By Acsah Lemma
When I applied to universities as a transfer student last year, I only applied to four schools.
Among those four, I applied to Long Beach State and UC Berkeley. I got into both and was left with a difficult choice to make.
With the help of my family and friends, I decided that Cal State Long Beach was the right choice for me and proceeded with enrollment.
Although it was a difficult decision to make, I looked at it in terms of two factors: finances and the student’s quality of life.
My family just barely crosses the threshold to qualify as middle class and so, unfortunately, we’re in a gray area where I don’t get much financial aid.
Knowing my family and I would have to bear the brunt of the financial burden, the yearly cost of attendance for each university played a huge role in my decision.
With UC Berkeley, the cost of attendance was a little over $15,000 a year, which included the minimal financial aid I was granted.
I also knew that paying for the housing costs in the Bay Area was a whole other physical and financial problem I would have to deal with.
“Nationally, 43% of students at four-year universities experienced housing insecurity in 2020, the Associated Press reports.
“Students reported being unable to pay utilities, rent, or mortgage, living in overcrowded units, or moving in with others due to financial difficulties.”
That wasn’t something I was looking forward to dealing with so I pivoted towards Cal State Long Beach and looked over their cost attendance summary.
The cost of attendance for CSULB was about $7,000, and when I looked at the individual costs, I knew that I could reduce that number by buying my textbooks online and using public transport instead of driving my car.
In the end, that lower cost really drew me more to Long Beach State.
Coming from a local community college and living at home, I was really looking forward to living the real “college experience.”
So when I was deciding between the two universities, I was also taking into account which school would be the best for balancing my academics as well as my leisure time.
Based on social media and having friends that go to UC Berkeley, I knew that the courses there were rigorous.
An opinion piece from The Daily Californian, a Berkeley-based student newspaper, reports that “Over time, the frequency of cheating may increase as students may become stressed to stay afloat in their classes.”
Although I knew I could have balanced my school life with my personal life, I was not interested in the sheer academic difficulty of UC Berkeley, especially when competition between classmates was inevitable.
In the end, I decided on CSU Long Beach. I don’t believe a good education is worth being in debt for the rest of the foreseeable future.
Long Beach State aided me in almost every area that I was struggling with understanding, and that experience alone really cemented my decision.
After committing to CSULB, I wasn’t thinking of the new school year with a sense of dread, but instead, with excitement.
