91–100 of 278 posts
I did the exact same thing a couple of months ago; ended up getting a reasonable job offer that will allow me to pay off my student loans. Higher education is (more or less) a waste of money these days.
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"Just wait until he gets Pfizered." 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 c…
Yeah, the financial aid system is pretty bad. A single woman I know who lives alone got denied financial aid because her gross annual income was 31k instead of the limit of 29k that financial aid requires. If you do the math and include all average expenses for any single person, you'll see that there's no way to pay for tuition and/or housing without a student loan in a situation as this. Is financial aid only suppo…
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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 tha…
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 alte…
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.
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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).
Retirement accounts don't affect financial aid, they are not even asked for on the FAFSA. 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.
"That summer I started my first engineering internship for six months from June to December, making $25.85 an hour working for a well-known tech company.",
"It made no sense for me to stay in school; the financial stress was affecting my ability to get work done, and subsequently my GPA dropped.",
"This June, I was notified that my financial aid was reduced from $16,000 to $104 because I had made too much money in 2012, which put me in a higher income bracket to receive less financial aid.",
"Every attempt to contact my financial aid office has been unhelpful.",
"They have parents that pay for school and all their expenses, which makes their internship money pocket money."Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there still a screw case for "kids from wealthier families" when the families refuse to help? At least during the '80s, I was told I was ineligible for any financial aid.
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 F…
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).
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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.
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 prevent…
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 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 in…
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."
Has the author tried the appeal process?
It sounds like the author is now extremely well-positioned to get reasonably good jobs and really start her career. Doing so and continuing her formal education part-time may be the best choice.