Low income student in CA: stick to UC/CSU system or branch out to out of state schools?

[Anonymous]

My suggestion would be to look at several paths. If you can get a guaranteed scholarship out of state great but those are difficult to get.

The most economical and guaranteed route for UC would be to do two years or 60 hours of community college and transfer into a UC. Don’t treat high school as well it doesn’t matter because I’m doing the CC path in, learn to work hard and self teach to challenge yourself. Take APs in freshman, sophomore and senior year. With the CC route if he can get his gpa up he can be in the honors program. He’ll go from a 5% chance of getting into UCLA to a 75%. He can also do TAG to UC Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz with just a 3.0.

You can do the same thing for Cal State. If you are in an area where your regional Cal State is good, go there! San Jose State, San Diego State, CAL Poly SLO, Pomona, Fullerton are all good. It is really cheap if you don’t need housing because he can go from home. The drawback to Cal State is that they don’t have the full range of programs. They have areas that are their specialty and very small programs for other areas. Some are very engineering focused, some business, some life sciences etc.

You can also look at the western alliance of universities which offer reciprocal tuition. I think Arizona State is on the list.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My low income cousin got into multiple UCs this round with scholarships whereas our much wealthier cousin who attends a fancy private school, got shut out of all except UC Merced. Both kids live in California. Low income cousin's main after school activity was working because her family needed the money.

UC schools will take the top 7% (?) from every school. The kid from the private school may not have been ranked that highly in their school. That's the down side of going to a high achieving school. Harder to stand out.

[Anonymous]

OP, I grew up lower income, went to a CSU school eons ago.

Something you should think about: if your kid goes far, you will have to pay for travel expenses to/from. Those expenses are not usually covered in any aid. It is so much harder to move your kid back and forth when they are far away, and you are low income.

IMO, it would be silly to not take advantage of any of the great colleges in CA -- private or public. CA is huge, as you know. If you live in Norcal, your kid could go to a school in SoCal if they don't to be so close to home (and vice versa). There are of course, neighboring states with decent universities, so those could be an option, too. In some cases, those neighboring states can be closer to you than the opposite side of CA. But, really, the CA schools are so much better than those in the neighboring states.

I have two regrets about moving out of CA: weather and college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My low income cousin got into multiple UCs this round with scholarships whereas our much wealthier cousin who attends a fancy private school, got shut out of all except UC Merced. Both kids live in California. Low income cousin's main after school activity was working because her family needed the money.

UC schools will take the top 7% (?) from every school. The kid from the private school may not have been ranked that highly in their school. That's the down side of going to a high achieving school. Harder to stand out.

No, this is not how it works in California

[Anonymous]

OP -do the community college transfer programs. My nieces did that in Ca. makes sense and is affordable