[jmduke]

Re: FAFSA --

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.

[josephhardin]

I was middle class(maybe lower middle class), and my entire education end up paid for. Not only that, but after work study, I actually made enough money to live on without having to get an outside job. Students taking out these huge loans should just consider a state school, or to put in for scholarships.