Scholarships & Financial Help for non-resident/private MSW programs? Are these common??

[SofieCat]

Greetings all-

New to the board here. I've been doing research on 10-15 of the most popular programs for MSW's and some are phenomenal. The problem is I am a CA resident any out-of-state or private program comes with a HEFTY price tag. I'd like to keep my graduate loans at under 30k (for tuition) when I'm finished. Does that seems realistic? With an MSW I may not even make more than 45,000 my first year so it seems ridiculous to owe about 90k in loans.

So my question to all of you is...are scholarships/grants/tuition waivers common? Should I not bother applying to a program that I can't realistically pay full price for? For example, I'm interested in Boston U and U of Washington but for non residents it comes to over 50k in tuition for the program. I DID read on the boards someone was granted a 1/3 tuition waiver from BU.....which would make it doable for me.

Do the vast majority of people pay sticker price for these programs or are scholarships/free fin aid a very likely possibility? I don't want to apply if it's unrealistic, but I also don't want to self select out of a phenomenal program because I didn't realize how much aid is out there.

Thanks everyone

Edited December 8, 2011 by SofieCat

[ellie811]

I have a co-worker who is applying to Washington University, and she was told that something like 90% of the students receive financial aid, and the scholarships start at $10,000/year. That sounds far-fetched to me, I don't know if it's true, but that's that.

I applied to Michigan and if I don't get substancial financial aid I'm not going to go. While I am passionate about the field, it's not worth putting myself in debt over, I'll wait a few years till I'm somewhere I can go to a state school with lower tuition.