THE COST OF HIGHER LEARNING

This is not me venting as much as it is a rant, but unlike most rants I will give solutions… One of the most complained about things in America is the cost of education. Every job wants you to have a college education AND experience in the field of work you are applying for. My job for example (Network Engineer) wants you to have a college degree, industry certifications (Cisco, Microsoft, ect…), and for my level 10+ years fortunately I have all 3. However, a lot of people don’t, they can’t get the necessary experience because they can’t get a job, and they can’t get the job because they can’t afford college. Hopefully this blog will help with the latter, I will post several links to free colleges and universities, links to financial aid and grants, and introduce some of you to MOOC’s which not only work for American students, but all prospective students.

AMERICAN STUDENTS

FAFSA (Pell Grant)
This by far is the most popular one, this is really easy to set up and use and the money comes fast and you don’t have to pay it back. The earlier you do it the more money you get for it, under the Obama administration they have added more money to this grant. I will list the websites below, there are some rules to getting the money, please check.

https://fafsa.ed.gov/

https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/grants-scholarships/pell

Scholarships

You can also apply for and win scholarships from college or university that you are applying to, or from the community you live in. There are a log of churches, boys and girls clubs, ect… than give out scholarships to students who deserve and qualify for them. The scholarships can range anywhere from $100 to $5000 per year, and never has to be paid back, below you will find a link to some scholarships and the requirements to get them.

https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/

Some of Americas top universities have made it free or really close to being free. In 2014 Stanford joined the list of the now 70 colleges and universities to allow free to reduced tuition for students and their families who don’t earn a certain amount, I will post the link below with all the schools and their particulars:

http://blog.stewart.com/stewart/2015/04/07/another-top-10-list-elite-schools-where-middle-class-students-are-tuition-free/

That’s just 10 schools, as I said already, there are a total of 70 schools that is doing this, one of the top universities in the world Princeton, parents making less than $140,000 do not pay tuition. Those making less than $60,000 are covered for tuition, room and board. Those making between $60,000 and $120,000 only pay a percentage of room and board. Princeton covers more for families with lower incomes.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

This last one is my personal favorite, and it will work for any type of student, American, International, working adults, someone looking for a career move, or if you want a better understanding of a particular subject. Sometimes on the internet we see a lot of thing we would rather not see, and we spend a lot of time on social media, not learning anything. This form of learning is what I would call “network learning” or “social learning”, it is Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs for short. This is the wave of the future in my opinion, as a friend of mine would say “down with brick and mortar”. MOOCs have courses from MIT, Harvard, university of London, and many more. The courses are free to take, and if you want credit for it you just pay for it, most of they just have to verify your identity and they will give you an official certificate stamped from the school. Below you will find some links of multiple websites that offer this type of learning, the one I personally like was founded by MIT and Harvard University and I will post that link below also.

https://www.edx.org/

https://alison.com/course/

https://www.coursera.org/

There are more available, those above are the more popular ones.