Posted by:
dragonmystic
(
)
Date: February 19, 2014 07:07PM
It's ridiculous.
My dad had always told me I could go to whatever school I wanted, and do what I wanted. One of the things I wanted to do was go to a college outside of Utah. I realized quickly, even as a TBM, that I didn't want to go to BYU. I had been smothered by the religion my entire life, and even if I wanted to still believe, I didn't want it to be mixed in with my schooling. On the other side, all the other colleges seemed to be distinctly anti-mormon or...not educationally good. (In my mind.) I just wanted to get out in the world.
So I applied everywhere. And I got accepted to 5 prestigious places. I specifically didn't look at the price tags, because I wanted my education to be based only on quality, not on money. I didn't want that to be a determining factor.
Well, I got into Cornell University, which is an Ivy League, and has probably the best Engineering program there is. So I went there.
The price tag was high, and I didn't even have a concept of how much.
But then my dad dumped me. All support, everything. Because I told him I was gay and "didn't believe in god." This isn't extrapolation, he told me this. To my face. What's more, he waited to do this until 2 months before the bill was due, because, again, I quote "if I had told you before, you would have been mad and ruined our family vacation."
Now, Cornell is expensive, if you have to pay full price. Federal Loans, grants, etc. are there to help you----if your family makes less than a certain amount.
As you may have gathered, my family is well off. Not high fancy rich, but well off. So I got none of that support. Nothing goes into those calculations about if your parents refuse to pay a dime.
So, my only option to continue my education while staying at Cornell--which, mind you, I had two months of warning and had already signed up for my classes. No time to go to a different school, no time to apply. If I didn't go back, I would be literally homeless, or worse do what my dad was probably trying to force me to do--go to BYU (he forced me to apply there before and I had gotten a full scholarship.)
That meant private loans. And those are forced by new laws to have short payment plans--max 10 years, and they can get away with high interest rates: 8-14%.
When I got out of school, I had $196,000 in student loans to pay back. And the economy collapsed and sequester hit, which hit mechanical Engineering hard--tons of these jobs are government contracted.
So. My monthly. MONTHLY school loans are about $2,000. I've already had to ask the school for a 1 year extension on my loan, cutting half of that down, and my dad felt guilty enough to pay for a tiny portion of that.
And he has rewritten his mental brain history to say that he did that because he didn't have enough money to continue paying for my education, and how he's doing me a FAVOR now.