Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering

How will I pay for college?
There are some useful comments about the tradeoffs of the decisions in front of you.  Intertwined with the financial choices, hopefully you can see a map opening up.   Make a little chart if it helps.  Benefit and Cost.  If you're looking for financial options, you will have to also add more columns to that chart:  Option and Cost. An example is the comment on making connections with rich kids.  Trust fund babies are everywhere in this country.  Did you know any rich kids while growing up?  How were those rich kids you knew of back then... in your school... in your town?  How did they treat you?  Were you ever invited to their parties or gatherings?  Now there's an opportunity for the privilege to pay a lot of money to sit in a classroom next to them?  Even in the early days of American history with merit based millionaires... tycoons who made it rich by the seat of their pants.  At fancy dinner parties and soirees, a new term emerged to put each other again out of reach: old money (the deserving) and new money (uncultured climbers).   That's my bias.  You'll have some of your own.  What is important to YOU has to come through because these days, the price tag of any higher education implies a considerable piece of your life's timeline will be committed to... something.  Make sure you get what you feel is worth that commitment. Take stock of what has been said here by the others, but put a value on those choices and seriously consider what you're willing to pay for... and what you're not.  There is no formula for your success as there's been thousands of exceptions... ESID (Every Situation is Different).