> I have had a job since freshman year, saved up $7000 (also from scholarships/awards and other general saving). That only pays for the cheapest colleges.

Keep in mind you have a few options available to you. Have you filled out a FAFSA, or will you be filling it out? That will tell you if you qualify for a lot of these, and if so, how much:

1) Federal grants
2) Federal loans (depending on the loan, the government may not make you start paying it back until 6 months after you graduate college)
3) State-based grants and loans (I'm assuming you live in California, so Cal Grants are what's in question here)
4) University-based grants and loans (once your FAFSA is done, the university you've chosen and been accepted to will use it to determine what they'll give you -- depending on the university, you can get some good merit-based scholarships)
5) Work-study programs, where you work around the college to pay off some of the debt you'll be acquiring
6) Private grants and loans (a.k.a. scholarships and bank loans).

Keep in mind I'm just a recently-graduated, soon-to-be-entering-college kid myself, so my terming may not exactly be right -- but I'm struggling for funding like you are (though for a different reason).

I live in a family with a low enough income (we live off SSDI and Avon, basically) that I qualified for tons of need-based financial aid -- meaning I probably could've comfortably attended a decent private university with cash to spare.

Since you apparently won't qualify for a lot of need-based aid, you'll want to go the opposite direction: work really hard in school so you qualify for merit-based aid, and continue working a job so you have money to pay off your debts.

A REALLY important factor for you is choosing the right college. Why do you like UCLA and Berkeley in particular? Is it just because they're highly regarded by other people? Do you have a major (or possible major[s]) in mind, or were you planning to try to figure that out once you get there?

Go to collegeboard.com and do an advanced college search. Specify only the most important criteria (location & available majors for me). From there, look at each college's website. It took all last summer for me to narrow down a list of hundreds of colleges that came up on my search to about 20 that satisfied my basic criteria, then to the 6 or 7 that I wanted to apply to, then to my first and second choices.

While you're looking, note something that's really important in your case -- one, how much the college costs, but two, and more importantly, what scholarships they offer. In your case, you're going to want a school that offers lots of merit-based scholarships, and you're going to want to work really hard in school to qualify for them. I'm not sure where you are in school right now, but if you aren't out of high school yet, keep that in mind. Merit-based scholarships in addition to need-based aid earned me around $29,000/year in financial aid at a college I didn't end up choosing... and I wasn't exactly at the very top of my class. These sorts of scholarships vary by university (CSU Fullerton, where I'll be going, didn't offer any merit-based at all), so make sure you look at each university's website to find this stuff out. When it comes down to picking a college, pick one that has some good scholarships you're pretty sure you qualify for so that you know you'll have some aid available.

And keep an open mind about colleges. Just because one university isn't the most widely-recognized in the nation doesn't mean they aren't pretty good in the program(s) you want to work in. And community college isn't always bad, either, as others have said. :)

I probably didn't explain this very well, but there are tons of resources out there that explain it for you -- again, collegeboard.com is a great place to start.

Ria/Amanda