Listen, if you want to slip the colleges an extra $10,000 a year for your college experience, I’m fine with that. I’ve come to peace with the fact that not everyone can do what I did. But a quality education is still available to people at an affordable price if they know where to look. Anyone can graduate from college debt free if they want to. And that means you… yes, you! If you want the story version with all the juicy details, keep reading. If you just want the strategy I used, skip to the section with the headings.
Here is how I went about getting not one, but two undergraduate degrees for what many people spend on their first year (or even first semester!) of undergrad, and how you can do the same. Some of these tricks I used from the very beginning, and some I learned several years in.
There are 5 schools in my college experience, I’ll start with the most recent first:
I attended a state school in Alaska. The average cost of attendance was $4400 a semester, which is far below average, even for a state school. On average I paid less than $2200 a semester. The difference was made up by scholarships. My overall cost could have been far less, but I didn’t decide to attend school my first year until after the deadline for scholarships had passed. In other words, 56% of what I spent at the University of Alaska was during my first 12 months there. Total cost for 4 years of full time school? $17,600
I averaged $1000 dollars a semester for 3/4 of this undergraduate degree. How? Part of it is luck; I received in-state tuition at one of the cheapest state schools in the USA. The other part of it was hard work. I spent time on local scholarships, and they drastically reduced my overall school cost. In fact, I treated scholarship applications as a type of part time work. During the time when most scholarships had their deadline, I worked non-stop on them. Probably averaging 5 hours per scholarship application. At this point I already had a bachelor’s degree in education and this worked to my advantage as I filled out scholarships. I spent far less time than some people on scholarships, and I turned out high quality (judging by my success rate) applications.
I went to two different schools where the tuition was free. Yes, free. They were Christian schools and their goal, aside from education, was to prevent their students from graduating with debt. That didn’t stop one of them from charging ~$1000 a semester in fees, but who am I to complain? This is probably of limited usefulness to most you, since not everyone wants to go to a Moody Bible Institute. But it was great for me, and I walked away at the end of 4 years with an accredited undergraduate degree in education (Counseling to be precise).
After starting at this school, I learned about another school that would accept my credits toward an accredited bachelor’s degree. That sounded like a miracle to me, since I had no idea that accrediting agencies existed just a few months earlier, and hadn’t thought to check my school before I began. So began my process of transferring credits from one school to another. I’ve now attended 5 different schools. I promise that I hated school when I left highschool. There was nothing that sounded more boring. Learning grows on you though.
The strategies that I employed:
FASFA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid)
If you haven’t applied for this, you are throwing away money. Every single person who goes to school needs to apply for the Fasfa. Try to apply about 9 months before your classes start. At one school I went to I received a “Pell grant” for 110% of my tuition costs. This covered my tuition and all of my books, and I had some spending money left over. I can’t emphasize how important this is, especially if your parents are low income (student aid awards consider the income of your parents, as well as your own, until you turn 24, when it becomes dependent on your income alone).
This is the website where you’ll need to go to fill out the forms:
https://studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid
Rent Share
If you can, find some people that you respect to rent with. This could go really well, or it could be really hard. Even under the best circumstances, I’ve never lived with a group of people without having some high stress moments, but it has always been worth it. You will get to know people very well when you live with them, so make sure they are worth your time before you move in with them. I lived on campus, or off campus in a house with others up until I moved in with my wife.
Part time work
I highly recommend part time work to most people, unless they are shooting for a 4.0 GPA or have some other good reason to not work. I highly recommend looking for a part time job during your freshman and sophomore years in school that will allow you to work on homework while on the clock. Once you are a junior or senior, you hopefully be able to find a position that will build skills for your career. During each of my 4 year degrees, I graduated with more money in the bank than I started with. In order to do this, I worked full time in the summers doing what I knew how to do, construction. Use whatever skillset you have to make money. If you have no skills you can always be a waiter, busboy, coffee shop barista, valet, janitor or window washer.
Loans
Some people seem to have an allergic reaction to loans. They break out in hives at just the mention of that dreaded word. Maybe you are this type of person, you wake up clutching the sheets and shouting “24% APR COMPOUNDED DAILY, NOOOOOO!! Please read this paragraph with great care, because I’m going to tell you a secret that can change your life. Debt is only bad when it decreases your overall financial well-being. To illustrate this, take home ownership. Historically speaking, home ownership can be a great investment. If real estate prices rise at a greater pace on average then the current going interest on a mortgage, you may make money by being in debt! I bring this example up first, because the debt averse person is usually willing to make an exception for a house, simply because most people can’t afford a house without taking on debt. College “CAN” be far more advantageous then any mortgage, even with deep debt. Consider this: with 4 years of school, I literally doubled my earning potential. I have pay stubs to prove it. Even if I had to go into debt to do school (which I didn’t), it would have been a brilliant strategy. Say for the sake of argument that I needed to take out loans to finish that degree. The average student loan at graduation is $25,921. That means I could have paid my loan back in the first year after graduation, and still had an extra $10,000 to spare, not to mention a lifetime of increased earning above that. Do you understand why I think some loans are an acceptable risk? The risk is actually quite low for academically competent individuals who carefully research their desired career path and understand how the specific degree program and school that they’ve chosen will affect their work life & post graduation finances. If that isn’t you, then you need to do the research. If you are the type of person who isn’t capable of doing that sort of research, then maybe college isn’t for you.
Textbooks
I have an overactive conscience that won’t allow me to use any digital content that I don’t personally own, which eliminated the common strategy of finding textbooks online. What I did do was buy a previous version of the textbook, and often literally paid $200 less than my classmates for the book. Then I’d borrow someone’s book and copy down the questions that the professor required for that week, using my own book for everything else. I’d estimate this can save you from $150 to $800 per year on the cost of books. Libraries sometimes carry class textbooks, but you’ll have to email the professor early in order to find out what book the class uses, and check it out early from the library to be sure you get a copy (there are other cheap people out there too).
Transportation
If you don’t have to have a car, don’t have a car. Insurance, gas, and maintenance can really add up, especially if you can’t do maintenance yourself.
Standardized Testing:
Incidentally, I have never taken the SAT or the ACT. I started my college career at a non-accredited school which didn’t require any standardized test before entrance, and after that I was always a transfer student. But I have done my fair share of other standardized testing. Mostly college placement exams and CLEP tests. I did 17 CLEP credits. If I had been able to do more for my degree programs, I would have. They were so much easier then taking a class. The average time that I studied for my CLEP tests was about 8-10 hours. Less than many final projects, even for easy classes. I never failed a CLEP test, so I probably could have studied less. The one exception to this was Chemistry. I studied Chemistry for hours and hours. I never took Chemistry in highschool, so it was some kind of miracle that I was able to pass a CLEP test that covered two semesters of college level chemistry and lab. I highly recommend CLEP testing as an advantageous way to knock out some credits for (virtually) free. I think the tests were $80 each, including the proctoring fee. College credits are on average about $500, which means you could be saving thousands of dollars by taking CLEP tests. If you have interest in getting a college degree using CLEP tests or similar strategies check out www.degreeforum.net.
Scholarships:
I already mentioned it above, but spend time on scholarships. I don’t know how to emphasize this any more strongly. There are scholarships for people with good grades, but there are sometimes even ones specifically for people with bad grades. I recommend spending the most time on regional or local scholarships, then state scholarships, then national scholarships, as I never received funding from any national scholarships, but plenty of help from the others. Call the school you are attending, speak to their financial aid, and ask about scholarships that you can sign up for. They will steer you in the right direction. It is even worth setting up an appointment with someone who would know about scholarships if possible. Do this long in advance of the start of the school semester. My school had a cutoff in February for most scholarship applications for the following fall.
Know How Hard Your Classes Will Be
I highly recommend looking up every professor that you take using this website:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
It gives you some idea of how difficult the professor will be. This allows you to plan much better for what classes to take in any given semester before the semester starts. This is only useful if other people have put a fair amount of reviews up. If you have a friend who is a year or two ahead of you in the program they will likely have a much better idea of what courses & professors will be difficult or easy.
Technical Schools: “Tech School”
These are public colleges that focus on non-four year degrees. They are cheaper, and usually require lighter homework requirements per credit hour. I knew people who couldn’t pass the physics or chemistry classes at the 4 year college, and they reported significantly easier classes at the tech school. They can also be a good strategy if you want to go to college, but haven’t decided on a major yet.
American Opportunity Tax Credit
I’ll just include a link so you can look it up yourself, but America subsidizes virtually every American college student with this tax credit.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/aotc
Transferring credits
Transferring credits is hard. It is so time consuming to try to figure out what credits will apply where. You will likely spend HOURS trying to understand how your credits transfer from one school to another.Take the time. It is worth it. I remember spending literally days figuring out what credits would transfer to my next program in school.
Honestly the credit transfer system for schools is broken. At some point you will need to see an academic advisor to see if your credits will transfer in. Very few schools will analyze your transfer credits unless you are an admitted student. If you are transferring credits, apply to the school and see what they say. If you don’t get the transfer credits you need, you are might lose out on your application fee, but that is better than having to retake entire classes because the school wouldn’t accept your transfer credit.
Once I started school, each progressive school accepted transfer credits from the school before it. It is a bit of a hassle to transfer as they usually require you to provide all kinds of information about the course work from your prior school, but think about how much time (and money) you’ll save by not having to complete any additional coursework! Transferring credits is a great strategy and you shouldn’t be scared to do it!
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