bearing blog: Postsecondary education questions: Can you still work ...

More fact-gathering. ?Just this past spring, PBS Newshour's blog The Rundown posted a useful article:

In researching the growing amount of college loan debt that students are taking on as academic sticker prices steadily increase, we wondered: Is it possible to pay for college through summer and part-time jobs alone?

So we compiled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics and others to create a calculator that compares possible annual income vs. college expenses since 1976, the first year all the data we need is available.

You can plug in your own hourly income as well as hours worked over the school year and during summer, and whether you attend a private or public college for a two-year or four-year program. Or, you can use our assumptions of the federal minimum wage rate -- currently $7.25 an hour -- with a part time job of 20 hours per week during the school year and a full-time job of 40 hours per week over the summer. Mousing over the lines shows you the college costs for that year and earnings. The difference shows whether you've made enough money or if you need more to foot the bill.

The calculator is located here.

Looking at four-year public institutions and using our assumptions for hours worked and income, average college costs actually could have been paid for up until the 2000-2001 school year. After that, a student would have to work more hours, or make more per hour, to keep up.

I think they must have changed the calculations since they wrote the article, because when I put "minimum wage," "four-year" and "public" into the calculator, I see the lines cross in 1991-92 --- my senior year in high school. ?

(Having played with the numbers, I suspect they erred and got the "could have been paid for up to 2000-2001" for the case of "working 40 hours a week all year long while attending school full time.")

It is extremely instructive to look at the average costs of two-year?public colleges. ?In 2012, you can just about break even working a minimum-wage job for only 15 hours a week during the school year, and 40 hours a week during the summer. ?

If you are attending a four-year college, you can just about break even working the same amount of hours if you could get your hourly wage up to $13.50. ?Perhaps this is a good argument for doing some time in a vocational or trade school before?starting college -- anything to bump your earnings significantly above minimum wage.

There's always the work a little, study a little option. ?What if you worked minimum wage, 40 h/week for a year (saving ALL your money), then attended school with room and board for a school year, for eight years in a row, working all the summers? ?I calculate that if you'd done that for the past eight years, you'd actually have come out ahead by $9500 to put toward your other expenses. ?

Those two-year colleges are looking like a better and better idea.

Spend some time with the calculator and tell me what you've learned.

Source: http://arlinghaus.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/postsecondary-education-questions-can-you-still-work-your-way-through-college.html

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