If you’re getting ready to go off to college, then you certainly have a lot of decisions to make. What are you going to choose for your major? Will you live on- or off-campus? How are you going to pay for school? This last question is one of the more important ones, and it has a lot of up-and-coming college students asking: Can you pay for college on a credit card?
The short and simple answer? Yes. The majority of colleges do accept credit cards as tuition payment.
And more and more people are charging tuition. An August 2008 Sallie Mae/Gallup poll showed that parents charged an average of $5,822 to help pay for their kid’s college education; the children themselves charged an average of $2,542. There are many reasons that you may be thinking of turning to credit cards to pay for your tuition. It could be a last-minute decision, or you could be having a hard time securing a student loan.
Whatever the reason, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of paying for your education with credit cards. On the plus side, you’ll rack up a good amount of reward card points. Furthermore, if you have a low-interest card, you could end up saving yourself quite a bit over student loan interest costs in the long run. However, the majority of the time, you’ll end up paying way more in interest on your credit card bill than you would by paying for your tuition in other ways.
But if you want to avoid using plastic to pay for your college schooling, there are options. Check out grants and scholarships, get a job and save up, apply for federal loans, or apply for private loans. Make sure you exhaust all of your options before you turn to your credit card, which should probably be a last resort.
Hi there, just stumbled across this on Google. I work for a company in Scotland who give advice to people with debt problems.
I would never advice using a credit card for anything other than an essential purchase and if college funding needs to be paid with credit cards then surely that is a bad reflection on the local authority.