Reply to Second home in Colorado, how hard to qualify for in state tuition?

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[quote=Anonymous]OP I understand what your argument is but you asked "how hard is it to qualify for in state tuition" and I am telling you as a former Colorado resident and graduate of CU Boulder: it is hard.

The fact that you have owned a vacation home for 10 years will be of no consequence. That house could be in Tibet for all the state or the university care. A lot of people own vacation homes in Colorado ski towns and you are not the first one to try this. If anything it will count against you because if you apply as an in-state resident with out-of-state transcripts and an address in Telluride (keep in mind Telluride's high school has a graduating class of less than 100 kids so this will stick out) your application will instantly be flagged as potentially fraudulent. If you lay out your case as you have here it will be denied.

Some thing else to consider is that Colorado state schools pretty much all give admissions preference to in-state students. In-state students who have above a certain GPA can be "auto admits" at certain schools. So you need to be careful here because if you are seen as not only pursuing the benefit of in-state tuition but also looking for an edge in admissions you risk having your kid's application thrown out altogether even if they might have been admitted as an out of state student had you just applied that way.

You also seem fixated on where your kid is living and working. That's not what in-state tuition is for. If you could get in-state tuition simply by living there as a student then very few people would pay out of state tuition. For kids attending at 18 the relevant things the parents' state of domicile. So forget about where your kid will live in the summer or where they will work -- lots of students live and work in the state where they go to school in the summers and it does not earn them in-state tuition because that status is based on where their parents lived and paid taxes before the kid turned 18. For you that is not Colorado.

Your best bet is to apply as an out of state student (which is what your kid is) and then move there and start paying taxes there as soon as possible. Then apply to the financial aid office to convert to in-state status. This is rare but if you are very careful and follow the rules to a "t" then you might get the tuition break on your kid's 3rd and 4th years (it is unlikely that you will be able to clearly establish domicile in order to get the break on sophomore tuition). Your best argument in favor of in-state tuition is the ability to show that you physically lived in *and paid income taxes in* Colorado for 12 continuous months. Anything short of that is unlikely to work.[/quote]

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