[elmarks]

Stanford is the most affordable school in the country. Pretty much bar none. If your family earns under $100k / year, you go for free. Many families with incomes in excess of $200k still get some form of financial aid.

They do have a business going, to be sure, but it's not built on gorging people on tuition. Many (most?) don't pay that number. And even it is extremely reasonable if you think about what the market clearing price would be.

[Crake]

That's only if you're 18, though. If you have to work a while before college to keep a roof over your head, or try to take classes at a community college, you basically disqualify yourself from virtually all financial aid and grants.

Most colleges don't extend financial aid to transfer students (even if they guarantee full need for other students), most take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions (even if they go on and on about making it affordable, apparently this doesn't apply if you're not a college credit virgin), and quite a few elite colleges don't accept transfers at all (and if they do, it's usually 5x more competitive than their normal admissions process).

[thaumasiotes]

This is actually an issue that bothers me a great deal. I don't like that college is, culturally, something you do once. If you've touched a college credit since high school, you're not pure, and you won't be considered alongside the more worthy students.

This phenomenon contributes heavily toward the view that college is more about signaling who you are than that you achieved anything in particular while you were there. Once admitted to University X, "University X" is branded on your soul forever.

That said, on the dual topic of elite colleges accepting transfers & financial aid, the university of california system is set up to take transfer students en masse, and gives an admissions priority to students coming from the highly affordable california community college system. Berkeley and UCLA both accept such transfers. I don't really have an idea of the specifics of UC financial aid, but I do know the system offers a purely merit-based scholarship (Regents). CA is gay-friendly too, for what it's worth.

[VLM]

"I don't like that college is, culturally, something you do once. If you've touched a college credit since high school, you're not pure, and you won't be considered alongside the more worthy students."

My actual experience with night school and tuition reimbursement was the opposite for more or less mid-level private uni (real school, 100 years old, not some kind of fly by night loan scam). If you're 18 and a HS senior they want you to jump thru hoops like a trained seal and write essays and take standardized tests and fill out applications and find references and ask for permission to be admitted and hope for weeks you'll be lucky, but 19 as a professional studies night student, "oh, hand me your check and a single page emergency contact / demographic type form, and you're all good" Uh, say what, thats all the hoops you want me to jump thru? Things may have changed a lot in the last decade, but it used to be the school was doing the student a huge favor if the student was 18, but even if you're too young to drink, the instant you applied thru professional studies, you were doing them a huge favor, probably because financially, you were.

Transfer student experience was the same. Oh you attended (insert medium sized name), well fill out a one page form, have them send us a transcript, and hand me a check and its all good. Uh, say what, you make 18 year old HS students jump thru hoops like trained seals but all I have to do to get in is let you know my next of kin in case of medical emergency, and give you a check and a transcript? What?

Now for transfer students a big game is only allowing X credits where X is pretty small, or not permitting certain classes to transfer in at all, which is how I got to take calculus three times, once in HS, and twice, at college and uni. So they may have screwed transfer students over once they admit them, but at least the admittance process was painless.

[Crake]

This is the opposite of my experience! I still had to write essays and jump hoops. Also, my community college didn't know how to fill out transcripts or forms for colleges out of state (they looked at the common app like it was from another planet) and as a result I got called a felon by one of the colleges I applied to. As it turns out, my CC people weren't checking off the "to my knowledge, not a felon" box. When I found this out, and asked them to check it, they told me that it wasn't their department even though it WAS the department that handled those things. Ok, whatever, but if you are too lazy to take it over to the right department, could you at least tell me I need to take it there to get it done before accepting it for processing? Geez. The receiving college was pretty rude about it too, the lady seemed pretty convinced the unchecked box was proof of my criminal status (I've never been arrested!).

I also had a hard time getting them to mail anything to New York because the address "wouldn't fit" in their computer system, so after two "lost" transcripts I found out they'd left off chunks of the address and thought this wouldn't be a problem. My suggestion of "write it by hand" was rejected. Very annoying. Of course, I was told "our transcripts always arrive" at the in state college. Well, thanks, I totally want to stay here after the crap your college system has put me through.

[Crake]

California is very far from me--I actually ended up on the other coast looking for cheaper college (CUNY system, which I feel is similar in some ways). It looks like out of state tuition at community college is about $5000 in California, which isn't so bad, but most places require you to live there a year without taking any classes in order to become a resident for college purposes (so you'd have to take a year off between community college and the four year, possibly), and finding a way to survive without a degree or any social network would have been quite difficult. I wouldn't really have had the money to move out there when I was younger; it's taken me this long to get to the east coast, which is a lot closer compared to California.

I think it's a really great system for people who live in state, though! (or states close to California) I've heard some things about impacted classes, but it sounds like California has their CC -> 4 year transfer system set up much better than a lot of places. The regent scholarship sounds great, but it'd have been a huge gamble to try to move out there for it, since you won't know until you're applying to the four year school if you'll get it or not. There are so many unknowns, when tuition is this high. The CoA for Berkeley for example is $33,000 for in state and over $50,000 for out of state.

Why is paying for college so much harder than getting accepted to one? Ugh.

[Loughla]

That's also false. Financial Aid from the government is based off of need. Grants are for anyone who qualify. If you haven't found any that you qualify for, you haven't looked hard enough. http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/nontraditional.phtml

All colleges extend financial aid to transfer students, they have to. Yes, there are scholarships for straight up freshmen through senior students at the home institution, but there are ALWAYS scholarships specifically designed for transfer students.

They do not take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions, that's illegal. They put together your 'aid' package based on your ability to pay. It, in NO way plays into the admissions process outside of that, and any proof you have of that is grounds for a lawsuit.

Elite colleges do accept transfers, find me one that doesn't. Is it hard to transfer into them? Of course, they're e.l.i.t.e., it's hard to get into them any way.

I don't know why you're spreading this misinformation, I assume it's ignorance. Stop.

After looking through your comment history, I now understand why you're spreading this nonsense. You're a young, pissed-off undergraduate student just finding your place in the world. My advice to you, having lived through this stage: We're not all out to get you. Read more, think more, and talk less.

[Crake]

Well, the response I got from the colleges I emailed to ask was "we don't give out scholarships to transfer students." This went for public AND private schools in a variety of states. Often, the public schools that give transfer scholarships only give them to students who are already in state residents. Alternately, the transfer "scholarship" often just reduces some of the out of state surcharge.

" Financial Aid from the government is based off of need. Grants are for anyone who qualify."

Key phrase: anyone who qualifies. When I was 18, I qualified for a $4500 stafford loan and nothing else. If I went to a community college, this dropped to about $800-900/quarter, which wasn't enough to even pay tuition.

Incidentally, the best need based grant you can get from the government is a pell grant. This maxes out at about $5000/year, and you can only get it if you make less than about $10,000/year (and your parents have no income, or you are an independent student).

"They do not take ability to pay into account when determining transfer admissions, that's illegal."

This is only true for public universities. Private can do whatever they want.

"Elite colleges do accept transfers, find me one that doesn't."

Princeton.

"You're a young, pissed-off undergraduate student just finding your place in the world."

I'm not 18 anymore, and haven't been for over half a decade.

[lmartel]

As a current Stanford student I agree that Stanford has great financial aid, but "bar none" isn't true. The same paperwork got me substantially better (need-based) financial aid offers from a few Ivies than I got from Stanford.

[cowsandmilk]

> If your family earns under $100k / year, you go for free

False. Pell Grant recipients (which typically earn less than $30k / year) paid on average $5,332 to attend Stanford in the 2010-11 academic year [1]. I would link to the actual Department of Education database with the forms filled out by Stanford showing this, but the government shut down has left us all without access.

[1] http://education.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/p...

[neltnerb]

I hate to nitpick, but "bar none"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_in_the_Un...

What do you base that on?