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Tuition Costs? We Don’t Need No Stinking Tuition Costs!
Posted on | November 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
My dream as a kid was to go to school at MIT. I was a nerd, and if you’re a nerd, you want to go to Nerd Mecca. But my mom is a school teacher and tuition at MIT was almost as much as her gross annual salary. I eventually accepted the fact that it was too expensive to go, and I ended up not even applying. I knew that I could get student loans, but that whole “as much as my mom makes in a year” thing loomed in my head, along with the “you’re going to have to pay that back”. I don’t have too many regrets about my life, but the fact that I didn’t even apply to MIT is by far my biggest.
Things have changed since then, and the top schools, flush with gigantic endowments, are working harder to a) continue attracting the best students, and b) spend some of the endowment money so the government doesn’t take a closer look at their tax-advantaged status. One way they’re spending this money is by fully paying the tuition for low- and middle-income students.
I knew about MIT, Stanford, and a few others, but I just came across a huge list of 100 schools that pay full tuition. It’s broken up into several categories, including Academic Acheivement, Work Study, Need-Based, Professional Demand, Location Based, Online, International, and Special Groups. Some interesting ones I found were:
- Stanford: free if your family earns less than $100,000
- Curtis Institute for Musicians: for “exceptionally gifted young musicians”
- Philadelphia: students in Philadelphia who have stalled their college degree can get free tuition from Philadelphia in order to finish their studies
- Karolinska University: Study in a hospital setting for free with this medical school
Check out the list and see if any apply to you!
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One Response to “Tuition Costs? We Don’t Need No Stinking Tuition Costs!”
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November 10th, 2008 @ 1:21 am
For Stanford, even room and board is free if your parents earn less than $60,000. (Perhaps low paying jobs will start to come in vogue as children enter school.)
When I was looking at colleges, I was gung-ho on the Ivy league, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Stanford, and the like. I just assumed that they all gave full rides to smart people. When I found many didn’t even give merit-based age, it seemed reason enough not to give them a dime for an application fee.
I did find that there were a number of public schools in Texas that were eager to give you free rides if you had decent grades. As I recall, if you are a valedictorian you get your first year’s tuition free at any public university in the state. If you top that off with a full scholarship from the school and a national merit scholarship, it is possible to make a profit going to school. A guess all that hard work doesn’t have to go to waste.