Carmen Segura and Jake Gotta both went to local community college before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The former didn’t get motivated about her education until senior year of high school, by which time her GPA was already shot, and the latter decided he would rather go to a two-year school where he could play baseball than a four-year one where he couldn’t. Segura, who’s currently enrolled in a chemistry PhD program in Santa Cruz, said she saved big by starting small. Same with Gotta.“In all, community saved me about $20,000, probably more, and I still will have my bachelor’s from the UC I wanted,” Gotta told me.The Brooklyn-based writer and editor (and a colleague of mine at VICE) Hanson O’Haver spent his first year of college at UCSB working hard to get the grades he needed to transfer to the school of his choice. He hadn’t gotten into New York University the first go-around, and figured it was stupid to spend money on a private college he didn’t feel passionate about. “I really didn’t want to be at UCSB, which was the best state school I got into,” O’Haver said. “So I kind of always had in mind that I needed to get good grades so I could transfer. And I knew I wanted to go to school in New York, and that the kids at NYU were who I actually wanted to be friends with.” It ended up working out perfectly. Not only did he get the degree he wanted and end up in the city he wanted to live in, but he very roughly estimated he probably saved around $40,000."Spending some time at a local community college before matriculating at a full-fledged university tends to be one of the simplest ways to rein in the spending."
“The cowboy college plan worked out, and I was there for three years,” Lantz, who now works as an executive assistant at JPMorgan, told me. “Then I took a little time off [from school] and tried to find full scholarships for transfer students by just googling around. I learned there aren’t many, but Shimer College offered one of them at the time.”"There are, in fact, plenty of merit-based scholarships awarded for special skills or talents. The trick is to seek these out on a given school’s website or by calling their financial aid office."
After Beckett Mufson, another colleague of mine, was accepted to Ursinus College in Pennsylvania with a decent financial aid package, he decided to visit. He’d already fallen for Hofstra University on Long Island, but was willing to at least have a look at the other school, where the biggest selling point seemed to be that J.D. Salinger did a semester there—and you could enter an essay contest for the privilege of sleeping in his former dorm. The student he ended up shadowing, however, had a pretty tame idea of a fun night out: driving to a local convenience store.“I was like, ‘NYC or Wawa?’” Mufson recently recalled.His mother encouraged him to send an email to Hofstra to see if he might squeeze out a bit more money. He essentially told the school he’d pick them over a competitor if they could be bothered to sweeten the deal. In so doing, he officially entered the post–financial crisis economy, an often terrifying place where wage stagnation and college debt loom above all else.“Basically, I made $1,000 in five minutes—a rate I will never match again,” Mufson told me.*Correction 10/16/2018: A previous version of this story inaccurately stated that Lantz attended community college before Deep Springs. We regret the error.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Allie Conti on Twitter."An extra conversation with a school’s admissions or financial-aid office is as good a place as any to toss in compelling biographical details that perhaps didn’t fit on your application. Or you could literally just ask for more money."