Richard R. West :You Can’t Work Your Way Through College Anymore In 1956, I waited tables for $1 an hour. That was enough to pay for one-sixth of my Yale education.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-cant-work-your-way-through-college-anymore-1521239612
The cost of college has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades, and the increasing availability of federal student loans is a principal cause. But even as demands grow daily to do something about student debt and loan defaults, hardly anyone laments the demise of a once-proud American aspiration: working your way through college.
In 1956, as a freshman at Yale, I waited tables in a student dorm for about $1 an hour, 10 hours a week, over the 30-week academic year. I received a full scholarship, but even if it had ended, I recall that Yale’s “all in” price—including tuition, room and board—was $1,800 a year. My work during the term could have covered one-sixth of that.
Today tuition, room and board at Yale run $66,900. Working the same amount as I did—even at, say, $12 an hour, an increase of roughly one-third after inflation—produces income of $3,600, or slightly more than 5% of the total. To earn enough to pay for one-sixth of a Yale education would require an hourly wage of more than $37! Yale’s own literature, by the by, lists the amount that a freshman on scholarship can expect to contribute during the school year at $2,850. The same basic economics applies to summer employment.
Yale’s experience closely tracks what has happened at virtually all of America’s elite private colleges and universities. The situation in public schools is little better. A half-century ago, the tuition and fees at many such institutions were barely above zero. Fully working your way through college was a real possibility. Now a year’s education at a typical state university, even for in-state students, can easily exceed $25,000, well beyond what can be earned while studying full-time. That is why so many students at public institutions are now leaving college, whether or not they graduate, with mountains of debt.
To reduce their need to borrow, increasing numbers of students are attending community colleges for their first two years while continuing to live at home. Admittedly this helps, although at the cost of greatly diminishing the college experience. But it doesn’t change the financial realities once these students then transfer to four-year institutions. CONTINUE AT SITE
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