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I'm gay, so my parents wouldn't pay or help me in any way. The public colleges in my state basically told me that if I didn't have the money, I should get lost

• lmartel 13y ago
  Your situation sounds awful and I'm very sorry you're going through that. But, what's the alternative from the universities' point of view? If they gave extra financial aid to students disowned by their parents, every parent would claim to hate their child to save on tuition.
  • Crake 13y ago
    The alternative would be to prioritize academics over profits. In civilized countries, tuition is usually free, and college entrance standards are much higher. I know an english major who graduated still unable to distinguish between "your" and "you're." Who would you rather have in college, her or me?
    • aestra 13y ago
      There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone pays for it. It's a minor but important point. Lets not kid ourselves here.
      • danieldk 13y ago
        Someone pays for it. I don't think anyone is under the illusion that education is free. However, it benefits society as a whole, and not everyone may be able to afford it. So, it is often in the interest of society to make good tuition affordable, regardless the background of a student. Of course, it is also beneficial for the student. But for that we have the tax man :).
      • epsylon 13y ago
        Yes, taxes pay for education for all. Considering that a large part comes from taxes on income, which means the rich pay more than the poor. Damned socialists, giving the same education opportunities for everyone! (Well, unfortunately it's more and more the middle class that pays due to tax evasion and fiscal advantages to the rich)
    • auctiontheory 13y ago
      I know an english major who graduated still unable to distinguish between "your" and "you're." Who would you rather have in college, her or me? Well, she apparently needs further education more than you do!
      • Crake 13y ago
        If 18 years of it didn't work, I don't know that more will help. Haha.
  • danielweber 13y ago
    Their students are old enough to drive, vote, and go off to fight in war.
    • walshemj 13y ago
      But not to be trusted to drink :-)
• mattlutze 13y ago
  There used to be a tax status that allowed independent status for a student, opening up the benefits for which they told you to wait until you were 24. http://collegeapps.about.com/od/payingforcollege/f/independent-status-financial-aid.htm http://collegeapps.about.com/od/payingforcollege/f/independe... I guess too many people tried gaming it and they've locked it down. It was a good law exactly for the reason you describe, it sucks that it was abused into a state requiring shuttering. I sympathize with being shut out by your parents, but I'm despondent over the very rapid change in the apparent expectation that parents are the only way to pay for college. Especially for a brilliant kid, going to college was not an impossible task. My parents' contribution to my college was ~5k in a savings account and a beater after my first year so I could come home time to time. I worked 30-40 hrs/wk to offset the loans I needed with a full-time course load. And it was a good school outside my home state, where I got in-state tuition but didn't qualify for a single other grant / scholarship. For context, this was 2003-2008, I'm not talking about decades ago. I'm sure the private / federal loan programs have shored up some because of the crisis, but I would be quite surprised if funding and education was really so impossible, or that it was impossible to work for a few years then go when you were 20.
  • Crake 13y ago
    Funding and education really IS that impossible. I think you underestimate just how expensive college has become, especially in states that don't value educating smart people. I graduated into a recession, and even finding enough work to pay rent was incredibly difficult, because I was competing for minimum wage jobs against people with college degrees. The area was and is incredibly economically depressed. I also had health problems that went untreated as a kid that made it hard to work. No college also meant no healthcare. Of course, I had to work anyway because I'd be homeless if I didn't. It's hard to pay $20,000/year for college when you can't find more than $7,000/year in work. $7,000 is barely enough to keep you fed and housed as it is. (Even at age 24, you don't start getting pell grant money until you make under about $10,000, incidentally.)
    • thaumasiotes 13y ago
      My view of the college funding situation is colored by the fact that after taking the PSAT I received monthly mail from the university of Tulsa offering free tuition, free board, and a stipend if only I would agree to attend their school. (In retrospect, I think that would have been a good idea... ah, hindsight.) I'm pretty sure there are other scholarships around that require more than the absolutely zero effort that took.
• telephonetemp 13y ago
  Are there any LGBT scholarships you could apply for?
  • Crake 13y ago
    Lgbt don't count as "minorities" for scholarships. Believe me, I've looked. It's all race based stuff, for the most part. I have a physical disability too, but it falls into that same abyss of not being pc attention worthy enough to get tons of free money.
    • Loughla 13y ago
      Bullshit. I received scholarships for college, I paid for two years of my undergraduate with LGBT ally scholarships. Those are ally scholarships, there are one metric shit-ton more scholarships for LGBT youth. There are entire foundations set up for this. Don't lie just because you haven't done your homework. Here are 3 databases if you're too lazy to google LGBT scholarships. http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/lgbt.phtml http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/lgbt.phtml http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/scholarship-database http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/scholarship-database http://www.pointfoundation.org/scholarships.html http://www.pointfoundation.org/scholarships.html Immediate Edit: I also googled scholarships for students with disabilities. Turns out there are tons of those, too.
      • Crake 13y ago
        Yes, there are scholarships for people in wheelchairs. I'm not in a wheelchair. My stuff is rare and has no funding behind it. I'm glad that you think that being a sexuality studies major is a noble goal, but I'm interested in tech (which eliminates a great deal of them--most require a sociology major or something similarly specific), and I'd also like to point out that leading a gay youth initiative (as is often required by these scholarships) is hard when: 1. You're the only out person in high school. 2. Your school won't even let you into NHS because you are gay. No teacher was willing to stand up for me because they didn't want to lose their job. Can you imagine the difficulties of getting one to volunteer to sponsor some sort of gay group? It'd never happen. 3. Your parents almost send you to a gay reparation camp because they're fundamentalist christian. 4. You live in a flyover state in the middle of nowhere. (many of the scholarships are for specific states, too.) It's great that you had the resources to land a glbt scholarship, but they're mostly unavailable to disadvantaged students. You may want to rethink your ally status if you're going to go around bashing gay people for not trying hard enough when there's already usually quite a lot on our plates.
• cwlb 13y ago
  you could get straight-married (for legal purposes, obviously) to become independent from your parents under the law.
  • levosmetalo 13y ago
    > you could get straight-married (for legal purposes, obviously) to become independent from your parents under the law. Is that all it gets? He could also, you know, sell his kidney, or something similar, in order to get into university. What kind of society are we talking about if you need to cheat to get something that you should get in every other civilized society? What other compromises would you be required to make in order to get an education? Join a political party, rob the bank, start working as a prostitute or porn actor?
    • Crake 13y ago
      Thank you.
• thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Please don't take this as a slam, but I'm curious about the interaction between "routinely having the highest standardized test scores in my entire high school" and testing in the 95-99th percentile nationwide. Some fuzzy intuitive probability suggests that for every 20 people in the high school, there should be one testing at or above the 95th percentile nationwide. The emphasis word "entire" suggests that your high school was large. Was it awful? What's the story there?
  • Crake 13y ago
    Without getting into a huge argument with an internet stranger as to the exact extent of my stupidity and/or intelligence, it'd probably be wise to note that nearly 2/3 of high school seniors are going to college now. Someone who is in the top 1-5% of high school seniors really shouldn't have the difficulties I did. I'm not trying to brag, I'm just trying to say that my stats were decent and I wasn't a slacker. It was really baffling to me that colleges preferred to take people who got 2s and 3s on their AP tests to someone who scored 5s, so long as they had parents who would fork over thousands of dollars. At a poorly funded rural high school where most people were members of FFA, outscoring my classmates wasn't hard, and there weren't many collegebound to begin with, outside of the people with welloff families. It was frustrating to see them get to go instead of me because I didn't have tens of thousands of dollars for the tuition bill. (I mean, a lot of them were in the low to mid twenties on their ACT scores...)
    • shamshiel 13y ago
      I'm curious about this. In several states - I thought all states - a sufficiently high ACT score will get you either a free ride, or a half-cost ride to any public university. Mid-20s is enough to get half. Is that not the case in your state?
      • Crake 13y ago
        Absolutely not. I was well into the 30s on mine, and the financial aid office still told me to fuck off. I suspect it varies a lot from state to state, hence a lot of people's condescending attitude and disbelief.
• at-fates-hands 13y ago
  This is interesting to me. I went to a college in North Dakota and most of the kids worked full-time jobs and took loans out in order to get their education. They often told me this is what their parents did and expected them to do the same. They've worked hard their whole lives, what's working 30 hours a week and paying off your tuition in the meantime? For many of them, it was a walk in the park. I had to do the same thing. My parents were only able to afford two years, the rest was on me. I got some partial academic scholarships which helped, but I had to bust my ass to go, and it made it that much more fulfilling. Nothing makes you feel better than being able to tell someone in an interview that you worked and paid your own way through college without the aid of your parents. There are a ton of options available to smart kids. Also, don't kid yourself that you need to go to an Ivy League school for an education. My roommates all got jobs at large companies and two of them were chosen over Ivy league grads. They both came from a state college engineering program. If you really want to go, then go. There's SO MANY opportunities out there which weren't around when I was coming out of high school. Two year technical degrees can get you a $50-60K a year job. There's code schools, online colleges, and other avenues you can explore. Hell, maybe you don't want to be a programmer - there's a HUGE deficit of skilled labor right now. I have a brother in law who's a welder who makes a low six figure salary because his job is in such high demand right now. Don't let life get you down. If you're driven and want to succeed, then go out and do it. There's no many less barriers today then there were 10 years ago.
  • Crake 13y ago
    "Only" able to afford two years? A four year university in my home state is $20,000/year. Going out of state to almost anywhere is even more expensive (california is up to nearly $40,000/year), and if you do find somewhere cheaper, you need the savings for a move, which is difficult at the poverty level. Many colleges are completely unaffordable, even working full time jobs: "The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If a minimum wage worker is employed full-time (forty hours per week for 52 weeks), that worker would earn $15,080 annually." http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full-time-minimum-wage-worker http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full... And that's IF you can find full time work, which is difficult in many areas. I had to live off of half that for several years because I couldn't find anything better for a long while. If I went to a community college, they'd only give me $900/quarter in student loans when the cost was more like $1500/quarter for tuition. So, I couldn't afford community college either, for quite a while. It was only once I was working 35-60 hours a week (it was a fulltime job, but weird work schedule) that I was able to afford to both not be homeless and attend community college. As a result, it took about six years to get even my associate's degree (between the waiting and the working). There are a lot of barriers. I think a lot of people on HN don't realize how rough it is out there for low income people right now.
• cloverich 13y ago
  Eh, plenty of people go to college with little or no money, and there's plenty of scholarship opportunities out there. My roomate and I were the only two people I knew in College who weren't there 75% or > on loans. Community college while working is also an option, where good grades can also assist in getting scholarships in addition to getting you credit - I took several and personally found them higher quality than the University courses I took. > I'm gay, so my parents wouldn't pay or help me in any way. Thats awful - sorry to hear that.
  • Crake 13y ago
    I did community college while working. It took 6 years to get my associate of science this way, only to find out that my state engineering college would "accept" the credits but I'd still have to enter as a freshman in their engineering department. Luckyily I have access to enough loans/savings now as an independent student to move to another state (if I'd been born here, with their $5,000/year tuition, I'd have graduated with an engineering degree by now...), but I really wish people would stop recommending community college for tech people. Some states just see it as another way to waste your time and make more money off you. If you're a transfer student, many colleges won't give you any institutional aid, either, which means you're limited to places you can afford on a $5,000 pell grant (if you can get one) and yearly stafford loan limits. I loved my cc profs, I just wish the four year colleges couldn't get away with so much snobbery/bs.
• Sagat 13y ago
  If you are that smart you don't need college. Just go at it on your own.