What should I do? Asked this before with no answers.

Hey guys, I asked this before but didn't really get any useful answers so I'm going to try again. So, my sister and I are currently both in our first year of community college. We live in SC, so we pay out of state, and are getting no help. It is costing us 5k each per semester, so 10k per person in one year, so 20k a year for community college.

Now, we can do these 2 years thankfully, but a 4 year university is too much. It costs 25k a semester per person, so 50k a year! 100k a year for both my sister and I, that's 200k before we get our 4 year degrees! This is mainly because we are out of state, though, and doing in state tuition would cost less than half of that, which brings me up to my point.

We are both finishing our first year of community college in SC. However, we plan to move to a different state, and go to the second year of community college there. This way, I hope, we would have established residency in in whatever state allows it to in one year, and it would cost a lot less.

So my question is regarding to establishing residency. Can we establish residency in 1 year if we live in a state? What state is easiest to establish residency for a 4 year university, and how exactly does it work? Which states allow us for in-state tuition as well? (some states may say they allow in-state tuition, but as long as you graduated from high school from that state, which wouldn't work for us because we graduated from SC).

Let me know please.

Here is some information regarding establishing residency.

http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/stateresidency.phtml

I can't speak to a 4 year university here in Georgia, since it was crazy expensive when I started looking into college after graduating high school, and there after the board of Regent's decided they didn't want us in there at all, but I am also in a technical college here in GA and yes, after a year of residency you can petition for instate tuition which I did and only paid about $1300 for fall semester as opposed to the 5k I was paying before as you have been too. You have to prove legal presence as opposed to legal status, which you do have w/ DACA.

Good luck neighbor!

It really depends. Some universities will allow you to petition a residency status even if you didn't meet the Dreamer qualifications/graduated high school in that state. At the University of Illinois, they will allow a petition for residency as long as you moved to Illinois with a primary reason OTHER than for education. So what I had to do was work for a bit before applying to any colleges or only went to college part-time. The petition asked for proof of income and filing income tax returns for the state a year prior to starting class.

I suggest researching specific universities and decide on the state that way.

You may consider moving to a cheaper neighborhood with state DA passed to get the most for your money

If you have DACA, get out of SC into an immigrant friendly state and establish residency. You and your sister can live together and pool your resources on rent.