Should I say yes to my dream school?

To Adriana: Congrats on getting your dream school! Awesome!!! So happy for you! Go bulls!

To other CareerVillage.org pros: Please comment with feedback / suggestions. I'd love to edit my response to be more helpful!

Step 1: make a financial plan. Step 2: speak with your college's financial aid team and your high school counselor to request other options. Step 3: if everything looks OK, accept the offer.

Whether you're doing a 6 month training program or a 4-year degree, it's critical to make sure that you can pay for the education and the costs of living as a student. Not only that, but not all degrees are created equal from a money perspective -- some will give you much higher employment rates or incomes after finishing school than others. If things go south (pun!), and you're half-way through your degree and suddenly run out of money, you might have to drop out of school, which can be extremely stressful and / or costly. Let's make sure that doesn't happen! Here's how...

Step 1: Make a simple one-page financial plan (2-6 hours)

Make a budget that lasts as long as your degree will take to complete. Your budget should have two parts: (a) all of your costs, (b) all of your incomes until you get the degree, and (c) what you think your budget will be until you pay off any loans you take on (based on your expected occupation and salary). You do not have to know everything, and you don't need to have a perfect plan -- you just need to know that there's a "reasonable" plan that allows you to afford the investment in your education! You can find a bunch of examples online, or you can ask questions here on CareerVillage.org to get help with that.

Types of costs you might include: Tuition, housing, food, transportation, textbooks, laptop, phone, internet, other bills, entertainment, travel, and more.

Types of incomes you might include: Grants, Scholarships, Government aid, Loans, side income from extracurricular work, money your family members are promising to give you, and more.

How to estimate your future earnings: Two options: (a) find the average salary for USF graduates majoring in [your desired major]. (b) Make a list of occupations you hope to pursue. For each one, get the estimated starting salary (Google search or ask here on CareerVillage.org) and estimate your cost of living. Calculate how much you can save each year, and apply that to any loan amount you expect to have remaining when you finish school. There are a lot of calculators out there that can help with this part, if needed.

Some tips:

• A piece of paper with a ruler and a pencil would be enough, but if you want to get fancy, you can use something like Google Spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel to make your budget.
• Play it safe by putting in extra costs for things. Be conservative (assume it's all more expensive than you think it is now)
• You can have multiple ways to raise the money you need. It's ok to have many ideas even if none of them is perfect.
• There are tons of scholarships out there. CareerVillage.org even runs some scholarships to promote career readiness. This can be a really good way to get funding for college, but you have to remember that even free money isn't free: you have to invest time as if applying to scholarships is your job. If we assume that you win ~5% of the ones you apply to, and you want to raise $50,000, you'll need to apply to a million dollars worth of scholarships! Think you can do better than 5%? Great; you'll have fewer scholarships to apply to. But the point is that it's a numbers game unlike what you experienced applying to college.

Step 2: call the college's financial aid rep and your HS counselor (1-2 hours spread across a few days)

Your college is going to make a lot of money on you if you attend. The college's financial aid department has a strong incentive to make sure that you can afford to attend, because they'd rather get your money than let your money go to another college. So they really want to make sure that you can afford to go. Call them and ask to speak with someone because "I want to accept, but I am not sure if I can afford it and want to know if there is an opportunity to either appeal to request more funding, or to secure funding in other ways that are not very expensive for me."

Your high school counselor may also be aware of other sources of funding specific to your high school or your community. Say to him/her: "I got into my dream school but am not sure I can afford to attend. Obviously I can do FAFSA and other standard programs, but are you aware of any scholarships or low-interest-rate loans that are available specifically to students in our high school or our community that I might not otherwise know about?"

Step 3: If everything looks OK, accept the offer. (1 hour)

Do you have a reasonable plan for how you'll pay for college? Does it seem like you could get by without anxiety and stress getting in the way of your ability to complete your degree? Do you have a pretty good idea of how much time you'll need to spend applying to scholarships, applying to additional aid programs, and/or doing work outside of school to pay for school? If you think the plan looks legit (tip: get feedback!) then go ahead and accept the offer and let the celebrations begin!

Special note: "What if a family member is offering to pay for me?"

If you're independently wealthy or have a family member vouching to pay for everything for you, then your financial plan might be as simple as "Grandma will pay for everything ✅" and you can go ahead and accept your offer. Although it still might be good to come up with a "what if Grandma doesn't come through?" backup plan just to be safe -- what if grandma changes her mind? It would be good to have at least an idea of what you might try next. </span>

Hello dear,

I must say that you should go with your dream school.

The reason of this is ,if you will not put the habit of achieving the things which you want and instead running for security, you will never understand the life.

People who have the courage to follow their dreams, they only can explore the most of this universe.

And hope with complete faith that you will win lot of scholarships and I know you will.

Best of luck