If you (or your child) went to an expensive college, how did you pay for it?

I’m in a similar position.

I’d recommend filling out the FAFSA regardless of whether or not she applies for Federal Aid, however. The FAFSA gets sent to both the federal government and the schools she selected, so even though she may not get any Federal money, the FAFSA is one of the main ways schools themselves hand out scholarships and financial aid to their students.

Loans. Lots of them.

Originally loans made it easier, so colleges adapted and made the education more expensive. Now it’s really difficult to get through without them.

The hope is that she can take over the payments when she gets out and you shouldn’t owe on them until then, but it’s scary to watch that number grow every year.

Congrats to her for getting in to schools she’s interested in, I hope she finds one she loves.

We currently pay around 40,000 USD per year for the tuition of our two children in upper primary. About 16,000 USD is paid by my employer.

Since there is no sincere schooling alternative available, the only strategy we put up against it is to make sure we make enough money to pay for that schooling. If ever that would not work, we’ll move to another place that offers more affordable schooling.

In all sincerety, I wouldn’t know yet what to do for our boys’ college years. Those are at least 9 years in the future still, though.

I paid for mine on the GI bill.

We did fill out the FAFSA, so that’s good. She got academic scholarships from just about every school, but they hardly make a dent. It just seems awful that she’d owe so much on student loans when she gets out.

You can take out student loans that add debt to you, the parent, and not her.

What college isn’t expensive anymore??

My son went to an excellent State university… and was also enrolled in their Navy ROTC program. By keeping his GPA high, he earned a scholarship that paid for his tuition for 3 of his 4 years. It was tough keeping his grades up, going to college full time AND being in ROTC. But he graduated with honors, became a US Naval officer and saved a ton of money in the process.

I’m curious… what do you guys consider expensive, nowadays?

Are we talking tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for a four year college program?

Be very careful with that attractive loan shark that goes by the name of Sallie Mae.

For undergrad, my wife and I went to State colleges. At the time, they weren’t too expensive – so we worked while in school and paid them monthly.

Later, when my wife went to law school, we had to take out loans (state and federal GSLs) totaling $60K. We’ll basically be paying them back monthly until the day we die.

@Aethelflaed I don’t qualify for any kind of loan, and her father doesn’t want to be 100K or more in debt himself, either.

@whitenoise Most of the schools she’s been accepted to cost somewhere between 35k to 60k per year. The absolute cheapest (which is a state school she doesn’t want to attend – no special program in her major) is about 15k per year.

@bkcunningham Can you go in to a little more detail of what, specifically, we should be careful of?

@cprevite Do the two of you regret taking out the loans, or was it worth it?

I’m pretty sure she’s completely against joining the military, even for tuition reasons.

My brother graduated high school in 2007. The University he got into was 37k at the time. He didn’t want to do loans either, and wasn’t going to get any help from parents or government, so he applied to jobs that didn’t require a college degree. He has been working multiple jobs since 07 till now. 5 years later, the university now charges 55k a year, but my brother earned enough to cover the 4 years of school. He started his first semester in 2012, and still works part time. He’s 23 years old. After he receives his bachelor degree, he plans to pay for graduate school using the same debt free method.

I’ll tell you about the very recent experience my sister and with her daughter after obtaining Sallie Mae (and other government loans) to go to the Art Institute of Cleveland for a BA. She received grants that took care of her first year for nearly everything. After that, she had to look elsewhere for money and didn’t work.

She was advised to look into Sallie Mae and was told she wouldn’t have to start paying on the loan until six months after her graduation date or six months after she quit going to school. Then you will will have 20 years to pay off the balance plus accrueing interest and any penalties.

After the student starts with the initial loan, the debt will have an affect on credit scores and their ability to get additional loans. So someone will have to co-sign and eventually take our loans in their own name. Unless you continue going to school, there are very few circumstances where you can defer the loans. You can’t bankrupt the loans and they will garnish your income to get the money.

My niece didn’t get a job after graduating and my sister and her husband had to consolidate all of the loans at a lower interest rate with a bank in order to pay the money back. She had well over $100,000 in debt. Some of her loans had interest rates of some 11 percent.

^The Cleveland Institute of Art is where she went to school.

@augustlan: My wife does because she’s not the practing attorney she had hoped to be.

I don’t, because I figure it’s the cost of doing business. She wouldn’t have the job she has now without it, or at least a Masters Degree – which would have cost us the same. So six of one half, a dozen of the other.

Both of my kids went to schools with a very high sticker price. In the end, though, neither will owe much money. My eldest went to a smallish liberal arts college with a gigantic endowment (people often don’t think to look at the size of a school’s endowment when choosing, but it does matter). This kind of school is often very generous with aid, and merit counts for a lot. The school just kept throwing money at her, and she graduated with a very manageable debt.

My youngest is in a larger ivy. Schools like that usually don’t give merit-based aid at all. Fortunately, his is one of the ivies that automatically gives huge breaks to kids of modest background. So there too, he’ll just have a little bit of debt at the end.

You really need to call the financial aid officers at your daughter’s prospective schools and tell them that the packages they’ve proposed just aren’t going to make it work for you. You can even play schools off of each other if one comes forward with a better package. The schools do have some room to bargain.

Scholarships, student assistantships, and basically any other “ship” that would keep me afloat. And the dreaded loans, too. I came out of college with an average amount of debt, but it is still going to take a long time to pay off.

My daughter was blessed. grandma paid. She is so grateful. She has so many friends who are buried in debt from student loans.

We were lucky. We had sold one house at a profit some years before and had invested some of the profit with an eye toward paying for college. (We had moved to a bigger house but not as expensive or fancy one as we could have qualified for.) It didn’t cover all the expense but it helped. One son got some merit money; the other went full freight to an Ivy. They also each worked part time jobs for the pocket money they needed. @thorninmud is right; talk to the Financial Aid departments of the schools and see if there is something you can negotiate.

You also might want to get acquainted with College Confidential. It hosts some good forums, including one specifically for financial aid matters, where parents and students share their experiences with specific schools. We found this to be a helpful resource.

Before college, I worked and saved money to pay for just about everything. No loans, no grants, only money I had saved.

I know this is rare to happen, but I was making great money from our concerts and I socked it away.

College costs so much more today, @john65pennington, even as a percentage of average income that I think it is totally unrealistic to expect young people today to pay for it entirely themselves!

One thing that’s screwed up about the financial aid system is that unless you have a pretty high income, you actually get penalized for saving for college.

If your income is such that there’s no way you’re going to qualify for financial aid anyway, then saving for college makes sense. But since you have to declare all of your savings and other financial assets on the FAFSA, the college will look at that and only propose whatever aid they think you need on top of what you’ve already socked away.

So the way it works is that if Family A has not put anything away, and has instead spent their extra income on vacations, home furnishings and restaurants, the school will make up for that lack of savings in aid. As for Family B, who has scrimped on their spending to put away a little each month for college, the school will simply give that much less in aid.

@thorninmud Yeah – like so many systems in America, this one sucks. Vive la France!

I got lucky and my school offered me some pretty hefty scholarships. Probably has to do with the fact there is a distinct lack of women here and they always want more….

But one option is external scholarships. Apply for any local scholarships that the guidance counselors might have information on, and check out websites like fastweb.com, zinch.com, cappex.com, etc.

Be sure to have your daughter apply for scholarships of all sizes. Every year about 3.5 million dollars worth of scholarships go unused because no one felt the need to apply for them. At the end of the day every 50 dollars helps; It’s part of a textbook here, or school supplies there.

Your daughter can also help lower costs by purchasing used books on chegg.com, ebay or amazon. I found many of my textbooks at my institution’s library. By using this method i saved a little more than a grand a year on books.

Finally, have your daughter apply for a position on campus that includes housing. I worked as a resident advisor through college and saved about 10,000 dollars a year on room and board. Although some people may disagree, I found the job to be quite a bit of fun. You meet new people, learn how to deal with difficult situations, and have a wonderful support network. That network also came invaluable for references.

Best of luck!

When I filed for financial aid, I was a legally independent 17 year old student with 0 income and 0 assets going to public school. I still had to take out massive loans to do it.

This is probably not what you want to hear, but from my perspective, going to the cheapest school available is probably her best bet. In my experience, unless your degree confers specific, technical skills (e.g., teaching, nursing, engineering) it has little bearing on future job prospects. So while the schools with specific programs might appeal to her, it just does not make financial sense. It is crushing to be 21, fresh out of college, and paying $700 a month in student loans. Given the chance again, I would make very different decisions, including doing anything possible to avoid taking on that much debt. It was a huge mistake and I will be paying for it for a very long time.

GI Bill, it was wonderful, they paid for tuition, books, fees, and paid me a monthly check to go, and I went to expensive (ivy league) schools

Thank you for all of the advice, everyone! We will definitely be talking to admissions offices to see if we can sweeten any of the deals or find campus work programs, etc. She’s applied to every scholarship she can find, but always has an eye out for more.

@nikipedia In most fields, I would agree with you about going to the cheapest school that offers your major. In this case, though, her destination is politics. The connections she can make going to a major school in Washington, DC could be very important in her ultimate success. It’s a toughie!