If you plan on going to college, you need to have, well, a plan. You need to do your research and narrow down the choices that are available to you. The Department of Education believes that it’s imperative that you find some form of learning beyond high school, and while I don’t necessarily deal in absolutes, I do believe that if you find out what your purpose is in life and if that purpose requires some form of higher education, you should definitely go to college. If you’re in high school and you just so happen to know what you want to do with your life (don’t worry if you don’t, because very few do), you should be preparing yourself for the next step. The question i though, how do you prepare?
On their blog, the Department of Education gives you a few tips on preparing for college:
- Research the tuition and fees for the college you wish to apply for. This is done through CATC (the College Affordability and Transparency Center), which compiles a list of institutions based on tuition costs. Just click click on a college that interests you, or falls within your price range, and you get taken to a different website, which gives you all the information you could possibly ever want to know about that school.
- Search for the colleges that best suit your needs. You can use the College Scorecard for that. This one is a smaller, more accessible version of the CATC website, allowing you to search for specific colleges, giving you a brief scorecard of that institution.
- Apply for scholarships and grants. Help for this can be found here or on the Federal Student Aid website.
The most important thing you should be focusing on when deciding on where to go to college is affordability. You don’t want to have come out of college with dept hanging over your head. If you’re not able to get the financial support you need, you can always go to a 2-year college, pick up a job or two, and save up some money for a 4-year college.
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