Be carefull with this. My credit was destroyed by my decision to go to grad school. I had an assistantship and was told by a financial aid counselor that I would also qualify for student loans. With the student loans, I would have been able to continue making payments on my old debts, so I quit my job, enrolled in grad school, and moved across the country only to find out the financial aid counselor made a mistake. My assistantship disqualified me from student loans. Without these loans, I fell behind on my old credit card payments and they were ALL eventually charged off, leaving me with a credit score in the 400's coming out of grad school.
The problem was in the wording of the assistantship. I attended a school that just merged into a larger school, so the wording error was discovered when it got transferred to the new school's financial aid dept. The amount of student loans you are eligible for depends on the cost of living estimate done by the school minus any scholarships. My assistantship was worded as such that it qualified as a scholarship when it wasn't, in fact, a scholarship since there were "work" requirements (lab research, teaching assistant, etc.) attached to it in order to keep it. The rest of the school assistantships were worded such that they were considered "employment" income rather than "scholarship" income and, therefore, those students still qualified for student loans and I didn't even though we all had the "same" assistantships.
Message Edited by valley_man0505 on 02-24-2010 11:22 AM
