Every year millions of students head off to college. Whether away from home, down the street, or in the bedroom on the computer, adults and teenagers all over are starting the journey towards achieving a middle class lifestyle by attending college. For many this is a dream financed with hard work rather than money from parents. While universities and professors may want students to focus solely on their studies and come away from each class with a deeper, transcendent understanding of the class material to provoke philosophical contemplation and achieve mental and spiritual synergy, the plain truth is most students just want to be able to get a better job than their parents. Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but is a luxury most people cannot afford. Because tuition and the cost of living rises every year, students must be able to work more than twenty hours a week in order to afford college, and pay their living expenses.
Traditionally it is thought that a student could not earn a decent GPA and work more than twenty hours per week. However, 17% of American undergraduates worked over twenty hours per week. 6% worked over 35 hours per week. This is especially true for students who come from families with yearly earnings at a middle class average of $67,000. These students qualify for less aid, but still are too financially burdened to pay for college out of pocket. Low-income families have unmet gaps as well, as they struggle to pay for living expenses while attending college, especially adult students with dependents. (Herzog)
Rising Tuition Costs
It used to be that graduating college was an American dream, and the ticket to the middle class. Individuals with a degree earn more than individuals without. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, full time workers with a high school diploma earn an average $651 per week. This is in contrast to individuals with bachelors and masters degrees, who earn an average of $1108 and $1329 per week, respectively. (Bls.gov) Investing in a college degree seems to make financial sense. However, the investment is an expensive one. The average cost of four years of university in 2009 was over $100,000. (Bissonnette) For parents planning to send kids to college in 2020, tuition costs are estimated to set a family back around $240,000 in private school tuition and $155,000 for public school tuition. (Clark, Wang) That is approximately $50,000 to $60,000 per year if an individual attends an Ivy League college. (Khalfani-Cox)
Many students are turning to loans, either government subsidized or private to help them finance college. The problem with relying solely on loans is that students leave college already weighted down with mountains of debt – rather than buoyed up with a new degree, ready to jump into the future.
Young adults who begin their lives with student loan burden are affected in every aspect of their lives. "Student loans can affect every decision young adults make: whether they can go to graduate school, buy a house, even start a family," says Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute.” (Clark, Wang) 90 billion students a year take out student loans. When they default, they accrue penalties, fees, and compound interest. Wages and tax refunds are seized. (Collinge) Student loans are now 25% of non-consumer debt. The graduating class of 2006/07 left college with over $22 thousand in debt. (Bissonnette) During school, students have the option to pay down their debt with a small monthly payment towards interest. This would save thousands of dollars in the long run. Many students do not take advantage of this because their finances are so poor that any expense that is not compulsory is pushed aside. Furthermore, if students could afford to pay down their debt, then perhaps they could afford not to accrue it in the first place. Students with full time employment are able, again, to make monthly payments towards their debt or can help pay for college expenses up front and never take out the loan. “Those going it alone have to make a difficult choice: work or take on significant debt.” (Herzog)
Adult Students
The face of the ‘average’ college student is rapidly changing. In fact, it has already undergone a metamorphosis. More and more students are returning to college well into their adult years and these adult students usually have families, jobs and other responsibilities they are juggling. Single mothers – well, parents of any demographic - who either enter college for the first time or return to college in order to improve their career opportunities do so with the motivation of providing for children. Many of these parents blend campus based courses with internet courses in order to accommodate their schedules. These internet-based courses also have ‘attendance’ requirements which state student must post content, usually based on the week’s reading- at a specific time during the week.
Older adults past child rearing years are also returning to college to either obtain their first degree or supplement their Bachelors. Many older adults find themselves having to work past retirement age in order to live. Retirement savings are not enough, social security is not enough, and the cost of living is too high.
So how is it that we could realistically require these students to restrict their work activities to merely twenty hours per week? The problem with this restriction is that it is predicated on an extremely narrow definition of what a college student is – an eighteen-year-old kid fresh out of high school, financially supported by parents. Whose only worry is to balance binge drinking with studying. Students who have no responsibility other than to study, for whom the twenty hour restriction is an unnecessary rule because they were not planning on working more than twenty hours any way – if they planned on working at all. Unfortunately, this is not the face of the typical college student. Many young people fresh out of high school now have to support themselves.
Many students come from low-income families that cannot afford to support them during college. These students rely on financial aid and whatever income they can earn while working, to support themselves through college. Because tuition along with the cost of living has risen substantially, and wages have not kept up with this rise, many students are forced to work full time in order to pay rent, and eat. In many cities, the cost of a studio apartment far exceeds the recommended 30% monthly income an individual is able to make working just twenty hours a week. When it is also considered the types of part time employment available to individuals with a degree – typically in the service and retail industries where wages are not even close to livable at an average of $8-9 per hour – then asking students to work less than twenty hours per week is a laughable conceit.
Opposition to working more than 20 hours per week
Individuals who oppose students working more than 20 hours per week have several reasons for doing so. One reason is that students who work are less focused on academics, and their GPA may suffer, or they may not fully realize the complete college experience that includes enriching extracurricular activities and community service. College is a demanding endeavor that requires a considerable time commitment and investment of mental energy. Students deal with the stress of hectic class schedules, intense study for exams, substantial amounts of reading and writing requirements that far exceed high school level composition. Students who work have a whole other set of concerns and responsibilities that have nothing to do with their degree plans.
However, if we analyze exactly how much time students spend studying a true picture emerges. A study of approximately 300 college students showed that far from studying, college students spend their time involved in binge drinking and gambling. The reports show that upwards of 40% of college students engage in binge drinking. These students also engage in other risky behaviors such as unprotected sex. In the study 42% of the survey students engaged in pathological gambling – the kind of chronic habit that takes both significant amounts of time, attention and money. (Bhullar) So to state that gainful employment takes time away from studying is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst. It assumes that college students are at home or in their dorms diligently pouring over texts and engaged in serious community service. It also, referring back to the changing demographics of students, implies that adult students should exclude themselves from college altogether since they have families to support. The reality is that students who are responsible and manage their time well are perfectly capable of balancing a complete workweek with a school schedule. It only takes effort, commitment, maturity, and opportunity.
So what is the real issue here? Whether students should work more than twenty hours per week, or why they have to? The real problem is that the higher educational system is broken. It has become a magnet for every big business, opportunistic bird of prey, and vulture seeking to make money off the struggling backs of millions of hopeful people who just want to have a decent quality of life. No one goes to college to get rich. They go to college because they want to work hard and contribute to society. So why is it that college is not free and the economy does not support families who need to get ahead?
If college education were free, then everyone would have the opportunity to earn a bachelors degree and enter the workforce to find a livable wage job. Many others still would be able to pursue their dreams of opening small businesses. If everyone has at least a bachelor’s degree, then you enable people who cannot find employment due to lack of education to take one more step towards self-sufficiency. So the problem is to working more than twenty hours, which is clearly necessary and desirable if one does not want to live under oppressive debt forever, the problem is that tuition and living is so high that individuals have to work more than twenty hours. Even if we cannot provide free tuition would not it make much more sense to defer tuition payments until after graduation and obtaining employment? Knocking out the burden of tuition will immediately help millions of people who have to work full time to cover college cots. Of course, adult wage earners with families must still work, but even then, it affords them a better chance of decreasing work hours if they can also receive some sort of scholarship or aid to subsidize their living while in college. This makes sense. It is an investment in the future workforce, an investment which pays off by enriching the tax base, and pouring more disposable income into the economy because people with degrees makes more money to spend.
WORKS CITED
Bhullar, Naureen, et al. "The Relationship Among Drinking Games, Binge Drinking And Gambling Activities In College Students." Journal Of Alcohol & Drug Education 56.2 (2012): 58-84. CINAHL Plus with Full Text. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
Bissonnette, Zac. Debt-Free U. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010. Print.
Bls.gov,. 'Earnings And Unemployment Rates By Educational Attainment'. N.p., 2014. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
Clark, K., & WANG, P. (2011). Stop the Tuition Madness. Money,40(8), 114-122.
Collinge, Alan. The Student Loan Scam. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009. Print.
Herzog, Karen. 'Working Your Way Through College Doesn't Add Up For Today's Students'.Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel 2013. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
Khalfani-Cox, Lynnette. College Secrets. Print.
