Mark Murphy
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| Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 9:58 pm
Post subject: Re: Can 47 yr old man get aid for college? |
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I strongly advise you go after private scholarships, and line them up before you even think of going off to college. The neck you save might be your own. I want to tell you a story...
I have a wife who attended Northeastern University to study nursing. She had gone to school for 8 years previously; had come from Manila, Philippines, with English as her second language. During those 8 years, she perfected her English, took pre-nursing courses, got up to speed studying at Los Angeles City College, and was nominated to the National Dean's List 4 times. By the time she left Quincy College, in Quincy, Massachusetts, she had a 3.65 GPA and was accepted to NEU's Bouve School of Nursing. By this time, she had run through all her BEOG and SEOG (Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, and Supplementary Educational Opportunity Grants, respectively). By the time my wife got to her second year in NEU, she had taken the maximum amount possible in the Ford Student Loan Program. There was no more money she could borrow, except for what we could put together, living in the house of my father, who wasn't taking rent but was asking we pay utilities. hat allowed us to keep my wife in school, but then one day father then served us an eviction notice, and everything sort of went to s***. Once we ended up paying $875.00 in rent for a studio apartment, it became impossible to keep my wife in school without turning to a private student loan. You make $37,000.00 a year here in Boston, subtract out about 23% for taxes, and you see that the rent takes a very substantial amount of pocket change. But...I get ahead of myself.
When we went for a private student loan, my wife couldn't get one. Bad credit. I couldn't co-sign her loan. Same reason; a prior bankruptcy filing kept us from getting the loan. We asked family, and friends; none would co-sign for us. I couldn't ask my parents; my mother was already dead, my father had moved against us, and my wife's relatives weren't even in this country, making them ineligible to co-sign a private student loan for her (by law, a co-signer must be a U.S. resident.). As a last-ditch effort to save my wife's nursing studies, she asked for an OIL loan...and the lender, Sallie Mae, refused to give one. My wife's education at NEU ended after 4 years. In disgust, I wrote to Senator Kennedy; he attempt to intercede in our behalf, without success. She is so discouraged, she might just quit what has now taken her 12 years to get through, take the $53,000.00 in debt she incurred, and simply work, with no way to pay it off at the wages she now makes. You don't want to start college and have no way to finish it, and that is far easier to have happen then you might imagine. I am now contemplating my legal options against NEU and Sallie Mae...
What I now find is, more and more college students are having great difficulties getting through college. They now take 6 years, on average, to complete college, because they must work longer hours, cutting back their time to study. They then study part-time, or just enough so they can continue getting financial aid. They start school, then as the federal scholarships and loans run out, they then run out of money themselves, forcing them to work to pay their tuition. If there's nowhere the student can turn, they then can't finish what they start; end up with debt they can't hope to pay back, and consequently, no way to get their transcripts (colleges here in MA won't allow the student to get their transcripts if they owe tuition; NEU is one case in point. UMass-Boston is the same way.). Some students can't get the private student loan; they either have bad credit or no credit, rendering them ineligible. Even if the student can find a co-signer, the co-signer has to qualify as follows: 1) they must have worked for at least two years, 2) must have lived in one place for at least 2 years, and 3) be credit-worthy (e.g., satisfactory income-debt ratio, no bankruptcy filing). Since about 10 million Americans filed for bankruptcy between 1990-2000, and a bankruptcy proceeding stays on your credit report for a minimum of 10 years here in Massachusetts, that is as many people who can't co-sign a private student loan. The parent can be in such a situation; they can't then help the student by co-signing...even if they wanted to. That's a huge cadre of persons who can't pursue higher education...them and their children. That's a very serious situation that no one has even come close to addressing. The Democrats are hamstrung by a congress who now works for the corporations and Corporate America...and not the People.
In the 1980s, a person could go to college, and get enough scholarship and student loans to pay the tuition and have a few dollars to pay for living expenses. Because college tuitions have been rising at double-digit rates for quite a few years now, and federal financial aid hasn't risen fast enough to cover the rises in tuitions, you're now far more likely to run out of federal grants and student loans before you graduate college. You can thank Bush and the Republican cronies he has for that, plus misguided policy that ever let that happen in the first place.
You now need to be very careful. Choose your school based on their financial aid package, and got for the best one. The cheap schools aren't always a bargain like that; you'll have cheap tuition... but no financial aid, and you pay more out of your own pocket than you would if you chose a $35,000.00 a year school that offers you $40,000.00 a year in financial aid, say.
If you check out New England Press, you'll find an e-book on how to search for college scholarships via the Web, plus a guide to those sites, and advice on how to fill out the profiles that are required on most of the scholarship websites before you can even see the scholarships. Moreover...the book contains way to avoid being scammed by unscrupulous businesses that promise scholarships. There are close to 28 million college scholarship sites that are returned on Google if you search on the words "college scholarships." However...not all the results are college scholarships...
Mark Murphy
New England Press. |
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