You Can't Work Your Way Through College Anymore- new report from Georgetown

Parents Forum
101

Let’s say you have a job that pays about 4X what minimum wage is. If you pull one 24 hour shift a week, how are you doing compared to the person who works 20 hours a week at the copy center or on fast food?

More basic math; Let’s say you average $32/hr in tips playing piano at the bar and you work from 5-10 pm on Thursday and Friday nights (10 hrs/week). How much better are you doing than the half-time minimum wage worker in the sandwich shop? Careful; it’s a trick question.

Answer
Min Wage: 20 hrs X $9 = $180/week

Piano: 10 hrs X $32 = $320 + 10 hrs of basepay = $400 total.
(More than twice the pay for half the time)

102

" But for your typical kid (can live with parents; is close to a 2 or 4 year school; wants to study English or business) it can work. "

I’m not saying it couldn’t work for a lot of kids, but they don’t want to take that route. The problem is the assumption that it should always work for your “typical” kid.

I already posted how DS could NOT achieve this. And many of his HS graduating class couldn’t either. I don’t imagine we are the only place in this country where this occurs. So I would say there are probably for more non typical kids out there then a lot of posters want to acknowledge.

103

I mean, granted I make more than the minimum wage at my job, but I am at a community college and plan to transfer in the fall, and I will be paying everything out of pocket. It can be done, so long as you start working at 13 and spend virtually no money on anything…

104

If you are willing to start at 13, it might be more efficient to spend your time on something that produces a higher wage in your college years.

105

A friend’s kid paid for a lot of college being a baseball umpire.

Started out in HS doing Little League for probably $10-15 a game. Worked up to doing high school games at $50 (or more) for a 90-120 minute game. Then there’s American Legion games all summer long. Plenty of all day tournaments on Saturday and Sunday.

Since the games are afternoons, evenings and weekends, easy to coordinate with school or other work. But you need a car.

106

I think working 10 hours a week is manageable and makes the student acceptable for their own discretionary income.

107

I really disagree that the problem is room&board. R&B ADDS to the problem, but the primary problem is the cost of tuition.

When people age 40 and over say “work through college” they mean “have a part-time job” (12-15 hours, perhaps up to 20) and earn enough to pay for everything about college, then graduate in 4-5 years. Most would imagine that “work through college” would mean that you can easily make enough money to pay for tuition yourself with a part time job as long as you’re not lazy.
“work your way through college”, for most people who came of age before the 2000’s, doesn’t mean “take on loans”, “join the military”, “take 8 years to graduate”. It means what it says: you work and that pays for college.

California has a uniquely good system. While the classes are overcrowded, there’s a decent offer, a straight, clear path from CC to CSU or UC, costs are kept to a minimum so that you can work to pay for tuition, there are 23 CSUs accross the State that you can commute to and so many CC’s that you may even live near two of them, and if admitted to a UC your R&B is factored into calculating financial aid, the costs are kept as low as possible and the state grants grants. And even like that families struggle and complain (hence the creation of “middle class” grants.)
People from California: this isn’t true everywhere else. You’re very very lucky. Don’t think your reality is the reality for most. It isn’t.
The one thing where you’re not lucky is traffic. :slight_smile: Hopefully some kind of rail system will be developed at some point but till then that’ll be a problem for commuters.

For instance, you may well not be able to commute the university you got into. So there’s a university nearby but it didn’t admit you, and there’s a university that admitted you but you can’t attend because it’s too far.
Or the only university you can commute to is private. What do you do then?
Or you cannot stay at home, for whatever reason - abusive parents, parents who think you should live on your own because you’re 18, violent neighborhood, your room is needed for someone else. So commuting and passing on the R&B bill to the family budget isn’t possible.
You also have the case of students who are singularly gifted for a subject - each year there are parents on this website who desperately try to find universities for their exceptional kids and can’t find one they can afford that will also allow the gift or talent to prosper sufficiently well.
If you live in the northern half of the US, commuting is actually pretty rough in winter. In many cases, it’s just not doable. Try living in Minnesota, in Montana, in Wyoming, in Iowa, in New Hampshire, or anywhere with mountains, with a long commute.
Some people are saying “well, just attend a CC, commute for 2 years, and transfer to a 4-year university”. First problem with that, not all community colleges are designed to help students transfer to a 4-year students. Many are conceived as technical institutes for trade certificates or terminal AS or remedial skills. If a student had AP’s, that student may very well have run out of classes to take at the CC and may not have anywhere to go. Add to this the fact a top student who attends a CC may have received merit scholarships as a freshman that are no longer available for transfers… but these merit scholarships aren’t sufficient because there’s no state grant, no institutional financial aid.

(That’s not even taking into account the fact not all people live near a CC and not all can just live at home and commute).
Oh, and: some kids can’t drive. (Anyone out here with a disabled child who can’t drive?) So the logistics become even more complicated and costs may well get in the way of that child’s education.
All of these examples represent real people. There are really too many of them to dismiss the problem as “students won’t go to their state U”; “there’s no problem” sounds like denial to me.

Who remembers the time when you didn’t need to be 24 to be declared independent for financial aid? When working 12 hours a week sufficed to pay tuition at your local college and pay for rent and food?

(I really am not so old. When I went to college, Harvard’s tuition cost about $15,000. A public university was much, much cheaper than that, depending on state you could definitely afford it with a part time job during the year and a full-time summer job before college. For a reference point, at that time, a college graduate could earn 30-35K.)

I don’t think we can have free-tuition colleges, but the cost of tuition OR net price for tuition/fees at a state university should be limited to what a teenager would be able to earn over the summer.
Some states are already within these limits. Others aren’t, and that’s where the main problem is.

108

I have a fundamental issue pricing colleges so that Bill Gates’ kid and his housekeeper’s kid both pay 3K per year in tuition- or whatever the number is that meets the “teenage can earn his/her way through” threshold. I dislike these schemes that throw the baby out with the bath water. If the problem is the X % of teenagers who cannot attend college due to finances, location, inability to drive and not near public transportation, etc. then fix things for the X %. But don’t ask taxpayers to subsidize the Gates and Buffet and zillionaires kids by driving all tuition down to a negligible amount.

What happens at State flagships when the taxpayers approve some scheme to pay oodles of merit aid for instate kids? The faculty walks past the student parking lot filled with BMW’s and fancy jeeps to the faculty parking lot- filled with aging Camry’s and the sedans patched together with electrical tape. (ask anyone you know who teaches at a state university). The upper middle class loves these programs- they get to tell their friends about the fantastic “scholarship” little Joey got; they get to pour the savings into consumer goods (“he’s saving us so much money by staying in-state, buying him a car was the least we could do”) and the poor STILL can’t afford to go to college.

Fix the problem, don’t chuck out the entire tuition system.

109

I agree we can’t throw the baby with the bathwater but…the Buffet and Gates kids aren’t commuting to their local public schools. Their parents have endowed a building at the college of their choice and they’re in a residence hall. :slight_smile:

Add to this the problem that fixing the problem for the poor and disabled only means no general support from that state’s taxpayers. The policy, to be viable, has to be good for most people in the state (or, at least, apply to most and sound good to most).

I agree that my solution of keeping the threshold at summer earnings for either full tuition or net price per family may not work - I’m not a policy maker :slight_smile:
But the tuition needs to be reasonable - I don’t think college should be free, but it should be affordable for all, in all states.

What about “no public college should cost more than EFC for any family, before loans”?
(EFC is often too high, but if the costs can have loans deducted, it’d make things a bit easier.)
And what about “room&board must be incorporated in the amount of financial aid a student receives if they live further away than a 20mn commute in reasonable weather, can’t drive, or can’t afford a car”?

110

I live in a place where adults routinely commute an hour or more on public transportation to work. The trains are reliable (mostly) and quiet. I’m not sure that more than 20 minutes is a hardship for a college student…

I don’t disagree with your issues MYOS- it’s the one size fits all solution that aggravates me. In some parts of the country, an hour long commute is a generally accepted “thing to do”. In others, that would mean switching buses three times and standing in the snow in the dark.

This is my point. Once you “fix” the problem with a meta-solution, you’ll be creating another set of problems. Why not just increase the amount of the Pell grant (a program that already exists, already has compliance and regulatory checks in place)? If Pell isn’t reaching enough kids, why not raise the income limit?

Why mess around with the pricing in 50 different states with 50 different legislatures and very different “local” conditions?

111

Re: #77, @nobelcollegekid - There was a study fairly recently that suggested that providing free tuition to every student at an in-state public college or university would be no more expensive than the existing patchwork of subsidized loans (with their high default rate) and grants.

112

No more expensive for whom- the Federal Government? All 50 states?

113

I will try to find the article. It wasn’t 100% convincing, but it was sufficiently intriguing to generate a lot of serious discussion. I think it primarily considered federal education spending, but it might have addressed all levels of public subsidies for college. The loan system now has been corrupted by for-profit colleges, and most low-income students will not be able to afford to remain in college and receive a degree; with no degree, they cannot afford to repay their loans. Students who have to work full-time usually will not graduate in 4-5 years. It might well be more cost-effective to provide free tuition at the local college, whereby the students are not amassing debts. The numbers might not add up, but it’s worth attempting the arithmetic.

114

Here’s an article on the topic: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/heres-exactly-how-much-the-government-would-have-to-spend-to-make-public-college-tuition-free/282803/

115

The glory days of super cheap state flagships are gone and ain’t coming back. Also, one reason why the glory days were glorious is that back in the day not that many people went to college. That isn’t the case anymore.

If you really want to fix this, you have to break the old model and come up with a new one with radically lower costs.

For example, Obama’s idea of 2 years free CC tuition to everyone. I think that’s on the right path. Sander’s idea of free four year college for all is the wrong path imho. Because it doesn’t reduce the costs.

For example, new/different ultra low cost starter colleges.

Google up “Portmon College” which the Bill Gates foundation funded.

Two year inner city commuter college. Tuition is equal to the amount of a Pell grant. Lots of specialized support so the kids can actually get through the program. No point in lowering the price if the kids just wash out. Then coordination agreements with 4 year colleges.

I don’t know how well Portmon is working in practice, but it is the kind of thing that needs to be tried.

116

I am glad that more and more people are finally arriving at the conclusion that it’s nearly impossible to work your way through college without some sacrifices (of no small magnitude, I might add).

I worked for years in HS to save money for college, and it was all gone just in my first year. Luckily, I’m one of the rare few who managed to find other ways to afford the rest of my college education. But there are thousands who continue to work during college, suffering the added stress of working to studying.

It doesn’t help when the Boomers and X-ers keep talking down to us Millennials and acting as if our inability to afford college is a result of our laziness.

117

Notyet- I don’t think your generation is lazy. But I do think that SOME of your cohort communicate with a tone of entitlement which is hard to stomach by the boomer’s.

“Back in the day” kids didn’t start their weekends on Thursday and blow off their Friday classes. “Back in the day” you worked in the housing office or cleaning dorms or frying eggs in the cafeteria and didn’t complain that your work-study job didn’t lead to anything meaningful. “Back in the day” Spring break meant staying on campus to interview for a summer job (if you wanted to stick around campus and could crash with a local friend) or going home and interviewing, not spending hundreds of dollars on a trip you can’t afford. “Back in the day” you lined up at career services first day of senior year so you’d have first crack at a professional level job, and when you got an offer (if you were lucky enough to get one) you didn’t call the recruiter and complain that the company wasn’t going to hold the offer open for six months while you figured out if you wanted to go to grad school or go work for your cousin’s start up in Seattle.

So not lazy. But I worry that actual reality is going to feel really cruel after the kind of college years that many of your generation are used to…

118

“Animal House” was not a movie about millennials.

119

Some Boomer and Gen-X college students did party hard starting Thursday and avoided scheduling Friday classes as much as possible.

Of course, others of the same cohort did work their way through college, often earning enough to support themselves without parental assistance (i.e. not requiring living at the parents’ house) while having money left over to pay in-state public tuition and books. Higher costs and worse job prospects for high school graduates today mean that parental assistance (which includes being able to live with the parents) is more likely to be needed today to work one’s way through college (which can mean a more restricted choice of colleges and majors).

120

I recruit for a living and have been working for large corporations in recruiting for over 30 years.

The number of “boomerangs” among new grads (kids who turned down an offer, then called a few months later to ask if the offer was still good) or the number of new grads who accepted an offer but never showed up for work was in the single digits in North America in the late 80’s and 90’s, both at the companies I worked for as well as those of colleagues and folks I met at industry conferences. So out of a class of hundreds of new hires, maybe 3 or 5 were problematic offers- accepts who didn’t show, or turn-downs who then tried to renegotiate.

It is a pretty big number nowadays. There are some campuses which are notorious for having kids describe a job offer from a global corporation as “my safety school”. So if something better comes along- bye- bye safety school. I understand having an epiphany during senior year and realizing that your “calling” is to study bird migration in Africa. So you pick up the phone and call the person who offered you the job and you tell them you’ve had a change of heart. You don’t eat the fruit basket they sent you to say “welcome to the team” and then just vanish off the face of the earth.

This isn’t a result of high tuition, low work-study hourly rates, inadequate Pell grants, higher costs for books and lab fees. I don’t know what it is (although I’ve seen studies with theories and speculation) but the idea that you’d get hired for a job- months ahead of time- and then just not show up for your first day of orientation- strikes me as entitled behavior.