[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

Get scholarships and financial aid. There's almost always a way to get some form of tuition assistance if you are really dedicated about it.

Not always. When it comes to elite schools, aid is a completely different beast. I got royally screwed here.

Originally Posted by kmay

this. you dont want to have to be paying back loans forever. my friend goes to columbia and has changed her major 3 times. thats so much money just wasted. and then she also dorms, and eats and, and books. it adds up, and for what? the name of the school. you most likely aren't going to get your masters from there anyway. i have friends from community college that went to columbia continue to their masters in economics. its not impossible no matter what anybody says.

college is a scam, beat the system, live at home, go to community college till you know exactly what you want to do and where you want to go. its cheap, and you can get scholarships and financial aid still. there are people who go to community college because it's the only place they could get in, but just don't mingle with them. i made that mistake once, horrible influences XD

It's very hard to go from a community college to an Ivy, especially when you've got a ton of students from other Ivies/top schools with fantastic GPA's, etc. I can also say this empirically because a ton of my Ivy friends pretty much went on to, well, more Ivies. The admission rates tend to scale with the nature of the school. It's not impossible to do it from a CC, but it's still very, very, very hard. To go from a community college to a place like Columbia basically means you have to be at the top of your college with ridiculous scores and whatnot -- there's not a lot of wiggle room compared to coming from a top school. You don't necessarily need the top school anyway. A lot of my Ivy friends who landed sweet jobs now were mainly able to do so because they had connections and came from rich and/or super-supportive families. Correlation != causation, in this case.

That being said, I don't think college is a scam. It's just gotten so retardedly expensive that the marginal benefit is decreasing over time, and for many, it's a negative-NPV deal.