Education for All

You have probably heard the term of tuition discounts before, but you may not know what they are or what they mean for you. Tuition discounts are the reason that less than one in five college students actually pay the full published tuition price of private and public colleges. Little confused? Don’t Worry!
Upon receiving your acceptance letter into any college, they begin to assess your financial needs. Each college or university that accepts you uses a similar formula when determining your financial need and your expected family contribution (EFC, the amount a school expects you to kick in). This means your EFC is basically the same whether a school costs $5,000 or $45,000 or if it’s a public, private, or ivy-league institution.
Each financial aid package that is presented to you usually represents the same thing. The difference between that institution’s cost of attendance (COA) and your EFC. That aid package may be a mix of federal grants and loans, need-based scholarships, federal Work-Study jobs and, “institutional aid” from the school. You may not even know you are eligible for some of these offerings, but when you are offered them you should seriously consider their use. Simply browsing publications from the colleges, or doing a quick search of expected tuition and various universities is not enough to fully grasp the information at hand. Call and ask about financial assistance, they want you to go their school and many will help you do so. Don’t let a high tuition keep you from picking a great college.

You are doing what you have always wanted and planning the trip of a lifetime across South America. You plan to visit each country for a long period of time and see the sights and sounds like that of a local. One issue. And it is a big one: you cannot speak Spanish and know you will need to know at least a little bit before you go.

Thankfully, you still have a few months before your vacation starts, so you can try to learn some Spanish before heading on your trip. However, you are not sure whats the best way to learning the language. You see the advertisements on televisions for the books and CD-ROM sets that claim to teach you the language in just a few days. You are more than skeptical.

Instead, you decide that taking a course with a native speaker would probably be the best for you. But where can you find these sorts of courses without enrolling in an actual Spanish language degree program? You are most likely to find programs like this for individuals just like you in continuing education programs. (more…)