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Knowing if you can afford a specific college depends on the school’s cost of attendance (COA) and the amount of aid you qualify for. By pitting your expenses against the amount you’ll potentially need to borrow, you’ll have a good idea of whether a program is in your budget.
You can find the cost of attendance for most schools on its financial aid website. Choosing a public versus private college can significantly impact how much you pay. Here’s the average cost of attendance for different types of schools for the 2017–2018 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics:
Public two-year college | Public four-year college | Private four-year college | |
---|---|---|---|
Tuition and fees | $3,304 | $8,738 | $34,600 |
Room and board | $6,483 | $11,631 | $14,864‬ |
Total cost of attendance | $9,787 | $20,369 | $49,464 |
The cost of tuition will account for books, but it typically won’t factor in travel or lifestyle expenses. If you want to join a sorority or fraternity, study abroad or take part in extracurricular activities, you’ll need to have a budget that accounts for these extra expenses. To find out more about these costs — and the cost of other extracurricular activities — contact your school’s student resource center or financial aid office.
If you can get a job or a paid internship, you’ll offset some of your costs and improve your employment prospects after you graduate. Otherwise, you may want to factor these miscellaneous costs into how much you’ll need to borrow.
Unfortunately, you won’t know the full extent of your financial aid until after you apply to a school. However, you can estimate the amount you’ll need to borrow by using a college’s net price calculator on its website, which subtracts any financial aid you plan on receiving from the school’s cost of attendance.
Types of financial aid you might qualify for include:
For example, suppose you receive $10,000 in scholarships and your school costs $25,000 a year. You’ll need to cover the remaining $15,000 with savings, income or student loans.
You can use a student loan repayment calculator to estimate potential monthly payments based on different loan amounts, but there’s a little more to it than that. To know what you can afford after you graduate, consider these three factors:
How to attend college for free
Once you know how much you can afford to borrow, you’ll want to compare your student loan options:
You can use a school’s net price calculator to estimate the true cost of attendance after scholarships, grants and other financial aid. And looking at your potential job prospects and salary after graduation can help you avoid borrowing more than you can comfortably afford to pay back.
You can learn more about how to pay for school with our guide to student loans.
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