Creative College Planning that Saves you Money

When people talk about finding a way to send their children to college, usually, they usually only seem to think about taking out a loan and funding college directly for the full four years. Alternative ways that save a lot of money do exist. For instance, college planning can go this way: one can first get two years’ worth of college credits in community college; this can work out to be far cheaper, and one could get a job for more credits. In the end, you can probably save at least $40,000 in college expenses. When you choose a flexible schedule like this, you can usually do your college planning at a fraction of the price other (less creative) people pay.

When a family tries to make a decision about this - that a child should attend community college for the first two years so that the family can save on college expenses, there really is no proper one-stop resource that they can head to for information. You can't just go to community college and bang out two years and hope that it will always save you money. It often won’t. You have to be quite knowledgeable about how the system works. If you end up taking the wrong classes, it could all be in waste. If this is the way you wish to make your way through college, this is how you need to plan for it.

Before you enroll at a community college, you need to know if they have a transfer system that works. Before you actually join, you need to talk to the office to learn how many of their students are known to be successful at an associate’s degree transfer to a regular four-year college. Whatever college you feel you would like to transfer to, you want to speak with the admissions officer there and ask them what rules they have in place to do with accepting transfer students. For instance, how many such students do they accept each year? If you could learn which community colleges they get most of their transfers from, you could target such a community college to join. Doing this, you'll easily come to hear of all the mistakes it is possible for students to make in the process.

Many young people imagine that it can be easy to get whatever course they want at any community college. "It isn't as if one is applying to an Ivy League college, is it?" they tell themselves. Finding a spot in a community college though can be somewhat challenging today. What with how the recession is throwing millions out of work, there is unbelievable pressure on the community colleges to help retrain them. You will really have to be at the head of the line if you wish to get into the community college you prefer.

While it may really save you a lot of money to do your college through a community college, you have to be aware that you can't get a poor grade anywhere. If you fail in an important class, you could end up having to do a whole semester all over again. And that could throw your entire college planning out.