There used to be a tax status that allowed independent status for a student, opening up the benefits for which they told you to wait until you were 24.
I guess too many people tried gaming it and they've locked it down. It was a good law exactly for the reason you describe, it sucks that it was abused into a state requiring shuttering.
I sympathize with being shut out by your parents, but I'm despondent over the very rapid change in the apparent expectation that parents are the only way to pay for college. Especially for a brilliant kid, going to college was not an impossible task.
My parents' contribution to my college was ~5k in a savings account and a beater after my first year so I could come home time to time.
I worked 30-40 hrs/wk to offset the loans I needed with a full-time course load. And it was a good school outside my home state, where I got in-state tuition but didn't qualify for a single other grant / scholarship.
For context, this was 2003-2008, I'm not talking about decades ago.
I'm sure the private / federal loan programs have shored up some because of the crisis, but I would be quite surprised if funding and education was really so impossible, or that it was impossible to work for a few years then go when you were 20.
Funding and education really IS that impossible. I think you underestimate just how expensive college has become, especially in states that don't value educating smart people. I graduated into a recession, and even finding enough work to pay rent was incredibly difficult, because I was competing for minimum wage jobs against people with college degrees. The area was and is incredibly economically depressed.
I also had health problems that went untreated as a kid that made it hard to work. No college also meant no healthcare. Of course, I had to work anyway because I'd be homeless if I didn't.
It's hard to pay $20,000/year for college when you can't find more than $7,000/year in work. $7,000 is barely enough to keep you fed and housed as it is.
(Even at age 24, you don't start getting pell grant money until you make under about $10,000, incidentally.)
My view of the college funding situation is colored by the fact that after taking the PSAT I received monthly mail from the university of Tulsa offering free tuition, free board, and a stipend if only I would agree to attend their school. (In retrospect, I think that would have been a good idea... ah, hindsight.) I'm pretty sure there are other scholarships around that require more than the absolutely zero effort that took.
I would have killed to have someone offer me that. :( You were lucky to have so many options available to you; I applied for 40+ scholarships at the time and placed as runner up for one and was awarded one other. It wasn't enough to meet even in state coa, sadly.
6 years later I got a full tuition science scholarship at a community college, but that took a ridiiiiiiculously huge effort and it only lasted for a year since I wasn't an 18 year old anymore (meh). I'm still incredibly grateful to my chemistry professor who helped me get it, though.
Thank you. I hate having to explain myself over and over again, especially when so many people just call me lazy, stupid, etc...but it's a serious problem, and if someone with my academic chops has trouble, then that really says a lot about how awful the system is for everyone else.
I think a lot of it is that people don't want to accept that their own college degree was more a factor of luck and money than anything else. Passing classes isn't hard at all, paying for them is.
I just looked it up, and tuition for my last semester (Fall 08) was $5,300. The two years before that, average tuition was 800/semester less. It is not that much more expensive.
I hadn't seen the health complication until I read through some of your other comments from the last few days. I think it makes you an exception though and not definitive of the state of education...
tl;dr: The numbers don't line up to suggest college is unavailable to kids whose parents won't pay.
It's going to mean loans. Even with 9 months of a really generously compensated internship (to Midwest standards, at least, I grew up in WI and went to school in MI), I still left college with north of 50k in loans.
Ohio University, cost is ~24k a year, more than 12k of which is room, board, transportation and personal. Ohio State this year is 21k, more than half of which is the room and board. For both, tuition and books is about 11-11.5k.
You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.
4.5k in the stafford loan means, 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost, which is probably 20-40% higher than it was 5 years ago.
4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree. $60 if they take a victory lap.
In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.
So in summary, funding an education is not impossible. Yes, the student will be paying for it for a while. I'm still paying on my loans and I still will be for a few years. But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.
Oh, I know plenty of people without health problems who can't afford it either. Your parents have complete control over your access to college until age 24. If they refuse to sign the FAFSA, or refuse to cosign private loans, you are 100% screwed in most states.
>It's going to mean loans.
Well, no shit.
>It is not that much more expensive.
It is when gas is $4/gallon instead of $2/gallon, and the economy makes it much harder to find a job of any kind. Not to mention tuition itself is increasing at about twice the rate of general inflation.
" On average, tuition tends to increase about 8% per year. An 8% college inflation rate means that the cost of college doubles every nine years."
>You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.
Hypothetically, sure. In reality, if you don't have 7 days a week of 24/7 availability, you can't get a job in many places.
Most of these low end jobs will have you coming in at 7AM one monday, and closing at 11PM the next. You can't plan your courses around work since there's no regularity.
In the best case scenario, you have a job already and try to change availability, but in that case they'll often slash your hours to barely nothing. Can YOU live on 12 hours a week of minimum wage?
> 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost
>4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree
You cannot get these without a cosigner or guarantor. When I was 18, I tried banks, sallie mae, online options, etc for (roughly) this amount and was completely denied. Hell, I couldn't even get a credit card for any amount, even through my bank.
Even when I later had a better fulltime job making 20K/year, I was again declined for loans. (At that time, I had 3 credit cards and awesome credit.)
>In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.
You have to have access to loans in the first place to get there.
>But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.
Oh, I see what the problem is. You don't live in reality. I'm talking about people who live in the US, FWIW.
I didn't have the money to at age 18. I mean, I had less than $500 in my bank account usually because rent and gas and food ate up my minimum wage earnings so quickly.
It's what I've done now that I have access to independent student level of stafford loans. I got a 35-60 hour/week job for 2 years before I moved which helped too. (Full time jobs are very hard to find due to the economy, where I'm from.)
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/payingforcollege/f/independe...
I guess too many people tried gaming it and they've locked it down. It was a good law exactly for the reason you describe, it sucks that it was abused into a state requiring shuttering.
I sympathize with being shut out by your parents, but I'm despondent over the very rapid change in the apparent expectation that parents are the only way to pay for college. Especially for a brilliant kid, going to college was not an impossible task.
My parents' contribution to my college was ~5k in a savings account and a beater after my first year so I could come home time to time.
I worked 30-40 hrs/wk to offset the loans I needed with a full-time course load. And it was a good school outside my home state, where I got in-state tuition but didn't qualify for a single other grant / scholarship.
For context, this was 2003-2008, I'm not talking about decades ago.
I'm sure the private / federal loan programs have shored up some because of the crisis, but I would be quite surprised if funding and education was really so impossible, or that it was impossible to work for a few years then go when you were 20.