Working Your Way Through College? Not Anymore

In the Wall Street Journal former college dean Richard R. West reminisces about working his 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.

When I was in college I worked around 40 hours a week. I cooked short order breakfasts, three hours a day, six days a week for five years. I waited on tables. I taught judo. I gave guitar lessons. I sang at weddings (I’ve sung at more than 400). I translated scientific articles from Russian into English. When you sum it all up, add a few thousand dollars in NDEA loans, and tossed in the scholarships I received it enabled me to graduate from a pricey private university. That’s no longer possible.

What has happened? Several things. The demand for a college education has gone up while the supply remained relatively constant. The proportion of college administrators has risen sharply, increasing costs. The federal government has made a lot more money available for college loans and when you increase what people can pay for a scarce resource its price will inevitably rise.

And all of that has taken place as wages for the sorts of jobs that college kids used to do have remained flat and there’s been more competition for them than ever before.

I don’t envy the situation of today’s college students. They’re emerging from four (or six or eight) years of higher education with significant levels of debt even as the monetary value of their educations except in a few niches has remained flat.

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