Do These Affordable Degrees Interest You

It's a sellers' market in education today, isn't it? Tuition is up everywhere and conventional sources of aid seem to be drying up. When a customer is this desperate, you could say that the suppliers hold all the aces, right? Well then, why are there new choices in affordable degrees these days, offered by expensive, private colleges themselves?

All through the country, students who have all but resigned themselves to going to public universities, are finding that their top private choices are fighting to get them over to their colleges, even if it means offering tens of thousands of dollars in loan-free aid. What exactly is happening?

The thing is, that ever since public university grants began to dry up, over the past 10 years, public university tuition has risen at a phenomenal 120%. Even private colleges haven't been raising their prices that quickly. The result has been that public  colleges and private colleges are now not priced that far apart.

Private colleges are now within shouting distance of public universities in what they charge. They want top students to attend their schools instead of going to a regular publicly funded one. All they have to do is to make use of their endowments and offer aid in the form of scholarships.

Public colleges now often see that they lose students that they've already admitted – snatched away by tempting offers made by private colleges. You can actually get more affordable degrees at private colleges now, than at public ones, just for the reason that the private ones have deeper resources to use at their discretion.

Bidding wars of this kind aren't a totally new concept the. Even a few Ivy League colleges have held no loan aid carrots in front of families of top students. What is new here is that aid of this kind is now showing up at small liberal arts colleges. While their prices may be as high as the Ivy League ones, they certainly don't have to the kind of market appeal among employers that the Ivy League ones do though.

When the private schools have a good bit of endowment, the can make astonishing offers. At some schools, two out of three students receives loan free aid for $30,000 or so. Is in the public schools, the Lord of loans of this kind of trust for 50% of the public schools.

Students do need to make sure that they distinguish between loan free aid  and merit scholarships though. Often, when schools offer merit scholarships and say that you have to maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA, that's a warning sign. It's very likely that they grade students in this  unfair way just so that they don't have to keep giving students any aid from the second year onwards.