How students today view college

silversas
Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:16:05 +0000

I want to comment on the point about students working part time – I ALWAYS worked during college and couldn’t understand why my son seemed so “spoiled” and uninterested in working… then he did the math for me. (And compromised at working in the summers, and double majoring in the school year.)


First, as a financial aid student, I was eligible for all sorts of really interesting work-study jobs at non-profits in interesting settings and in departments across the university; my son was pretty much stuck with minimum wage jobs at big box stores
What he could earn at minimum wage in 2011 was not a heck of a lot more than I was earning on work study in 1979! It was 1/3 to 1/2 of what my non=profit was paying law clerks per hour.
In my day, I could earn real pocket money with a three hour shift here or there. Since he could find a job on campus (35,000 students and jobs going first to work-study eligible – as they should) by the time he used public transit or drove to a job and back, it was hard to make it time and cost effective.


So I decided he wasn’t as lazy as I originally thought he was, and he certainly learned how hard it is to support oneself on a low income salary!

Finally, when I was in college, a lot of PROFESSORS had the most challenging accents! Refugees from Nazi germany, immigrants from Communist China, folks who fled Eastern Europe…My math mentor was from Italy, I had humanities professors from France and Argentina. And frankly one upper crust Boston accent I had a lot of trouble with!