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.

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!

Someone pays for it.

It's a minor but important point. Lets not kid ourselves here.

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 :).

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?

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...)

In the US, higher education, like most everything else, is a business. That's not cynical, that's a fact. With the exception of a small handful of wealthy schools, most universities are looking out for their bottom line. Don't let the glossy brochures and cozy advertising copy confuse you. And you might as well get used to it, because the country is moving further in that direction.

On a more positive note, try to google: scholarships for gay kids

It returns a lot of promising hits.

Good luck.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.)

6 years later I got a full tuition science scholarship at a community college, but that took a ridiiiiiiculously huge effort and it only lasted for a year since I wasn't an 18 year old anymore (meh). I'm still incredibly grateful to my chemistry professor who helped me get it, though.

I think a lot of it is that people don't want to accept that their own college degree was more a factor of luck and money than anything else. Passing classes isn't hard at all, paying for them is.

I hadn't seen the health complication until I read through some of your other comments from the last few days. I think it makes you an exception though and not definitive of the state of education...

tl;dr: The numbers don't line up to suggest college is unavailable to kids whose parents won't pay.

It's going to mean loans. Even with 9 months of a really generously compensated internship (to Midwest standards, at least, I grew up in WI and went to school in MI), I still left college with north of 50k in loans.

Ohio University, cost is ~24k a year, more than 12k of which is room, board, transportation and personal. Ohio State this year is 21k, more than half of which is the room and board. For both, tuition and books is about 11-11.5k.

You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.

4.5k in the stafford loan means, 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost, which is probably 20-40% higher than it was 5 years ago.

4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree. $60 if they take a victory lap.

In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.

So in summary, funding an education is not impossible. Yes, the student will be paying for it for a while. I'm still paying on my loans and I still will be for a few years. But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.

>It's going to mean loans.

Well, no shit.

>It is not that much more expensive.

It is when gas is $4/gallon instead of $2/gallon, and the economy makes it much harder to find a job of any kind. Not to mention tuition itself is increasing at about twice the rate of general inflation.

" On average, tuition tends to increase about 8% per year. An 8% college inflation rate means that the cost of college doubles every nine years."

http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml

>You'd hypothetically already be paying the rest with the 7k / year job that's keeping you kicking.

Hypothetically, sure. In reality, if you don't have 7 days a week of 24/7 availability, you can't get a job in many places.

Most of these low end jobs will have you coming in at 7AM one monday, and closing at 11PM the next. You can't plan your courses around work since there's no regularity.

In the best case scenario, you have a job already and try to change availability, but in that case they'll often slash your hours to barely nothing. Can YOU live on 12 hours a week of minimum wage?

> 6k in other loans a year to fill it in at today's cost

>4 years of loans, even if they're shitty, "credit ready" loans at personal loan rates, still only leaves a fictional Ohio traditional student with $45k in student loan debt at the end of the degree

You cannot get these without a cosigner or guarantor. When I was 18, I tried banks, sallie mae, online options, etc for (roughly) this amount and was completely denied. Hell, I couldn't even get a credit card for any amount, even through my bank.

Even when I later had a better fulltime job making 20K/year, I was again declined for loans. (At that time, I had 3 credit cards and awesome credit.)

>In any STEM discipline, paid internships and co-ops are also possible, which would further reduce the loan load required.

You have to have access to loans in the first place to get there.

>But I'm sorry, not having parents foot the bill generally isn't yet a barrier to a high-quality education.

Oh, I see what the problem is. You don't live in reality. I'm talking about people who live in the US, FWIW.

It's what I've done now that I have access to independent student level of stafford loans. I got a 35-60 hour/week job for 2 years before I moved which helped too. (Full time jobs are very hard to find due to the economy, where I'm from.)

> I'm gay, so my parents wouldn't pay or help me in any way.

Thats awful - sorry to hear that.

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.

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.hrc.org/resources/entry/scholarship-database http://www.pointfoundation.org/scholarships.html

Immediate Edit: I also googled scholarships for students with disabilities. Turns out there are tons of those, too.

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.

"and I'd also like to point out that leading a gay youth initiative (as is often required by these scholarships" The scholarships that I've run through that talk about leading anything only require leadership skills and experience. No mention of specific gay leadership. And even if they did, your example is exactly what they're looking for, and the exact reason that I received money in the first place. I was from a high school with less than 200 people, no parents in the picture, in the midwest.

I'm not saying that your life has been easy, I'm saying that your arguments seem very poorly thought out, and that you're simply grasping for someone to blame for your place in life right now.

"It's great that you had the resources to land a glbt [sic] 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." I was a disadvantaged youth. Homeless at 16, graduated from a GED program, went to community college and a state school. Now I teach at a university after a decade or so working in sales. I'm not saying that everyone can do it, or that I am even the rule, maybe I am just the exception. What I am saying is that these scholarships are EXPRESSLY designed for disadvantaged youth. That's who they're made for. I'm going to say it one more time - disadvantaged youth are who scholarships, grants and other sources of aid are designed for.

I never bashed gay people. Just you for not doing your homework. I can't believe that you are hiding behind your sexual orientation as an excuse. It's 20and fucking13; the youth of America don't give a shit about who you want to have sex with. Those youth are also the ones you're competing with in the tech industry. Stop using it as a crutch, and start taking responsibility for your own choices. Being an ally means that I support your good choices and am here to help you when times get tough. Being an ally also means that I don't have to put up with bullshit excuses from young people, regardless of sexual orientation.

As for this: "Yes, there are scholarships for people in wheelchairs. I'm not in a wheelchair. My stuff is rare and has no funding behind it."

If you're willing to disclose what the condition is, I am willing to help you find scholarships/aid for sufferers of it. I guarantee there are scholarships or other aid available.

"Deaf Queer Youth Scholarship The Deaf Queer Resource Center sponsors a $500 scholarship for deaf lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer students"

Well, I'm not deaf.

"Gamma Mu Foundation Scholarships The Gamma Mu Foundation awards $19,000 in individual scholarships to gay men"

Nope, not this either.

"Malyon-Smith Scholarship Award The American Psychological Association's Division 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian and Gay Issues) offers this award to support graduate student research into psychological issues "

Not interested in psychology, also, still worrying about undergrad.

"Live Out Loud Annual Scholarship ...the scholarship is open to graduating high school seniors in the tri-state area (NY, CT, NJ)."

Well, shit, I guess that's out too.

"The Messenger-Anderson Journalism Scholarship and Internship Program offers several $10,000 scholarships ($5,000 for the first year and $2,500 for the second and third years) to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students pursuing a degree in journalism and communications "

Not a journalism major.

"NGPA-Education Fund Scholarships for Aviation Students The National Gay Pilots Association (NGPA) Education Fund provides scholarships to members of the gay and lesbian community (including straight allies) who are pursuing an aviation career as a professional pilot."

Not a pilot.

"National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) NLGJA provides several scholarships and awards for "students who demonstrate a commitment to providing fair and accurate coverage of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community."

Not a published journalist.

"NWSA Graduate Scholarships in Lesbian Studies This award provides financial assistance to graduate students doing Master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation research in lesbian studies."

I think I would rather punch myself in the face than go to school for "lesbian studies." Also, not for undergrad.

"Roy Scrivner Research Grants The American Psychological Foundation (APF) sponsors the Roy Scrivner Research Grants for graduate and postdoctoral research concerning the study of lesbian, gay and bisexual family psychology and family therapy."

Not in grad school, not into psych, etc.

"Transgender Scholarship and Education Legacy Fund (TSELF) TSELF awards several scholarships for transgender-identified students in the helping and caring professions, including social services, health care, religious instruction, teaching, and law."

Not going into "helping and caring" professions.

"An Uncommon Legacy Foundation, Inc. The Lesbian Leadership Scholarship program, for both undergraduate and graduate students, provides awards for projects that address lesbian social, cultural and educational needs. Consideration will be given to academic performance, honors, personal or financial hardship and especially service to the lesbian/gay community. Candidates must have a minimum 3.0 GPA, have financial need, and demonstrate a commitment or significant contribution to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

Didn't have "financial need" on paper from ages 18-24, and it's hard to "demonstrate a significant contribution" when you're trying to survive.

"Point foundation"

Applied for this, didn't get it.

"Queer Foundation Scholarships The Queer Foundation (http://queerfoundation.org) sponsors a high school seniors English essay contest to promote queer studies. Winners receive $1,000 scholarships for study in queer theory or a related field such as queer medical, legal, or social issues."

Not going into "queer studies."

Everything else is regional or athletic, and the one regional one for my area requires: "dedicated time and energy to the GLBT community and toward GLBT and HIV/AIDS issues."

"SOLGA Kenneth W. Payne Student Prize Competition "The American Anthropological Association - Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA) offers this award for a scholarly anthropological paper, written by a student, on a gay or lesbian topic. The prize consists of a $400 cash award and a letter of commendation from the Prize Committee. (The prize is not specifically for tuition, but rather is intended to reward excellent graduate student papers.) The deadline is in mid-June. deadline is July 15."

>The prize consists of a $400 cash award

Oh, I really hope I get this one, everyone knows that $80,000 in undergrad can be paid for with a $400 grant.

It'd also be wise to note how many of the few scholarships that do exist specify that you have to be a high school senior, something I no longer am. I applied for 40+ essay scholarships during the time that I WAS one, though, and it wasn't enough.

I don't really see any reason to disclose my disability to you when you're rude and condescending enough about GLBT things: "It's 20and fucking13; the youth of America don't give a shit about who you want to have sex with."

1. It wasn't 2013 when I went to high school. 2. There are still plenty of asshole homophobes in the youth demographic, which is why the suicide rates are so high. You are an incredibly insensitive person, and I hope for their sake that you don't work with glbt youth.

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?