We’ve all heard horror stories of college students racking up so much student debt that they can never pay it all off in their lifetime. Most of us know several friends in this situation, and can see first-hand how stressful and futile college debt can leave us feeling. The average earnings of the college grad has fallen though in all sectors of the market other than tech and engineering. Over half of college grads take jobs paying less than what they thought they would earn with their degree. However, it’s not all bad news. There are easy ways to avoid these common faults, and Brains & Brawn helps students save on their college educations every day.
With parents and students scrambling to find any advantage possible to eke out a bit more tuition assistance, there are a few very simple ways to quickly save on college.
Each college and university in the US will take the two standard admissions tests: The SAT and ACT. These tests are learnable and students can easily prepare for them to improve their scores. Our average students see 4 points of improvement, which is a huge improvement when compared to market averages, but is also consistently obtained by our clientele, so we’ll use this as the basis for our analysis below.
Firstly, if you’re unfamiliar with tuition calculators, almost every school offering academic scholarships have these online tools on their websites. They’re great at getting close estimates of tuition, and can factor in differences from improvements in scores, GPA, and other factors.
For this exercise, we’re using LSU as the case study. A student starting with a 25/36 on the ACT, applying out of state from Tennessee, will spend a total of $50,517/year on tuition. That’s over $200,000 on a 4 year degree. However, more college students in America take 6 years to complete their degree than 4, so this could cost as much as $300,000!! However, if that same student worked with our team, and boosted their score from a 25 to a 29, which is our average improvement, the tuition would fall by $15,335 per year. That’s a savings of $61,340 for a 4 year degree, and $92,010 for a degree that takes 6 years!
However, the above does NOT tell the entire story. Who’s paying in cash for their education anyways? If the above Tennessee-native were to use a federal student loan to finance this education, and were lucky enough to get an interest rate of 4.53%, that 4 year degree would cost $93,374 more, and that 6 year degree would cost $140,062 more on a 20 year student loan (that’s the average loan maturity in the US for student loans).
So, how do you make your salary count when you graduate college? Spending a small amount on the best quality tutoring available, and taking 4-6 weeks in high school to improve your scores will save the average student more than 3 years of their salary! Also, 85% of our students pay for all of the tutoring they obtain within their 1st semester of college thanks to the scholarships they obtain.
Student debt is the second largest area of debt for Americas, and reached $1.41 trillion this year. Avoid this catastrophe and set your child up for success. Graduating college should start life off on the right foot, and not create insurmountable debt for your student.
-Mark Wilson, Director of Curriculum Development and Design