Being in school full-time can be really stressful – it’s difficult to find time to relax or maintain a social life. Imagine having to work full-time on top of that. Unfortunately, that’s the reality for many young adults attending college.
According to research conducted by Georgetown University, “About 40 percent of undergraduates and 76 percent of graduate students work at least 30 hours a week; 25 percent of all working learners are simultaneously employed full-time and enrolled in college full-time; and 19 percent of all working learners have children.”
In addition to that, the study also concluded that you can’t work your way through college like previous generations could.
The report from Georgetown University states “a student working full-time at the federal minimum wage would earn $15,080 annually, which would not cover tuition and living expenses at most colleges. Many college students that work full-time while in school still have to take out loans and take on debt.”
This means that although these students are sacrificing so much time and energy already, they can still barely, if at all, afford their living costs.
Working too much while in school can be as detrimental as it may be essential. Many young adults in college don’t have everything handed to them on a silver platter by their family members—they have to work to get things they want, and sometimes even just to get the bare minimum to survive.
These people work 40 hours a week while attending classes, doing assignments, studying, and many have other responsibilities such as families or other commitments that they can’t just drop.
This needs to change.
Working like this while in school takes away so much from the education. Speaking from experience, you will fall behind in at least one class if you’re trying to work full-time and attend university. Not only does this waste time, but also the money that you’re struggling to make to pay for the class in the first place; it’s an extremely vicious cycle.
So, why are college kids pressured into working so much while studying? There is a myriad of reasons for this, and certainly not everyone has the same reasoning.
Many families are just getting by, living paycheck to paycheck, and they can’t afford to help send their child away to college. Tuition, dorms, meals, and other commodities are really expensive, especially if you have multiple kids going to college at once. Even with grants, scholarships, and of course student loans, sometimes it STILL isn’t enough to cover everything we need.
It’s too much for the common middle-class parent to pay their own bills and for their child’s education and separate bills at the same time. Some students are also the main income of their families. They have people who are dependent on them and may not be able to work, like children or elderly family members.
A lifestyle like this, for whatever reason you have to take it on, is extremely overwhelming, usually resulting in choosing from three of four things: school, work, sleep, or social life. There are countless other factors, like mental health or physical ability to name a few, that play into this, making each scenario that much harder to figure out.
The reality is that many college students are living like this and this is no way to live. I have known since before coming to college that being an adult would be difficult, but the level of difficulty of being an adult, comparing this generation to the last generation, is much higher.
Today we are obviously at a much higher cost of living, yet not as obviously high of a minimum wage (albeit higher, it does not match the amount of inflation that has occurred since 1980).
The cost of living is so expensive that we’re told to get higher education to get better jobs, then we’re forced into a hole of student debt, and only make $50,000 per year on average with a bachelor’s degree… It’s almost paradoxical.
I don’t want to be “handed” anything, I just want an equal playing field with my colleagues who are lucky enough to have the help they get so that they can focus on their studies, enjoy their lives, and not drown in debt.
– Breanna Rife