The difficult advice I would offer is this: If you are not a top X% student, and the only way for you to pay for your education is to take on debt, you are making a mistake. Full stop. Find a cheaper school. Find another way, work part time and go to school part time. See if your church/mosque/community group/etc will give you even $500/semester toward school. Live at home or with a relative. If you still get gifts for Christmas, ask for money instead and put that toward books for Spring semester. Stop eating out, learn to make your own food, the meals on campus are too expensive. Find something that you can buy in bulk and sell one at a time on ebay. And of course, the best choice is to go back in time and be born into a wealthy family.
You can make it work, but you have to be willing to set aside whatever vision you have about how college should be. Take what is available and make it your own.
It’s difficult to process just how expensive school is becoming, how quickly. Right now, California community colleges charge $46 per semester unit, or $1,104 full-time for 1 year, plus maybe $40 in miscellaneous fees. If you want a heavy course load, 17 units all year, that rises to $1,564. A bunch of students qualify for the Board of Governors Fee Waiver, but that generally means the their families have poor financial situations, too. How much did community college cost when you were a young adult?
And that’s just the community college, in-state fees. 4-year colleges and private colleges are becoming ever more expensive, too. Adjusting for inflation, Stanford increased from $10,600 per year in 1960 to $59,600 now, just tuition, not counting miscellaneous fees or the cost of living in Palo Alto. And then there’s financial aid, of which there are nice grants for the destitute, enough to cover books and stuff, but mostly it takes the form of bankruptcy-immune student loans. Is it even possible to work part-time, go to school part-time, and graduate without debt, anymore?
It certainly doesn’t help that most of the kids learn fantasy-world liberal social policies, and increase their own fees. For example, I watched the students at UC Santa Cruz protest the wages and working conditions from the prison-food multinational that ran the cafeterias, and they “won” when UCSC agreed to turn the service workers into UC employees. The next year, instead of cutting the salaries of the executives, UCSC made cafeteria meal plans mandatory for everybody. And then these kids grow up into adults who vote for every bond and regressive tax that plagues my ballot.
As a caregiver and mentor, I’m not sure I can tell my kids to go to college.
Right now, the community college that one went to is $100/credit hour. The private school is $1200/credit hour, although they charge a flat rate for full time admission. There are a lot of fee waivers in there that lower the actual amount to about $700/credit hour. For both, books ran about $500/semester, and that reflects strategically not purchasing some books.
For all of the above, the targets were 30 credits per year.
For my personal experience, the answer was yes. I went to a Midwestern in-state school and worked IT jobs part time (full time in summer) to pay for my school.
Get your degree, file for bankruptcy. Since they can't take your degree away and you have no collateral, there wasn't much they could do.
The inability to relieve debt through bankruptcy is a result of that scam.
School debt is not normal. That used to be for only the classic professions: teacher, lawyer, doctor. College was either paid for by family, by grants, or you worked your ass off but had no debt after the undergraduate degree. Now everyone thinks debt is sane.
If I were a parent, I'd plot with the kid how bankruptcy is part of their normal college education. Not debt.