(The post below is an old post I made in the Off-Topic forum years ago. I though it was really good and decide to repost it on my blog. I have redacted some of the material and fixed some grammar and spelling issues.)
Introduction
I’ve seen lots of posts questioning if college is worth the debt. I wanted to give my advice from my experiences with college. How to make it worth it and come out with little debt. This is just what I have learned after going through the University system for over 4 years and the mistakes I saw people make on the way through.
Minimizing Your Debt
- Go to a college you can afford. Even look at doing your first year or two at a community college. In my experience, most community college are pretty good. They have smaller class sizes and more teaching orientated professors than you would find at a large public university. I can’t speak for every CC out there.
- Many private Universities provide needs-based financial aid. They look at your family’s and your estimated contributions and give a financial aid package accordingly. Sometimes, with financial aid a private college could cost the same as a public 4-year or less.
- Look at taking AP, IB, or CLEP tests. There are tons of online material to knock out these tests. You could knock out your pre-requisites this way and save lots of money.
- There are ways to pay for college without student loans or scholarships. Work study programs, CO-OP's, military, and companies that do tuition reimbursement—for example. Also, many departments give grants and have department scholarships. At my grad school, my department had a surplus of scholarship money, funny enough, hardly anyone ever applied.
- If you have decent grades you could get scholarships and/or grants. There are thousands of external scholarships out there. Try to apply for as many as you can. If you do some student research you could get grants.
It’s possible to go through college without ever taking out a student loan. For example, I knew a Psychiatrist that graduated debt free. How did he do it? When he was an undergrad he started out with no scholarships, but his college had a co-op program with a large company in his town. He would work 20 hours a week and they covered tuition. During the summer he saved up enough money to cover all his other expenses. He also lived at home for the first two years of college. When it came time for medical school, he got an ROTC scholarship which covered everything for med school.
Planning Your College Career
- Get experience when you’re in college not after college. Internships are the obvious one. However, getting a low-level job in your field is another. For example, if you’re studying accounting for example. You could work at an HR Block or as an Administrative Assistant at a CPA firm.)
- Another way to get experience: volunteer. For example, if you want to do software development, start developing a website for a church or work on open source projects. Build your portfolio while you are in school. Also, take advantage of research opportunities.
- No Career Services department is going to 'pimp' your resume to employers. They will give you the tools to help you get a job--resume writing, interview coaching, posting up job openings, etc. You can't sit on your butt and have career services do all the work for you. You need to take initiative by networking, joining trade groups, applying for job openings on her career board, joined Linkedin, and go to some temp/staffing agencies in your field.
- Before picking a major, do some research on what you can do with that major. Look at a job board. See how many relevant openings you see in that field. Talk to some people that majored in field. What are they doing?
- There are some people that are going into careers where they don’t a specific degree (pre-professional, sales, military, etc). Some of them will pick majors they enjoy or are easy. I think that is a good reason to major in “worthless” major.
- If you’re not sure what you want to major in: take an introductory class in different majors you might be interested in. Even if you don’t go that route, you could possibly use the class as an elective.
- If you are a pre-professional (i.e. pre-med, pre-law, pre-vet, etc). Make sure you have a backup plan.
- Grades are important for grad school and your first job, after that they don’t matter that much. School prestige is extremely overrated, IMHO. When I interviewed with medical schools they cared more about my GPA and MCATs than where I went to school and what I majored in. If you go out into the work force, a brand name college loses it’s value pretty quickly.
Conclusion
And there you go—that’s advice I wish I knew before I went to college. This is mainly for American university students, but some should apply to other countries (especially Canada).
The biggest point, if you don't take anything else away, is research. Research different colleges, ways to save money, ways to pay for college and realistic careers with your major.
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