supposed to be complex and broken, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve.
Without a ridiculously good merit-based scholarship from a great school, I never would have been able to attend any of the top-tier schools into which I had been accepted, because my parents' money was counted as my money, even though their money was clearly not mine, and not something that I could choose to spend.
I worked a full time job during my undergrad for the same reason: my parents' income was above the threshold for government support, even though my parents didn't support me. It was frustrating that other people whose parents earned a tiny bit less but did pay for them to live and study, would also get a huge lump of free money from the government each year. But ultimately, not getting free money made me independent and forced me to learn to manage my time and make money from my skills. That lesson is going to pay dividends for a long time to come.
My parents repeatedly said they would support me, then didn't, after not letting me get loans (I had a pretty nice scholarship, but it didn't cover housing in a major city or fees or food).
I couldn't see that being possible with today's college costs.
The flip side to this is I know someone who went through the legal steps to have their parents money not be counted as theirs and got huge scholarships. Trick: Their parents still supported him and were worth about 100 million. So he got a nice Mercedes(2 actually, he crashed one) and cheap college.
It's a flawed system, but simply not counting your parents money is an even more flawed system.
Or just marry your roommate. As soon as you're married (or get an honorable military discharge) you don't have to be saddled with your parents' income.
IMHO, it's far more of an error that those without privilege/money are denied access to education than those with privilege/money get an undeserved benefit.
This doesn't just affect the individual, it affects all of us who are trying to hire good engineers. The smaller the number of people that are allowed to attempt an engineering degree, the fewer that will earn them. Every single potential engineer that is prevented from entering the field because of education hinders us.
Trying to bring this back to HN a bit more, I think that entrepreneurs and capitalists should realize (and you may already be on the same page with me) that they are in essence farming society; they are leveraging and multiplying the work and efforts of many others in order to enrich their own wealth and the wealth of others. The more fertile the soil, the more the entrepreneur can grow. For technology based capitalists, a more educated society provides far more fertile soil both in terms of workforce and potential customer base.
In Germany, there's the Duale Hochschulreife, where students apply to companies and colleges. The company will then pay for your degree in exchange of your working for them during the breaks and some additional periods fully sanctioned by the University in question. They also pay you a wage for the time and usually offer you a full time job after you've graduated.
The benefit for the companies which do this is that they've essentially trained engineers allready familar with their company culture, technology stack and working procedures, which require no additional time to train. Also it's beneficial for the image of the company.
The benefit for the students is that they graduate debt free and with solid job prospects (since they allready have one).
I'd agree, except that most financial aid is zero sum (in terms of scholarships/grants). If you don't get it, someone else will who also might become an engineer. Someone gets screwed either way if your parents really won't support you. But if they were lying, then you go to college anyway.
Every time the idea of basic income is discussed I think that universal healthcare, subsidized education, and - possibly - targeted infrastructure spending are much better approach.
The system is set up in a way that OP (and I am sure many others) found herself in this strange valley, where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The reason that economists like basic income is that each recipient is free to decide how to apply that income to best advance their lot in life. Any other breakdown, and you get more overhead of policy and administration because you are determining for a population some some mix of programs. The risk that you fall into some policy gap, just as in the article, is increased at that point; and the government is then paying both the benefit, and for a higher administration cost to qualify people and distribute the benefit.
Sounds like you're smart and have skills in demand. Try to get a job at a bay area company; living like a student should allow you to save enough money to go back to college within 18-24 months (if you even want to go back by then).
Don't know about you, but there was no way she could win. Her financial aid package wasn't covering her costs, and making money to close the gap just reduced the aid.
Same here, on my third attempt to get Fin Aid, I tracked my time spent working on it. It was the first year that I received any money. It worked out to ~5 Dollars per hour.
I agree with the ultimate sentiment, which is that it's generally inadvisable to try and pay your way through school these days. The federal government will let you and your parents borrow as much as you need to pay for school, and you'll make more money after you finish your degree, so your efforts are better spent trying to finish in as few semesters as possible to minimize the amount of money you need to borrow instead of trying to pay for things as you go.
This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren't willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
I'm not saying that it's the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000's at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that's increasingly something that's not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.
Yep. If your parents are wealthy and don't want to help you, you are most definitely not going to a high-end school, not even a state flagship. At that point community college is the only reasonable option (because it's actually possible to earn enough without the degree to cover the cost).
You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is that everyone's parents will "refuse" to pay and the financial aid system would be totally overwhelmed.
I am incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful that my parents value high-quality education and come from a tradition of academics who help their children through college. Some of my friends who are far smarter than me had to give up on dreams because their parents don't understand how inflation works and think you can still pay your own way through high-quality undergrad in the US.
That is, until you get to the high-end Ivies. Harvard would have cost me $12,500 over UW Madison's $24,000, but I was never going to get accepted there.
My parents had just gotten divorced. My dad had zero net worth, my mom very little. Full federal financial aid and need-blind admission at Columbia U. Super cheap, but only later did I realize how lucky I was (in a way) compared to a kid from a moderately wealthy family with two siblings in college. Let alone my friend who came to CU from a rich family but with no parental support who had to get an official parental divorce to make it work!
I think your analysis is mostly correct, but it leaves out the option of really hustling for scholarship money.
My good friend from high school was in a position of not being able to afford our flagship state school, even though he got accepted.
He basically made it his full time job to scour all of the scholarship websites and apply to everything he was even minimally eligible for. He was constantly writing, or altering essays to fit a particular scholarship prompt.
All in all, he was able to afford school and has since graduated and become a pharmacist.
Like in a lot of things, hard work and hustle pays off.
The problem is most scholarship programs with significant awards have a single-digit number of winners.
This strategy works for a few of the most shining individuals in the country in any given year who dedicate the time required and get extremely lucky. I tip my hat to your friend, but the nature of scholarship programs is that for every kid like your brother, hundreds more worked just as hard, had just as much hustle, and got nothing (or a little, but not enough to make college affordable).
Paying for school on outside scholarships is an impressive accomplishment, but not something we can reasonably expect kids in general to pull off.
I think he means his friend hustled for the ones that on their own were not significant. Like I think my credit union gives out 5 $500 scholarships a semester. It wouldn't surprise me if the only people who apply are those who's parents work there. If you found a ton of programs like that it can make a pretty sizable dent.
Still, the availability of scholarship money doesn't scale up with the demand for it. They're designed to reward the extraordinarily gifted (or whatever minority status their endowment specifies), not fund education in general.
The incremental cost of going to school versus "just" living is like $6000. Even the child of a rich parent with no financial aid should be able to pull that together, especially if you manage to swing any scholarship money.
No, they shouldn't, because "just" living gives you 40-60 hours/week to work, and going to college doesn't. Especially at a high-level, challenging school.
The financial aid system shouldn't be pre hoc means tested, it should be post hoc means tested. 18 years old is old enough to vote, marry, and enlist in the military. The government ought not to be looking at parents to foot the bills for legal adults.
Students do not have anything close to enough money to cover the actual cost of their education before earning it.
The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc.
The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.
The schools should lend students their education. They are in the best position to underwrite such loans, and such a system would eliminate the current perverse incentives the schools face.
Unsubsidized Stafford loans are, AFAIK, always available no matter what your parents make. They will cover half to most of in-state tuition (~3-5k) at many in-state colleges, but not much more. It wouldn't cover even half the tuition + fees at Cal Berkeley, but it would cover half to most at SFSU.
Don't forget parents with modest incomes but a lot of savings from planning their own retirement. That's the reason I didn't get any financial aid (other than some subsidized loans to cover part of my costs).
Many private schools (including UChicago) supplement FAFSA with CollegeBoard's CSS PROFILE, which is more encompassing and looks straight through retirement savings, business assets, trusts, and everything else. My dad is a CPA and it took him several days to fill it out. He said it was very clearly designed by experts who are very good at finding hidden assets.
Before someone turns that into an argument for state schools, remember that it's really only private schools which give any financial aid at all to middle-class kids.
This annoys the hell out of me. "Retirement account" here is a tax deferred account like a 401k or an IRA, right? There are limits to how much you can put into accounts like these, and in today's world it can be difficult to adequately fund a comfortable retirement on these savings alone.
If you make a modest income but are careful about your spending, it's not unreasonable to have leftover after-tax money that you can invest in other ways. That doesn't mean it somehow ceases to be retirement money.
> where they could use it for things other than retirement
Retirement isn't some thing you just go to the store and buy. There's no clear split between buying goods and services that are "retirement things" and "non retirement things."
Some people retire by quitting their job once they reach some magic number in an account, and then hope that they die before their balance goes to zero. This is increasingly harder to do if you don't want to be working past 70.
The age threshold for withdrawal from some of these tax deferred accounts can be a significant hindrance if you plan to fund your retirement in other ways such as by buying a rental property. You don't want to be buying the property at 60, you want to have already bought it, done maintenance, allowed it to depreciate a bit, etc. so that you can actually make a reasonable profit by the time you're 60.
But your concern of their limitations applies to so few people.
Roughly 30% of people have less than $1000 saved for retirement, in any kind of account [1]
Roughly 55% of people have less than $25K saved, in any kind of account
The 401k personal contribution limit is $17,500 this year, and if someone had a 50% match form their company, they could top that in just ONE single year.
Yes, I know that the vast majority of people don't/can't/won't plan for retirement at all. But we're already talking about "parents with modest incomes but a lot of savings from planning their own retirement." Many of these people could fall into this category.
The part that killed the FAFSA was a mutual fund that my parents committed to use only as a supplement to their retirement accounts. Based on the amount in the mutual fund (in combination with all the other factors), FAFSA estimated that my family could afford $40,000 a year on college, which was over half the household's yearly income and was patently ridiculous.
I'm wondering what the parent meant when they said that their parents were unwilling to help. Does that mean that they would not cosign for a private loan?
If you're referring to me, yes, they totally rejected cosigning a private loan. My school had its own independent program for this, and their credit was not exactly a problem (that year their main band issued them an unsecured note for more than 4 years of the total costs; ironically to set up a computer system, the brand of which I researched and specified as about the last thing I did before going to the university).
A bit more: they were quite determined to make sure none of us graduated from college, with one exception that proved the rule and another than paid her way through a community college level 4 year school, the sort that rents textbooks and was literally on the other side of a creek sharing a border with us. The other 2 of us were more ambitious and ruthlessly crushed.
The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
> The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread.
Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth.
Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for the exact same reason as house prices in 2007. The bizarre funding schemes and underwriting are a temporary state of financial cprruption, not the natural order of things.
Thirdly, the free rider problem only applies to zero sum games. If FedGov stopped blackmailing parents, it would not be education that collapses, just the bureaucracy grown fat on the back of ill gotten money.
Fourthly, to the extent that higher education is a zero sum game, that problem is trivially solvable by funding it with taxes. If higher education is a profitless necessary evil, like street construction and dog catchers, it should be funded the same way.
The equal protection clause is of no use to nineteen year-olds whose assets measure in the hundreds of dollars. What's your suggestion to the student who is wronged by the Fin Aid office? Hire a lawyer and sue? Ridiculous.
>Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ...
What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.
Well, the 2nd is responsive even if the author doesn't know it. MIT is a genuinely expensive place: the last time I knew the numbers, it spent about half your tuition on you in your freshman year and quite a bit more on average for the 3 remaining years. STEM subjects are expensive, all have lab work, and one of the reasons MIT is MIT is that with the rare exception that proves the rule, all courses are taught by tenure track or tenured professors.
You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.
MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.
3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.
4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).
My comment was directed to the repeated claims that free riders mean the only viable way to pay for universities is to bill parents. I am apparently not able to make that clear after staying up to four in the morning.
Is MIT actually that expensive, inflation adjusted, compared to 1960?
Bureaucracy is not just about labelled bureaucrats, but about the well-meaning organizational structure that tends to spring up over time. Take an axe to the budget and the excess structure often disappears with no ill effect. (I'm looking at you, committee meetings and approval processes.)
For academic year 2012-3, the MIT nominal cost is $57,010. Plugging that into the BLS inflation CPI inflation calculator at 2012, that's $7350 1960 dollars.
But that's somewhere around what the tuition was 2 decades later from memory and someone graduating in 1980, the same as my first academic year. Can't remember the rest, maybe $3,000, could be less if you went for less expensive housing (not sure if that was much of an option) and especially food.
Looks like MIT's inflation rate 1979-2012 was very roughly double the CPI; I'm comfortable saying it was around that, and it's congruent with the general reports I've seen on US higher education inflation.
It's been my experience that when people say any they really mean the straightforward stuff like Federal and State grants and loans. Being Ineligible for Federal grants is one thing, but so long as you filled out a FAFSA you were still eligible for school grants, private grants, and private student loans with deferred interest payments. That's a huge incentive to complete a FAFSA. Even people who have used up their Federal and State aid should keep their FAFSA going and check their school's financial aid office for other types of aid.
Case in point: in high school I lined up thousands of dollars in financial aid that no one else bothered to apply to. The largest check being $4,000 from my Alumni association for writing two paragraphs about how much I liked my school. A white friend of mine even got a NAACP scholarship because no one else applied (In case you don't believe this happens or think I'm joking, see [1] (not my friend). No one seemed to mind in his case).
I had some family issues and then had a falling out with my family and was locked out of FAFSA until I turned 23. Now THAT is something that does made you ineligible for pretty much any financial aid aside from traditional loans and working a lot. That really sucked. I ended up having not finishing my bachelors as a result. Thankfully Community College worked out pretty well for me.
Well, none was available as far as my financial aid office knew. ALL the school's financial aid was needs based, so there were no scholarship or school grant options. It was very expensive (and worth every penny) so "small" checks like $4K wouldn't have helped much. And my parents certainly wouldn't have filled out a FAFSA/College Board CSS PROFILE (I believe the latter was required; it is now).
Only other option was the military, but my eyesight was too poor to even enlist in the Army (and this during the Carter nadir of the military).
Do you think the landscape is completely unchanged since the Carter administration?
While this history can certainly be interesting, you're anecdotes aren't all that helpful for people looking for options now such as the person who wrote the blog post.
I don't think it has changed significantly for the better with one exception:
By then, the cost of going to a top school was beyond what almost anyone could do to work through it (MIT used to be known as a place where working class parents could send their children to to become engineers, and they'd work on the side to put themselves through it; didn't Feynman do this in part?), and since academic inflation has been a lot greater than CPI inflation, it's only gotten worse. E.g. not too long after I started in the fall of 1979, as I understand it MIT's costs doubled in the space of a few years (no doubt due to Carter inflation plus MIT's horrible financial management which I detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178931).
MIT still has the same needs based only financial aid system. Others have confirmed that if you don't need it as judged by FAFSA/College Board CSS PROFILE---which my parent would have refused to fill out anyway---you will get insufficient or no loans if your parents don't cooperate/co-sign.
The military eyesight situation has improved due to new procedures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_surgery ; the radial keratotomy available then was right out), although I don't know if my astigmatism would be a disqualifier now, or if it could be arranged or maybe afforded by me as my eyesight was back then.
Bottom line: if the military is not an option, the kids of uncooperative rich parents are still seriously screwed, and for the same reasons.
Declare yourself independent, move out, get a part-time job, remove yourself as a dependent from your parents taxes, etc. etc. Now you are the income source for your own education expenses, and if you don't make that much money should be eligible for all kinds of wonderful tuition assistance programs. If the school asks, just say you have a terrible relationship with your parents and are estranged from them.
I brought that sort of scenario up, was told it wasn't an option, although the lower level staffer I talked to wished it was. Perhaps my school took a particularly hard line, I certainly had a few peers who boasted of scams they and their family were running, e.g. borrowing at subsidized rates and getting >20% returns that Carter era inflation allowed them to earn (the government was slow to acknowledge the inflation it had created back then).
Dunno then. It's exactly what I did. I had to show lots of paperwork, bills in my name, apartment rent payment and cashed rent checks, bank account info etc. But once over that hurdle I was in like Flynn (except I didn't have wealthy parents in the first place).
My school is exceptionally expensive, almost $60K last academic year, and had been historically very bad with their endowment and earning money from inventions, and was one of the post-Civil war ones so didn't it have centuries of compounding donations. Iffy alumni loyalty, particularly for unrestricted donations. In face, tuition was very very highly prized because it was unrestricted....
Prior to a fairly recent overhaul, the technology licencing office (rough quote from memory from Tech Talk, the Institute's official newsletter): "focused on the details of licencing vs. doing a lot of licences" and averaged a little over 1 per year (!!!). Given that I know 3 of those, the LMI Lisp Machine licenses and the same plus Macsyma to Symbolics....
They notoriously screwed up the 3D core memory patent ($40 million lump sum to IBM vs. the offered 1 cent per core) and a synthetic penicillin patent. Either could have paid for a complete replacement of the entire campus. I very strongly suspect these weren't the only screwups, and e.g. Symbolics scammed an exclusive license to Macsyma mostly to keep it out of other people's hands, one reason Wolfram was able to beat it sort of starting from scratch.
Back then, when the prime rate was over 20%, and inflation was over 15%, MIT was getting a much lower return on its endowment. I want to say 4%, but I'm not sure. MIT does a lot better now, but that is also recent.
It got its charter just as the Civil War started, and set up operations just after. So as noted it doesn't have the 2 centuries or more of additional compounding alumni donations the famous Ivies have.
Not sure when it started, and it was again fixed only fairly recently, but the alumni magazine, Technology Review, was dedicated to telling most of the alumni that what they were doing was evil. And again by then the Institute apparently had convinced a lot of alumni that it couldn't be trusted with unrestricted gifts. In its favor it never tried a Princeton Woodrow Wilson Center type donation theft, then again I don't know of any other top school so brazen.
Ah, it also was wretched, not interested or perhaps in part stymied by city government (which hates Harvard with a passion, and MIT gets some of the blowback) in making money off of local real estate. When I showed up the Kendal Square area had that bombed out sort of look, in part due to NASA deciding after JFK's assassination and LBJ becoming President that, oh, on second though Texas is where we should build our space center. There was almost no housing, let alone vaguely affordable and safe, to be found close to campus. I'm sure that bit of MIT's studied indifference to student welfare didn't escape some of the alumni who were the sort to later make a fortune.
Bottom line: not a lot of money to grant to students, and a total focus on needs based aid. And, hmmm, rather obviously students like me who were crushed by the intersection of the financial aid policies of MIT and their parents would never be in a position to donate a lot of money, and not inclined to donate much of what we do have.
All I can say is, I hope a quarter million for an undergrad is worth it to you and that it helps you land a high paying job out of the gate so you can start paying off any loans. Statistically, at around 5 to 7 years post-graduation, your much lower tuition paying state school peers will end up at job parity with you. Unless your school offers some highly specific specialty program that you can't get anywhere else.
I've written here quite a bit about my school experience and why it doesn't have to put new grads into unbelievable debt. I did freshmen through MS for under $30k out of pocket -- in the U.S and not all that long ago. Looking at the subject the last few years I've no reason to think it can't still be done for maybe no more than $45-50k. Paying off all of my student debt 3 years out of undergrad, then earning enough to cover my M.S. out of pocket is a pretty awesome feeling. (BTW My school's entire endowment wouldn't even add up to MIT's yearly earned interest on their's)
If you really think that your school is where you have to go, most outrageously expensive private schools have a handsome tuition assistance program if you can figure out how to work the system -- these days you can probably get an undergrad from one of those schools for less than I paid for my education. They probably do everything they can not to advertise is. But you have to have lots of chutzpah and don't take no for an answer. Hit the tuition assistance office daily, be a squeaky wheel, adjust your living conditions to suite the requirements for maximum assistance. Need to make less than $x per year? Do that. Need to not be a dependent of your parents? Do that (make sure they take you off of their taxes, you might need a copy). Get extra assistance as a school employee? Get a crap job cleaning floors.
Do not pay the inflated sticker price just to have fashionable brand recognition for a brand that won't matter in the job market in 7 years.
Do the math and optimize. If you aren't willing to do that, it might be worth reevaluating why you went to an "exceptionally expensive" school in the first place.
Given that my calling is science, and an undergraduate degree is just a step toward your terminal Ph.D., and getting into a good program for the latter means a lot of luck if you don't have a professor who the admitting department knows recommend you and your ability to do research, yes, it would have been worth it. As long as you get a STEM degree (don't know about other departments, but then again all students have to do a serious amount of the calculus and calculus based mechanics and E&M) its generally considered to be worth the price. Ditto CalTech, and ditto the other 3 top in the world CS schools if you do that major (CMU, UC Berkeley and Stanford).
In my case, with multimillionaire parents who back in the '80s drove one vehicle with a depreciated value of 2 plus or minus years of full costs, no amount of cleverness would have helped with the financial aid office. Due to MIT's horrible money management and youth it just didn't have the money.
As for why I choose MIT, my parents attempted to set up a trap, they were sure I couldn't get into it or CalTech (I'm not a math genius, but good enough to do MIT's required level), so they said it "wasn't worth their money" to send me to any place good but those two. As it turned out, MIT was looking for people like me (ask for details if desired; one less obvious one is that they look for evidence the student can do projects, and submitted a couple of those) and I got in, not that they had any intention of paying more than they could get away with (a saving face sort of thing).
The later experiences of my younger siblings showed that it wouldn't have mattered where I went, except that I probably could have worked my way through the very cheapest possible place, but that was so down market getting into a good grad school would have been iffy. In my field of chemistry, the only none required by the subject accrediting organization courses they offered were analytical lab ones clearly intended for student for whom the undergraduate degree was terminal, for a lab tech career.
They've thought of that. Even emancipated children are not considered financially independent for aid purposes until the age of 25. The only exception is if you can provide documentation of child abuse - police reports, DCF files, etc. Estrangement is not enough.
Even a noncustodial parent you've never met is expected to make the same sacrifice as your custodial parent.
At my school, I once worked with an administrator who helped with the admissions process (every application is read by a minimum of two people, at least back then), and she had her hands on a lot of data, including a big set of accepted students. We looked through them and noted a couple of things: a disproportionate number were first born (like me) or only children, and no admits she looked at were from broken families. She also got a feel for that based on people asking about going to the university in her department, she hears a lot of stories, arranges and gives lots of tours, etc. Hmmm, now that I think about it I cannot remember a single student I knew who came from a broken home.
Basically, it appears that once parents divorce, at least one parent is not willing to pay what the College Board/the school expects, and that's game over.
At least as of a few years ago, that's not quite true. I went back to school at 24, and because I had earned over 50% of my own income in the past year (100% in my case) and had not been claimed as a dependent on my parents' taxes, I was considered independent.
Yeah, that is half of why I dropped out of MIT (the other half was chance to do an ecash startup, but I was financially screwed for this reason otherwise; the alternative was ROTC)
My parents helped me pay for college. In fact, they covered my tuition. We did take out some loans but not much. I am eternally grateful that this debt has not been saddled upon me for the rest of my life, because if it was I probably wouldn't have gone to college in the first place, seeing no way of ever making enough money back to warrant what I've learned.
I did not go to school for CompSci, btw, or anything programming-related (unless you count programming synthesizers as "programming" :P)
as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
True, the debt seems a lot smaller in that context. I'm (very slightly) optimistic that the new rules which cap student loan payments as a % of income and also subsidize public service work will make this burden a little lighter and less intimidating.
But at bottom, it's still a terrible problem. Not everyone is a financial wizard, and after an unpleasant brush with debt as a youth I've been largely allergic to it since. It's disappointing that people who want to take a fiscally conservative approach and pay up front or as they go are finding that becoming ever more impractical, thereby limiting their economic opportunity and productivity. Although many schools offer scholarships and suchlike, they're far from transparent.
I'm currently a PhD student. I quit a fairly lucrative trading career in 2010 and went back to school without any intention of doing a GRA (I was fine with self-funding; to be honest, I wanted to not have a boss for a while)... that lasted one semester.
My adviser realized she liked the idea of paying 1/10 my old salary and getting an actual software engineer on her staff. I'm not one to complain or turn down money, so I took the gig and I'm near finished with the degree.
Moral of the story #1: Go back to school for a PhD with a boat load of cash in your pocket, legitimate skills and solid work experience. You won't have to pay tuition.
My wife and also decided to start a family during this time. We paid for her insurance out of pocket. Once the little guy came into the world, we started getting pamphlets in the mail from the state (aka the broke state of Illinois) regarding free programs (health insurance, food and formula vouchers) that we qualified for due to my lowly GRA salary (my wife is a stay-at-home mom). They don't care about or penalize high savings; these program managers just want to get as many qualified participants on the dole as possible to justify their existence. "Need" is not important; quotas are.
Moral of the story #2: Quit producing taxable income, go back to school, breed like a rabbit. The state will provide.
I realize this may sound harsh to those students currently getting by thanks to federal grants, but if you want to fix the problem, we need to get rid of these fucking programs. Prices will drop. All these loans accomplish is artificially inflating demand and putting graduates deep in debt. It'll be messy, sure, but the system is not sustainable in current form.
I've seen others make a comparable choice for the same reason of independence and also for getting out of workplace politics. I'm completing a GRA now, though not self-directed and only for a Master's. Though the stipend is… humble, without it, I wouldn't even have gone to grad school.
Something specific? Overall, I was surprised to find out how political journal publications are. Before I started, I kinda naively assumed that the best ideas are pushed to the top "because science".
Oh man, don't get me started on pubs. I've actually had it pretty easy, but yes, a minefield. I could publish used toilet paper if it had the right names on it.
The big annoyance for me has been dealing with academics as managers (they're not very good, IMO; there are some phenomenal exceptions, but they tend to leave for industry).
Across this country, this very month, legions of rubes will be getting low-interest student loans to enroll in psychology, general studies, and undecided major degree programs, paying $40k per year, only to drop out shortly thereafter with a huge financial hangover and little ability to pay for it.
In contrast, an electrical engineering degree will easily pay for itself, particularly if you've managed to bootstrap yourself to a third year.
Why haven't you addressed student loans as a vector for finishing a highly lucrative degree program? Seems like you are (forgive the term) a poster child for student loans.
You say with great conviction that EE is the way to go, but with the world being what is is, who can predict the future these days?
In the early 2000s a degree in chemistry was considered a safe bet, especially with a biochemistry PhD tacked on. Then there was the 2008 recession, the great round of layoffs at the major pharmcos, combined with the offshoring of early discovery. If anyone says they feel cheated I'm not going to disagree. I'm not going to use the word "rube", and neither should you!
At the moment medical school is what the kids at my university are shooting for, that used to be the ticket into a safe career, but one thing is clear: healthcare in this country is in need of reform. I cannot say how it is going to look, but I will not say that taking out five-digit loans for medical school is a good idea.
And who can tell about EE? If they offshored chemistry they will offshore design. It's going to happen, the pharmaceutical industry has provided the blueprint.
Dude, you went through like 5 different unrelated issues there o_o. But to your first point, the original commenter was stating that EE is a safe bet now, and therefore will likely be in 2 years when the OP graduates.
Just wait until he gets Pfizered. At least all the experienced Med. Chemists that Pfizer let go since 2008 had ample time to pay off their student loans, nevermind that when they got their degrees 20 years ago it was actually possible to work one's way through school.
On a long enough time scale, everyone will get "Pfizered." What makes you think this is likely to happen soon? Genuinely curious, as a practicing (sort of) EE.
I'm looking at Albany Molecular. That is a contract shop in Albany, NY. Ten years ago they were still doing contract work there, and they advertising themselves as being in Albany. That was the downside, but the upside was that cost-of-living in Upstate NY is low.
Nowadays the work is done in Hydarabad, Shanghai and Hungary, and what is left stateside is supervisory work. I think we are seeing a trend in EE towards contract shops. The only thing that's yet missing is for the contract work to be done overseas.
In fact, I seem to recall some recent articles about the EE profession showing growing concern about the increasing unemployment rate in the industry. It is still quite low, especially compared to the national average, but perhaps is indicative of a trend?
You can't borrow enough to pay for tuition at many schools using federal loans as an undergraduate student. Stafford loans have a maximum borrowing limit of $12,500 per year, and 4% of that goes to origination fees, leaving $12,000 for tuition, less if you're a freshman or sophomore:
The only way to get private loans is to have a creditworthy cosigner. Otherwise, you need parents to take out Parent PLUS loans to cover the remainder.
I assume the person here was paying for tuition with a combination of school-provided need-based grants and Stafford loans. Now that the need-based aid has been cut because her Expected Family Contribution has gone up due to her paid internship, she can no longer get enough money to pay the full tuition.
There are also dozens of scholarship programs that, when I was in college, I didn't qualify for because I didn't look like the OP. A lot of them are only for upperclassmen, and a lot of them are only for STEM disciplines.
It may be too late to apply and get such things but I didn't read of any effort to track those down. Finding scholarships, even qty 10 of $500 apiece requiring 3 hours' work each, should be easier with this backstory than any other I've ever read.
It's unclear if her financial aid was grants or loans. If they denied her grants I'd say this (while unfair by current standards) is reasonable. Given her internships, it's reasonable to say she could probably pay for a chunk of her degree and certainly afford loan payments when employed later.
Now, of course, one wonder's why we are offering loans and aid to people who can't get such a return on investment ( regardless of whether they need to pay or not).
The government offers both need-based subsidized loans and unsubsidized loans. The latter are available to anyone, regardless of need. They usually won't cover everything, but they often cover a good chunk of your total bill.
That was one of the reasons keeping me from doing a paid internship. My scholarship included full tuition and even paid for a lot of room and board. Furthermore, the university paid me an extra $15,000 scholarship just for doing a dual degree in philosophy and engineering. Sorry to hear about your story. It really does sound like a terrible situation.
Just for clarification (I'm a Pitt alum): Pitt is sort of a public school. A portion of the budget comes from the state, but not as much as many other state schools (the California system, for example).
When I was applying for school (which was a while ago) public schools were actually getting hard to get into, because they were cheaper and college was becoming a popular thing, everyone was going, even people who it would be a waste of time for. All the psychology, art history, and undeclared majors were flocking there. I found a private school that was not much more expensive.
It is seriously not realistic that everyone go to public school. Also, public school funding is being cut, and students are being asked to pay bigger part of the tuition. Also, public school prices vary a lot by state.
Private universities might have a bigger sticker price, but there's more room for leeway. There's need based grants that can be given out by the school itself, for example (I got them from mine). I don't know if public schools can do this.
I'm in a similar situation from paid internships and my own business. My advice: talk to your school's financial aid office and explain your situation. They should be able to help you. At the very least, it's worth TALKING to them.
(Disclaimer: I go to a need-blind school with very good financial aid. I don't know how engineering/state schools will treat this. But it's worth TALKING to them.)
Ingrid really sorry to hear this. I had to take out loans to help pay for college and found the entire process extremely convoluted and most aid offices quite unhelpful. Ultimately, I think our schools and government should be supporting students who are working hard to supplement loans with their own income, not punishing them by reducing your ability to take out a loan.
>>"Students should be warned that doing a paid internship can negatively impact your ability to finish up paying for school."
Students should be warned that crossing the highway blindfolded if unsafe.
Students should be warned that the stove could be hot if you leave it on.
At some point, people need to take personal responsibility for their action. They need to understand how their actions effect them positively or negatively and balance out those decisions. People need to understand that there is nobody that is going to hand hold them through life.
She's not complaining or asking to be handheld. She's warning her fellow students that working to make money will impact the ability to pay for school.
It's counter intuitive. It's not obvious at all. It's barely mentioned or talked about. It can cost (and it did cost her) a college degree.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your remark, but it's completely out of place here. She's simply warning others not to do the same mistake, since it's an easy one to make.
When I clicked on the comment thread, I made a bet with myself that some jackass would've shown up within the first hour to bellow "It's your fault your academic advisor/student aid office lied to you."
It's a crazy system indeed and it's not only for scholarships that marginal tax rates on the poor with benefits are often extremely high. Other examples include people on disability who lose their benefits forever if they try to work full time, even if they fail after a week.
It's going to be hard to change things because every little rule has people making a living a living of it.
International students face a worse situation. Students on F1 visa are not even allowed to intern for 2 semesters in most universities. To make the situation worse, the tuition is almost thrice the normal amount.
Shitty deal for students from countries whose currency's value is less than USD.
That site messes with the vertical scrollbar on Firefox Android, how hard can it be to serve a page of text without doing any useless CSS or JS or who-knows-what trickeries?
I paid my way through the latter grades of college thanks to a somewhat devious manager at my first summer internship. That manager transitioned me to a part-time employee at the end of the internship period after the school year started. In the latter two years of college I was a full time employee while going to school. Now, I took five years to graduate a four year degree, but since I was cashflow positive (yay low cost cal-state tuition) and employed in a topical field, the extended time really didn't matter. Now the manager was somewhat devious because I don't think the internships were necessarily supposed to work that way for all interns, but really it worked out well for both me and the company in the long term.
It would be worth probing the internship company in this case to see if some similar arrangement could be made. (if the budget for tuition vs part/full time pay works out, I did this in the 90's, no idea how it would work now).
At Cal state in the 90's I was paying ~$4000 a quarter, now [1] it seems to be $6000-7000. It's not ideal, but not an order of magnitude either.
Today, the gap is undeniably tighter between college expenses vs living wages at available jobs. If you're sending yourself through college, working or with a loan or some mix, it seems like a career ROI calc and a budget/cashflow calc for during college is in order. You also might have some hard choices in deciding not to pay a premium for prestige, and look for a solid education at a discount at a less prestigious, but still perfectly functional college.
Have you ever worked hard for something and then realized it wasn't enough? Or worse, working hard brought you to this point, alone and unable to pay for school? It's clear that if she's writing this, she's trying talking to financial aid. She's tried saving as much as possible for school. She's tried all the options... but none were left for her. I go to Stanford and I found myself in a slightly similar situation on a smaller scale. I had $1.2k in debt before the start of the year. Yes you read that right, just over one thousand.
Well... Stanford won't disperse financial aid if you have a balance of over $1k. So, I had 2 days before school started and I didn't have the money to head back to school. No matter who I talked to or who I called, the story was the same. That $1k was my responsibility but to be honest, I didn't have it. That summer I barely made enough to support myself. I also maxed out my credit cards and because of my family situation, I didn't have a cosigner that could help me co-sign a private loan. I also couldn't apply for a loan through my school because that was also considered financial aid. That night I cried... so much. I called my financial aid office over and over only for them to tell me the same thing. I called relatives. I even begged my brother for a small loan just so I could register for classes (which he never gave btw). The next day at work I burst into tears for seemingly no reason at all. Why should I? I go to a school with all the bells and whistles. Why would that be a concern? Had a sorority sister not heard me crying, I would never have gotten the money to enroll.
It's because the system is broken. This story is not about amounts or what she "could've done," it's about the reality of being in a situation you can't possibly control.
277 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadWithout a ridiculously good merit-based scholarship from a great school, I never would have been able to attend any of the top-tier schools into which I had been accepted, because my parents' money was counted as my money, even though their money was clearly not mine, and not something that I could choose to spend.
I couldn't see that being possible with today's college costs.
It's a flawed system, but simply not counting your parents money is an even more flawed system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors
This doesn't just affect the individual, it affects all of us who are trying to hire good engineers. The smaller the number of people that are allowed to attempt an engineering degree, the fewer that will earn them. Every single potential engineer that is prevented from entering the field because of education hinders us.
Trying to bring this back to HN a bit more, I think that entrepreneurs and capitalists should realize (and you may already be on the same page with me) that they are in essence farming society; they are leveraging and multiplying the work and efforts of many others in order to enrich their own wealth and the wealth of others. The more fertile the soil, the more the entrepreneur can grow. For technology based capitalists, a more educated society provides far more fertile soil both in terms of workforce and potential customer base.
The benefit for the companies which do this is that they've essentially trained engineers allready familar with their company culture, technology stack and working procedures, which require no additional time to train. Also it's beneficial for the image of the company.
The benefit for the students is that they graduate debt free and with solid job prospects (since they allready have one).
The system is set up in a way that OP (and I am sure many others) found herself in this strange valley, where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Or a job of any kind. Same thing happened to me.
Does a late FAFSA impact Stafford loans at all? I'm fairly certain I still made the deadline, but by no means was I an early submission.
This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren't willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
I'm not saying that it's the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000's at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that's increasingly something that's not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.
At least during the '80s, I was told I was ineligible for any financial aid.
You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is that everyone's parents will "refuse" to pay and the financial aid system would be totally overwhelmed.
I am incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful that my parents value high-quality education and come from a tradition of academics who help their children through college. Some of my friends who are far smarter than me had to give up on dreams because their parents don't understand how inflation works and think you can still pay your own way through high-quality undergrad in the US.
That is, until you get to the high-end Ivies. Harvard would have cost me $12,500 over UW Madison's $24,000, but I was never going to get accepted there.
My good friend from high school was in a position of not being able to afford our flagship state school, even though he got accepted.
He basically made it his full time job to scour all of the scholarship websites and apply to everything he was even minimally eligible for. He was constantly writing, or altering essays to fit a particular scholarship prompt.
All in all, he was able to afford school and has since graduated and become a pharmacist.
Like in a lot of things, hard work and hustle pays off.
This strategy works for a few of the most shining individuals in the country in any given year who dedicate the time required and get extremely lucky. I tip my hat to your friend, but the nature of scholarship programs is that for every kid like your brother, hundreds more worked just as hard, had just as much hustle, and got nothing (or a little, but not enough to make college affordable).
Paying for school on outside scholarships is an impressive accomplishment, but not something we can reasonably expect kids in general to pull off.
The incremental cost of going to school versus "just" living is like $6000. Even the child of a rich parent with no financial aid should be able to pull that together, especially if you manage to swing any scholarship money.
Something like the Harvard Law School debt repayment program: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/sfs/lipp/participant-cont...
If a given college is worried that such a plan will bankrupt it, perhaps it should reconsider the value of the education it is providing.
The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc.
The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.
Only if they had savings in a non-retirement account-- where they could use it for things other than retirement-- it would affect your financial aid.
Before someone turns that into an argument for state schools, remember that it's really only private schools which give any financial aid at all to middle-class kids.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/04/18/campus-announces-2...
If you make a modest income but are careful about your spending, it's not unreasonable to have leftover after-tax money that you can invest in other ways. That doesn't mean it somehow ceases to be retirement money.
> where they could use it for things other than retirement
Retirement isn't some thing you just go to the store and buy. There's no clear split between buying goods and services that are "retirement things" and "non retirement things."
Some people retire by quitting their job once they reach some magic number in an account, and then hope that they die before their balance goes to zero. This is increasingly harder to do if you don't want to be working past 70.
The age threshold for withdrawal from some of these tax deferred accounts can be a significant hindrance if you plan to fund your retirement in other ways such as by buying a rental property. You don't want to be buying the property at 60, you want to have already bought it, done maintenance, allowed it to depreciate a bit, etc. so that you can actually make a reasonable profit by the time you're 60.
But your concern of their limitations applies to so few people.
Roughly 30% of people have less than $1000 saved for retirement, in any kind of account [1]
Roughly 55% of people have less than $25K saved, in any kind of account
The 401k personal contribution limit is $17,500 this year, and if someone had a 50% match form their company, they could top that in just ONE single year.
[1] page 18, 19: http://www.pacificlife.com/NR/rdonlyres/BCCBDD57-93B9-4B5F-8...
A bit more: they were quite determined to make sure none of us graduated from college, with one exception that proved the rule and another than paid her way through a community college level 4 year school, the sort that rents textbooks and was literally on the other side of a creek sharing a border with us. The other 2 of us were more ambitious and ruthlessly crushed.
The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread.
Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth.
Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for the exact same reason as house prices in 2007. The bizarre funding schemes and underwriting are a temporary state of financial cprruption, not the natural order of things.
Thirdly, the free rider problem only applies to zero sum games. If FedGov stopped blackmailing parents, it would not be education that collapses, just the bureaucracy grown fat on the back of ill gotten money.
Fourthly, to the extent that higher education is a zero sum game, that problem is trivially solvable by funding it with taxes. If higher education is a profitless necessary evil, like street construction and dog catchers, it should be funded the same way.
>Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ...
What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.
You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.
MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.
3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.
4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).
Is MIT actually that expensive, inflation adjusted, compared to 1960?
Bureaucracy is not just about labelled bureaucrats, but about the well-meaning organizational structure that tends to spring up over time. Take an axe to the budget and the excess structure often disappears with no ill effect. (I'm looking at you, committee meetings and approval processes.)
But that's somewhere around what the tuition was 2 decades later from memory and someone graduating in 1980, the same as my first academic year. Can't remember the rest, maybe $3,000, could be less if you went for less expensive housing (not sure if that was much of an option) and especially food.
Looks like MIT's inflation rate 1979-2012 was very roughly double the CPI; I'm comfortable saying it was around that, and it's congruent with the general reports I've seen on US higher education inflation.
Case in point: in high school I lined up thousands of dollars in financial aid that no one else bothered to apply to. The largest check being $4,000 from my Alumni association for writing two paragraphs about how much I liked my school. A white friend of mine even got a NAACP scholarship because no one else applied (In case you don't believe this happens or think I'm joking, see [1] (not my friend). No one seemed to mind in his case).
I had some family issues and then had a falling out with my family and was locked out of FAFSA until I turned 23. Now THAT is something that does made you ineligible for pretty much any financial aid aside from traditional loans and working a lot. That really sucked. I ended up having not finishing my bachelors as a result. Thankfully Community College worked out pretty well for me.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/jeffrey-warren-whit...
Only other option was the military, but my eyesight was too poor to even enlist in the Army (and this during the Carter nadir of the military).
While this history can certainly be interesting, you're anecdotes aren't all that helpful for people looking for options now such as the person who wrote the blog post.
By then, the cost of going to a top school was beyond what almost anyone could do to work through it (MIT used to be known as a place where working class parents could send their children to to become engineers, and they'd work on the side to put themselves through it; didn't Feynman do this in part?), and since academic inflation has been a lot greater than CPI inflation, it's only gotten worse. E.g. not too long after I started in the fall of 1979, as I understand it MIT's costs doubled in the space of a few years (no doubt due to Carter inflation plus MIT's horrible financial management which I detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178931).
MIT still has the same needs based only financial aid system. Others have confirmed that if you don't need it as judged by FAFSA/College Board CSS PROFILE---which my parent would have refused to fill out anyway---you will get insufficient or no loans if your parents don't cooperate/co-sign.
The military eyesight situation has improved due to new procedures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_surgery ; the radial keratotomy available then was right out), although I don't know if my astigmatism would be a disqualifier now, or if it could be arranged or maybe afforded by me as my eyesight was back then.
Bottom line: if the military is not an option, the kids of uncooperative rich parents are still seriously screwed, and for the same reasons.
Prior to a fairly recent overhaul, the technology licencing office (rough quote from memory from Tech Talk, the Institute's official newsletter): "focused on the details of licencing vs. doing a lot of licences" and averaged a little over 1 per year (!!!). Given that I know 3 of those, the LMI Lisp Machine licenses and the same plus Macsyma to Symbolics....
They notoriously screwed up the 3D core memory patent ($40 million lump sum to IBM vs. the offered 1 cent per core) and a synthetic penicillin patent. Either could have paid for a complete replacement of the entire campus. I very strongly suspect these weren't the only screwups, and e.g. Symbolics scammed an exclusive license to Macsyma mostly to keep it out of other people's hands, one reason Wolfram was able to beat it sort of starting from scratch.
Back then, when the prime rate was over 20%, and inflation was over 15%, MIT was getting a much lower return on its endowment. I want to say 4%, but I'm not sure. MIT does a lot better now, but that is also recent.
It got its charter just as the Civil War started, and set up operations just after. So as noted it doesn't have the 2 centuries or more of additional compounding alumni donations the famous Ivies have.
Not sure when it started, and it was again fixed only fairly recently, but the alumni magazine, Technology Review, was dedicated to telling most of the alumni that what they were doing was evil. And again by then the Institute apparently had convinced a lot of alumni that it couldn't be trusted with unrestricted gifts. In its favor it never tried a Princeton Woodrow Wilson Center type donation theft, then again I don't know of any other top school so brazen.
Ah, it also was wretched, not interested or perhaps in part stymied by city government (which hates Harvard with a passion, and MIT gets some of the blowback) in making money off of local real estate. When I showed up the Kendal Square area had that bombed out sort of look, in part due to NASA deciding after JFK's assassination and LBJ becoming President that, oh, on second though Texas is where we should build our space center. There was almost no housing, let alone vaguely affordable and safe, to be found close to campus. I'm sure that bit of MIT's studied indifference to student welfare didn't escape some of the alumni who were the sort to later make a fortune.
Bottom line: not a lot of money to grant to students, and a total focus on needs based aid. And, hmmm, rather obviously students like me who were crushed by the intersection of the financial aid policies of MIT and their parents would never be in a position to donate a lot of money, and not inclined to donate much of what we do have.
I've written here quite a bit about my school experience and why it doesn't have to put new grads into unbelievable debt. I did freshmen through MS for under $30k out of pocket -- in the U.S and not all that long ago. Looking at the subject the last few years I've no reason to think it can't still be done for maybe no more than $45-50k. Paying off all of my student debt 3 years out of undergrad, then earning enough to cover my M.S. out of pocket is a pretty awesome feeling. (BTW My school's entire endowment wouldn't even add up to MIT's yearly earned interest on their's)
If you really think that your school is where you have to go, most outrageously expensive private schools have a handsome tuition assistance program if you can figure out how to work the system -- these days you can probably get an undergrad from one of those schools for less than I paid for my education. They probably do everything they can not to advertise is. But you have to have lots of chutzpah and don't take no for an answer. Hit the tuition assistance office daily, be a squeaky wheel, adjust your living conditions to suite the requirements for maximum assistance. Need to make less than $x per year? Do that. Need to not be a dependent of your parents? Do that (make sure they take you off of their taxes, you might need a copy). Get extra assistance as a school employee? Get a crap job cleaning floors.
Do not pay the inflated sticker price just to have fashionable brand recognition for a brand that won't matter in the job market in 7 years.
Do the math and optimize. If you aren't willing to do that, it might be worth reevaluating why you went to an "exceptionally expensive" school in the first place.
In my case, with multimillionaire parents who back in the '80s drove one vehicle with a depreciated value of 2 plus or minus years of full costs, no amount of cleverness would have helped with the financial aid office. Due to MIT's horrible money management and youth it just didn't have the money.
As for why I choose MIT, my parents attempted to set up a trap, they were sure I couldn't get into it or CalTech (I'm not a math genius, but good enough to do MIT's required level), so they said it "wasn't worth their money" to send me to any place good but those two. As it turned out, MIT was looking for people like me (ask for details if desired; one less obvious one is that they look for evidence the student can do projects, and submitted a couple of those) and I got in, not that they had any intention of paying more than they could get away with (a saving face sort of thing).
The later experiences of my younger siblings showed that it wouldn't have mattered where I went, except that I probably could have worked my way through the very cheapest possible place, but that was so down market getting into a good grad school would have been iffy. In my field of chemistry, the only none required by the subject accrediting organization courses they offered were analytical lab ones clearly intended for student for whom the undergraduate degree was terminal, for a lab tech career.
Even a noncustodial parent you've never met is expected to make the same sacrifice as your custodial parent.
Basically, it appears that once parents divorce, at least one parent is not willing to pay what the College Board/the school expects, and that's game over.
I did not go to school for CompSci, btw, or anything programming-related (unless you count programming synthesizers as "programming" :P)
True, the debt seems a lot smaller in that context. I'm (very slightly) optimistic that the new rules which cap student loan payments as a % of income and also subsidize public service work will make this burden a little lighter and less intimidating.
But at bottom, it's still a terrible problem. Not everyone is a financial wizard, and after an unpleasant brush with debt as a youth I've been largely allergic to it since. It's disappointing that people who want to take a fiscally conservative approach and pay up front or as they go are finding that becoming ever more impractical, thereby limiting their economic opportunity and productivity. Although many schools offer scholarships and suchlike, they're far from transparent.
If that is the case, why is Ingrid saying that she cannot?
"All of my debt is government loans, but this time around I don’t even have the option to take those out."
I'm currently a PhD student. I quit a fairly lucrative trading career in 2010 and went back to school without any intention of doing a GRA (I was fine with self-funding; to be honest, I wanted to not have a boss for a while)... that lasted one semester.
My adviser realized she liked the idea of paying 1/10 my old salary and getting an actual software engineer on her staff. I'm not one to complain or turn down money, so I took the gig and I'm near finished with the degree.
Moral of the story #1: Go back to school for a PhD with a boat load of cash in your pocket, legitimate skills and solid work experience. You won't have to pay tuition.
My wife and also decided to start a family during this time. We paid for her insurance out of pocket. Once the little guy came into the world, we started getting pamphlets in the mail from the state (aka the broke state of Illinois) regarding free programs (health insurance, food and formula vouchers) that we qualified for due to my lowly GRA salary (my wife is a stay-at-home mom). They don't care about or penalize high savings; these program managers just want to get as many qualified participants on the dole as possible to justify their existence. "Need" is not important; quotas are.
Moral of the story #2: Quit producing taxable income, go back to school, breed like a rabbit. The state will provide.
I realize this may sound harsh to those students currently getting by thanks to federal grants, but if you want to fix the problem, we need to get rid of these fucking programs. Prices will drop. All these loans accomplish is artificially inflating demand and putting graduates deep in debt. It'll be messy, sure, but the system is not sustainable in current form.
The big annoyance for me has been dealing with academics as managers (they're not very good, IMO; there are some phenomenal exceptions, but they tend to leave for industry).
In contrast, an electrical engineering degree will easily pay for itself, particularly if you've managed to bootstrap yourself to a third year.
Why haven't you addressed student loans as a vector for finishing a highly lucrative degree program? Seems like you are (forgive the term) a poster child for student loans.
In the early 2000s a degree in chemistry was considered a safe bet, especially with a biochemistry PhD tacked on. Then there was the 2008 recession, the great round of layoffs at the major pharmcos, combined with the offshoring of early discovery. If anyone says they feel cheated I'm not going to disagree. I'm not going to use the word "rube", and neither should you!
At the moment medical school is what the kids at my university are shooting for, that used to be the ticket into a safe career, but one thing is clear: healthcare in this country is in need of reform. I cannot say how it is going to look, but I will not say that taking out five-digit loans for medical school is a good idea.
And who can tell about EE? If they offshored chemistry they will offshore design. It's going to happen, the pharmaceutical industry has provided the blueprint.
On a long enough time scale, everyone will get "Pfizered." What makes you think this is likely to happen soon? Genuinely curious, as a practicing (sort of) EE.
Nowadays the work is done in Hydarabad, Shanghai and Hungary, and what is left stateside is supervisory work. I think we are seeing a trend in EE towards contract shops. The only thing that's yet missing is for the contract work to be done overseas.
It includes projected number of new jobs this decade and projected growth rate per career.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/
http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized...
That's not enough for many state schools, and definitely not enough for private schools:
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
The only way to get private loans is to have a creditworthy cosigner. Otherwise, you need parents to take out Parent PLUS loans to cover the remainder.
I assume the person here was paying for tuition with a combination of school-provided need-based grants and Stafford loans. Now that the need-based aid has been cut because her Expected Family Contribution has gone up due to her paid internship, she can no longer get enough money to pay the full tuition.
It may be too late to apply and get such things but I didn't read of any effort to track those down. Finding scholarships, even qty 10 of $500 apiece requiring 3 hours' work each, should be easier with this backstory than any other I've ever read.
Now, of course, one wonder's why we are offering loans and aid to people who can't get such a return on investment ( regardless of whether they need to pay or not).
It sounds like between the two internships combined they'd have made around $30k total, no?
If so, that seems like just barely enough to cover living expenses and a year at a public university with $4 to $7k in tuition and fees a semester.
Though it would be lame to have to spend 9 months off school to spend a year in school.
It is seriously not realistic that everyone go to public school. Also, public school funding is being cut, and students are being asked to pay bigger part of the tuition. Also, public school prices vary a lot by state.
Private universities might have a bigger sticker price, but there's more room for leeway. There's need based grants that can be given out by the school itself, for example (I got them from mine). I don't know if public schools can do this.
(Disclaimer: I go to a need-blind school with very good financial aid. I don't know how engineering/state schools will treat this. But it's worth TALKING to them.)
Students should be warned that crossing the highway blindfolded if unsafe.
Students should be warned that the stove could be hot if you leave it on.
At some point, people need to take personal responsibility for their action. They need to understand how their actions effect them positively or negatively and balance out those decisions. People need to understand that there is nobody that is going to hand hold them through life.
It's counter intuitive. It's not obvious at all. It's barely mentioned or talked about. It can cost (and it did cost her) a college degree.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your remark, but it's completely out of place here. She's simply warning others not to do the same mistake, since it's an easy one to make.
The fact that earning money in college could negatively impact your ability to pay for college is not obvious.
The warning is justified. Many people would not anticipate this.
It's going to be hard to change things because every little rule has people making a living a living of it.
Merit scholarships exist for the latter.
It would be worth probing the internship company in this case to see if some similar arrangement could be made. (if the budget for tuition vs part/full time pay works out, I did this in the 90's, no idea how it would work now).
Today, the gap is undeniably tighter between college expenses vs living wages at available jobs. If you're sending yourself through college, working or with a loan or some mix, it seems like a career ROI calc and a budget/cashflow calc for during college is in order. You also might have some hard choices in deciding not to pay a premium for prestige, and look for a solid education at a discount at a less prestigious, but still perfectly functional college.
[1] http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-fees/fee-rates/Tuitio...
Well... Stanford won't disperse financial aid if you have a balance of over $1k. So, I had 2 days before school started and I didn't have the money to head back to school. No matter who I talked to or who I called, the story was the same. That $1k was my responsibility but to be honest, I didn't have it. That summer I barely made enough to support myself. I also maxed out my credit cards and because of my family situation, I didn't have a cosigner that could help me co-sign a private loan. I also couldn't apply for a loan through my school because that was also considered financial aid. That night I cried... so much. I called my financial aid office over and over only for them to tell me the same thing. I called relatives. I even begged my brother for a small loan just so I could register for classes (which he never gave btw). The next day at work I burst into tears for seemingly no reason at all. Why should I? I go to a school with all the bells and whistles. Why would that be a concern? Had a sorority sister not heard me crying, I would never have gotten the money to enroll.
It's because the system is broken. This story is not about amounts or what she "could've done," it's about the reality of being in a situation you can't possibly control.