Junior College or University?
“Unless you get a full four year scholarship to a university, you have to go to a community college to get your basics first.” My father says.
I remember thinking how unfair it was that all of my friends were going to Universities and Private colleges. Meanwhile, I was still stuck in Baytown planning my future. As soon as he exited the room I opened the Texas A&M website and pulled up the financial planner. After calculating everything I wanted in my University experience my tuition would have been around $20,000 per year. That’s not bad right? In my dad’s eyes I was wrong. I just didn’t understand why that would be so hard for us. We made good money and I was the only child who wasn’t going into the military, therefore the only child they would have to pay college fees for. After disputing with my father for a few more days he pulled me into the office. My father sat me down in the office chair and pulled up a list of statistics.
“See this Peyton? The average amount of debt students looking at your major are in is about $22,000. After all is said and done with how would you like to pay for that? If you stay and go to a junior college your debt at the end of it all is something I would be more apt to negotiate with you. Compared to a University, you will be looking at a $10,000 difference at least. That’s not exactly something I want to pay so I just want you to look a little more into a junior college and if that is still something you don’t want to do I will help you fill out scholarship forms”
By this time I was completely annoyed, but what could it really hurt to look into going to a junior college? I pull up some research sites on my computer and the first thing that pops out at me is the major transition I will have to make. The website told about how hard most kids find it going straight into a major university. The difference between high school and college is tremendous. More than half of the comments were kids who told us about what a nightmare it was trying to adjust to the university as opposed to college. Almost all of them said they wish they would have done at least one semester at a junior college before making the difficult transition. This made me wonder whether I could really jump right into university life seeing as I have anxiety problems as it is. Next, I found that the majority of the kids on there told us that during mid-year they decided to change majors and while the ones who went to a community college found this easy, most at the universities found this more of a challenge than anticipated. Kids commented on how much money they had to dole out on extra courses that they didn’t need after they changed their majors. This made me wonder what I would do if I decided to change majors. There is no way to really know if you’re going to like something and changing in the middle of the semester would be extremely ill advised. Most commented telling us to know what we wanted to do before we went to a