Paying school fees

Throughout my educational life, I have been lucky enough to get admission into various government institutions.It started with government primary school Ndongo, in which I spend seven years.I passed the common entrance examination and the interview and spend the next five years in government bilingual grammar school Molyko,Buea.A token school fees of about nine thousand francs CFA was introduced during my second year at Buea.It was paid by those that lived in the dormitory.I passed, the GCE ordinary levels and spend two years at CCAS kumba.You guessed it, it was a government high school, no fees paid.I did a stink at the University of Yaounde for a year.During this time, no fees where paid either.As a matter of fact, the government gave us an allowance of 25thousands francs monthly for living expenses.Everything was to change when I arrived the US.My first year at Tri-County Tech was taken care of by my brother.The fees was not that much to begin with.When I got admitted into Howard University, the fees was 2000dollars a semester.There were two semesters yearly, excluding summer school.The first year at Howard, I did not have much problems coming up with the money because I had been saving money for school for the past two years or so.I cruised past the first year and had the advantage of working throughout the summer,paying down some credit card bills, while preparing for the fall semester.Fall semester went okay, but I ran into some problems during the Spring Semester.This was during the period that I had lost my job at Burns Security.The money that I was earning at Radio Shack could not cover all my expenses.I hard to drop out of school and it was a very difficult period for me.There was to be one other semester that I stayed out of school .Education, as I found out in the US, requires financing.US citizens, the ones whose parents are not well to do, apply for student loans, grants and other forms of scholarships.This is how they take care of their financing,so once they come to school, they concentrate on their studies.These options are not available to foreign students.I was to be taught a number of tricks that would help me during difficult periods in the future.The most popular one used by a lot of foreign students was to apply for one course and paid the fees for the single course.Once your fees are paid, your payment slip is validated.It did not matter how many subjects you choose, so long as the fees for each subject was paid.Once you are validated in the finance department, you can then go back to the registration office and pick up additional courses for the semester.You still had to pay for the courses before the next semester.You did buy yourself some time though.We had to pay for our textbooks also.There was a fellow who lived in DC, you could get used textbooks from him.Smaller textbooks, you just made photocopies of the chapters that you needed.I graduate from Howard University in the Summer of 1992, but did not pick up my BA certificate until the summer of 1994.That was when I had completed the payment of all the fees that I owed the school.