""A reader in her 70s once asked me why kids today don’t do what she did: Work for a year after high school and save up enough to pay for a bachelor’s degree.
If you just busted out laughing, then you’re familiar with how high today’s college costs are compared with five or six decades ago. Even with substantial financial aid and one heck of a work ethic, it’s hard to imagine a high school graduate earning enough in a year to pay for four (or usually five or even six) years of college. The average annual sticker price for a public university is close to $20,000, while private schools average over $40,000.
The reason seven out of 10 college graduates have student loan debt averaging nearly $29,000 is that graduating without debt is hard. Really hard. (Paying it off is even harder.)“”
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don’t understand how both college costs and the job market have changed.
Tuition at the college I attended has increased roughly 2800% since I was there (albeit over 30 years ago). During that same time period the minimum wage has a little more than doubled. Big difference.
When I was in my teens, I was able to find full time jobs in retail and also as a temporary secretary. Both paid minimum wage or close to it. I was a teenager and didn’t have a lot of skills, so I accepted that was what I could make. But I could pay my tuition with a full time secretarial job and a half-time nights and weekends retail job over 12 weeks of summer. It’s much worse now. I have a daughter who has graduated from high school but is not in college. Around here, most people who get secretarial jobs have college degrees - she couldn’t even get in the door. She has tried to find a full time job in retail, but no one wants to hire full time because employers don’t want to pay benefits. And it’s difficult to combine two part-time jobs to get a full-time equivalent because employers want their retail employees to be flexible - few employers in my area are willing to offer the same hours or work days week after week. So I’d love to see how she’d save up for her college education during a gap year.
It used to be possible to work your way through school with a minimum of loans. Both my husband and I worked our way through both undergraduate and professional schools without a penny of help from our families OR a penny of financial aid (other than loans). We lived as starving students for a number of years and worked hard, but in retrospect it wasn’t all that difficult. It doesn’t even seem like a possibility today.