<p>From your post, I’m guessing you’re a non-traditional entering student – grad student? or starting your BA at a later age? (I only ask because most students usually have their parents paying for car insurance, cell phones, etc. while in school.)</p>
<p>Things like class fees are considered a part of your USC “bill” and scholarships/loans are usually applied against them. Any outstanding balance on your bill can either be paid by taking out a private loan, or through the USC payment plan – but you should know that SCA class fees are never more than ~$1000 and you won’t get your first SCA class fee until your sophomore year when you take things like 290. (If you’re a BA student at SCA, that is. Not sure about the grad program.)</p>
<p>Since you’ve been working full time for several years, maybe you have some sort of a savings account? If not, maybe start saving money? That can be a good buffer and source of “income” for you to pay things like car payments and other bills while you’re in school.</p>
<p>It is really hard to be a USC student – especially an SCA student – and work a FT job. You will have homework and classes that take up pretty much all of your time – plus, most FT jobs in LA have hours during class times.</p>
<p>You can easily get a PT job on campus (you’ll have better chances if you were awarded work study) that will give you some supplemental income. Depending on the position, you can make anywhere from $10-$15/hr working a student job. The taxes are far less than “real world” jobs, so you do end up getting almost all of the money in your paycheck. I was an SCA student and I had PT jobs all throughout college; in my first two years, my schedule wasn’t very “open,” so I only worked around 8-10 hours a week, but as a junior/senior, I was working closer to 15 hours a week.</p>
<p>I recommend you look at Campus Cruiser; their hours of operation are at night, which makes it easy if you have class during the day. Also, library jobs and IT jobs also offer later hours. You won’t really know what kind of job you can have until you build your first semester schedule.</p>
<p>As a USC student, you can have USC’s health insurance which is a flat fee tacked onto your USC bill and can be covered with your loans, etc.</p>
<p>If none of these things I mentioned are feasible for you, then you can take out a private student loan for any given amount and use that to live off of – but I only recommend this if you cannot get an on-campus job, do not have a savings and cannot cut costs. I had to do this one semester where my schedule was so crazy, I couldn’t hold a job.</p>