Save 100% by planning far enough ahead to look poor and get grants for tuition :). Maybe get your kid adopted by your broke relatives in advance of the FAFSA application?
Go for a graduate degree in something science related and they pay you (not much admittedly), rather than the other way around. Of course if you want to drink your way through a business school degree, thatās going to cost full fare.
I did a few of these while in High School some caveats
Itās difficult to squeeze in all these additional classes into an already busy high school junior/senior year. Itās the same time your worrying about SATs, ACTs, college applications, and those can arguably be more worthwhile to focus on should you be able to get a substantial scholarship.
Certain College Now / AP classes are going to be more useful than others depending on your major. If youāre unsure of your major, AP Calculus or Statistics is generally a safe bet if your planning to do any STEM as you would probably need a semester of it in most related majors anyways.
Once in college be mindful of how many credits you need for graduation and how many credits you need for your major. After I added in the credits I needed for my major and credits I had from High School I had more than enough for graduation, but still needed to fulfill Liberal Arts requirements.
+1 on the trying to overload the maximum courses, for me all it took was visiting the student scholastic department every semester and asking, if your GPA is above average they usually have no problem. Leverage your ability to withdrawal from classes here to be able to easily trial courses.
This one is doubly goodāyou get the extra classes for āfree,ā and you stay more focused and less distracted. When I would carry 18 units Iād pull in a 4.0. If I dropped that to 12 Iād end up with one B, at 9 units Iād probably have goofed off so much I would have paid for it with bad grades.
The best part of this post talks about dual enrollment. I graduated high school earlier this year with an associate degree from a regional university and transferred into a top 10 school.
Just a word of advice: focus more on the bullshit gen ed courses than anything having to do with your inteneed major. The courses taught by a community college or regional university are not going to be of the same caliber as an actual, good university.
So no mention of community college yet. My first two years were roughly 30% of my second two years at a private university. Factoring room and board could easily widen that gap.
Much of this is dependent on major/program. I found that liberal arts programs and some basic sciences are often ok with bringing in your base credits from somewhere else. Engineering and architecture programs often have a very tight prerequisite structure that limits your pace. Graduating a semester early is possible, two would be a stretch. In many of these programs, two years early would be impossible.
My oldest son got free tuitionā¦
Plan ahead, take rigorous high school courses, including AP. Study your butt off and get straight Aās.
Score a perfect 36 on your ACT
= full tuition (including room & board) offers from 3 out 5 colleges applied to.
Apply early to the colleges you want (only 2 or 3 top personal choices), grants and scholarships are usually given āfirst come, first servedā.
(My middle son received $15k in scholarships by doing this)
Colleges usually accept 6-8 AP credits; while Universities will usually take all.
In MN, there is PSEO (Post Secondary Education Opportunity) of taking college classes while in high school (for free). Those college credits donāt always transfer (to other colleges/universities).
EDIT to clarify: āCollegesā are generally private institutions, while āUniversitiesā are public.
I think these are all good ideas. I took AP in high school and got credits for a full quarter worth of college. I know theres ore opportunity to do that stuff nowadays.
But ā¦
How feasible is it to do all this and actually accumulate 2 full years of college credits?? What degree? Which college? How about in engineering?
The BA in four weeks strategy gives you a regionally accredited degree by taking DANTES and CLEP exams in literally four weeks (plus the amount of time to study). If you just need a degree to fulfill a requirement (i.e. advancement in an existing job) this would work. http://www.bain4weeks.com/ Also thereās the method of working at Starbucks and getting free tuition at ASU online.
For graduate school, you can get a AACSB MBA for instate tuition rate ($430 a unit) online at North Dakota. Or Western New Mexico University and their masterās in interdisciplinary studies or MBA for about $12,000 all in (provided you only take 6 units a semester).
This doesnāt make any sense. Universities are usually a collection of colleges, but there are plenty of āuniversitiesā that arenāt ā the definitions arenāt very distinct.
In my experience college and university are mostly used interchangeably. My university had many colleges within it.
But maybe some other places have a clear distinction between a college and a university ?
