| re: Second-class degree
Geogia Tech's engineering program ranks extremely high in the U.S. and the United States' academic institutions rank extremely high on various world-wide charts. Having spent a long time on the inside track of the Silicon Valley hiring processes, I can vouch that getting a degree from a prestigious institution really does fast-track your interview, at least when it comes to the screening or pre-screening phase. $6,600 will at the current engineering salaries be at most a month and a half of your future net salary in the USA, or about 4-5 months worth of rent in San Francisco, so it is overall a very small forward investment to make if you live in the US. I doubt the degree will be treated as "second class," this will occur only if the words get out that the program is somehow easier to finish and I strongly doubt that. If anything, without in-person TA-ing and live peer interaction, it will be harder to complete some of the courses. re: Cost of graduate-level education in the USA
I understand that EU-citizens get free Masters' education. This is somewhat a side-effect of the EU-wide Bologna process, which promoted everyone's Bachelors degree into a Masters by adding a year's worth more of education and introducing a credit-system. If you are a non-EU citizen trying to get a degree in the EU, you will be paying much more than $6600 in many countries, including the socialist-leaning Scandinavia. Any US citizen can give FAFSA a try and (from memory) more than half of the undergraduate student body receives some form of financial aid from the government. There are reputable sources that say that paradoxically the generous FAFSA grants are partially responsible for a tuition inflation, but this debate is completely off-topic. |
If you go into any community with a lot of college students / new grads you'll hear a lot of complaints about how its impossible to qualify for FAFSA, scholarships, financial aid, etc.
I'm a middle-class white male and was incredibly worried that I'd hit FAFSA's 'blind spot': our family has a home and a stable middle-class income, but not enough to comfortably afford even a public college education (for our European friends: public colleges offer lower tuition for students residing in the same state as the college because they are partially funded by the state -- instead of paying 50K tuition, I'd be paying around 20K). Furthermore, I was by no means a prodigy: I did well enough in high school to more or less choose the college I went to (I'm from Virginia, and our public colleges are some of the best in the country) I certainly wasn't being courted or showered with incentives.
I managed to still get a pretty fair shake from FAFSA (that 20K number was knocked down to around 11K) and was able to secure some elective scholarships. America's college system isn't some bureaucratic hellhole destined to crush the spirits of its entrants; its just coping with some changes it wasn't really designed to handle.