The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: hashbrowns on August 25, 2018, 05:26:35 PM
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Hey mustachians! So, I moved to Oregon to take a job (I'm a mechanic). Soon after starting I destroyed my back, and decided to go back to engineering school to get away from the physical work.
I'm looking at transferring to Oregon State within the year, and while I've met almost all the guidelines to be receive in-state tuition, I'm still considered out-of-state. At this point I don't know if I can continue school if I don't get in-state tuition, it'll just cost too much. The only thing that seems to disqualify my Oregon resident status is that I started going to school about three months after I moved here, and I haven't had a years worth of time where I haven't taken a term of classes below 8 credits.
I'm getting ready to send in an appeal, but information about this situation is almost non existent, and the few people I've spoken to have been no help.
Please let me know if any of you have been through similar situations, or have any advice.
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I don't know the rules in Oregon, but in Colorado, they look for evidence that you plan to reside there permanently - things like registering your car in-state, getting a new driver's license, registering to vote, buying a home, etc. So I'd recommend including as many of those that apply to you as evidence in your appeal.
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Tell the story of your injury in a letter - people are more likely to make exceptions if they know why.
You have to convince them you didn't just move for school.
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Years ago, before the advent of massive computer databases....
You used to be able to get a PO box at one of those Mailbox places that would forward your mail.... You could then direct all your correspondence to that "in-state" address. At that time, the schools didn't have the resources (or often the desire) to check up on your actual residence.
This would also work if you knew someone that resided in the state.
Not sure if it works now, but it did 20 years ago.
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I can only provide you with anecdotes, but when we tried this in Oregon 10 years ago for my husband, we could not get them to waive the 12-month residency requirement. He wound up using the Western Undergraduate Exchange program (we moved from Idaho for me to attend grad school), which is about 1.5x the cost of in-state tuition instead of out-of-state, which is ~3x. Unfortunately, when he exceeded a certain number of credits on his transcript, he was again charged out-of-state tuition even though we'd been living there three years and would go on to live there another three (Oregon driver's licences, long-term lease, etc.). He had to drop to below the credit threshold for a year because he had too much of his degree left to have paying out-of-state make sense.
My mom recently tried this in North Carolina and they also wouldn't waive the 12-month residency requirement even though she moved there approximately 11 months and 2 weeks before the start of the term she was applying for. They literally asked her what day she crossed state lines into NC and that was the day they were going to put that she was eligible for in-state tuition. Technically since she didn't have resident status at the start of term, she was SOL.
It's one of those situations where I understand why the rule is there, but it can make life very frustrating.
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Not sure if it works now, but it did 20 years ago.
In general, it is getting harder to get in-state tuition. I think the public universities' budgets have been strained, and so the more out-of-state payers the school has versus in-state payers, the better it is for the schools' finances.
I briefly looked into it for a school in Colorado, but they basically said "We don't care what you do; if the student is a dependent for FAFSA and the parent lives out-of-state, then the student is out-of-state."
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Hey mustachians! So, I moved to Oregon to take a job (I'm a mechanic). Soon after starting I destroyed my back, and decided to go back to engineering school to get away from the physical work.
I'm looking at transferring to Oregon State within the year, and while I've met almost all the guidelines to be receive in-state tuition, I'm still considered out-of-state. At this point I don't know if I can continue school if I don't get in-state tuition, it'll just cost too much. The only thing that seems to disqualify my Oregon resident status is that I started going to school about three months after I moved here, and I haven't had a years worth of time where I haven't taken a term of classes below 8 credits.
I'm getting ready to send in an appeal, but information about this situation is almost non existent, and the few people I've spoken to have been no help.
Please let me know if any of you have been through similar situations, or have any advice.
Definitely write an appeal letter to the Campus Residency Review Committee. Provide as much documentation as possible to show a complete timeline (offer letter for job, medical documentation regarding inability to work at job, driver's license). Also, demonstration your community engagement, volunteer activities, church groups, local library card, etc. Briefly state your career goals and how Oregon State is the best place to reach them.
Good Luck