I remember the day I wrote off my college tuition debt. I'd made payments on it while earning money in the city, put it on hold during my year at Berea, then come home and not found a job that would pay the bills for a few months. The'rents conferred. Dad had gone blind and secured a dimly lighted, "accessible," guarded flat in a building for disabled seniors in town. I was appointed to stay there and keep the place sanitary; blind people tend to break and spill things. For one full year I swept and mopped, heard more of the Limbaugh Show and the NFL series than I wanted to hear, and discovered that Dad was actually a pretty good person to work for--tough, but fair and generous. I was allowed to have day jobs, and I put together several to pay my own expenses, including payments on the debt. Then I moved back home, and by that time Mother had saved up enough money from her job to write a check for the whole debt.
That was in the Clinton Administration. The debt had been $2500 and I'd paid it down below $2000. That was for two and a half years at a heinously overpriced church college for rich kids. I had added some course credits from four other schools, at none of which I'd even taken out a loan.
Young people are now looking for objects to throw at me. "You couldn't do that now," they mutter. "No one could. Tuition is so much higher now. We have to take out loans to do the first two years at the local community college. And for good jobs they expect you to do 'junior year abroad' and that's guaranteed to cost two hundred thousand dollars at a minimum."
Right. Nephews and other young people, you are up against it. Your educational options have shrunk drastically below what was available to my generation. You're expected to pay more while probably learning less. Jobs that used to call for a two-year degree now demand a six-year degree. You might get a job, which in many States would legally pay you half the minimum hourly wage for part-time work; your job wouldn't make a noticeable dent in your expenses, anyway. You would have valid reasons for moaning and whinnying, if you were the moaning and whinnying type.
But you're not. You are my Nephews. Each of you has at least one physical parent who is well known for fortitude and ingenuity. Your grandparents and other ancestors are legendary examples of those qualities. You inherited backbones from them. You do not absolutely have to go to college, if you don't want to--but why wouldn't you want to? You can do it, possibly without debt, or at least with substantially less debt than your classmates are going to be carrying after graduation.
I do recommend college. I didn't finish a degree, due to illness and things, but I had a lot of fun getting as far as I went, as did those of your parents who went to college. College does require a little more actual studying than high school. This should not be a problem for any of you. College requires you to take some responsibility for your life, return your own library books on time, go into bars with friends and shout "I'm driving," rent a room off campus if you don't like sharing your room with the slob the school picked for you, and so on.
College actually even requires you to go to sophisticated cultural events, free of charge, in the company of beautiful young people of the opposite sex, with no obligation whatsoever because nobody even has to pay. If you can't decide whom to invite to the play, go with both of the leading prospects and sit in between them. Go everywhere in fours or sixes and let people try to guess who's a couple. Go to dinner with foreign exchange students just to talk about their countries. This kind of fun stuff does not happen in the grown-up dating game, where there can be heavy pressure to become a committed couple or break up by the second date. (If that happens, of course, you should always break up.) In college all you have to do is learn to appreciate sophisticated entertainment in the company of friends.
So of course you want to go to college, but you have to pay those outrageous tuition fees before you can start going to classes, much less loafing romantically on the quad, swimming in competitions, or touring with the band. Whatchagonna do, whatcha gonna do...? No, not declare yourself insane because you have a horrible aunt who sings 1970s songs at you when you're trying to think of answers to questions that have no answers.
1. Do your homework. Find out how many of your core courses you can do at the local community college, which will be much cheaper than a big-name university.
I realize that some of you are highly motivated to go to a big-name university and adjust your White classmates' expectations about Black guys' study habits. That is a valuable part of the White kids' education for which Black students at big-name schools ought to be paid. Boys likewise need to know that it's not normal or natural for them to be able to compete with girls, and Yankees need to internalize the understanding that, if they're even getting a hillbilly's dust in their faces, something is awry. But you may not be able to afford to start doing it in your freshman year.
2. Find out how many of those courses you can take at night, or remotely, while working full-time in a real grown-up job. Don't limit yourself to student labor. If not hired to manage a store, consider taking a nursing assistant course first and working in a hospital, or try a construction job, a factory job, maybe the National Guard or Army Reserve. Take the training and do the actual work as an EMT (emergency medical technician) or ambulance driver. If you're in a city that pays fire fighters, be one. Use baby-sitting time to make a fantastically arty hand-stitched quilt to sell at a state fair. The fact that it's legal in many States to pay students half the minimum wage in no way obligates you to work for even the full minimum wage.
3. Find out how many of the optional frills of "campus life" you can do without. Can you rent a room off-campus for less than the cost of a dorm room?
(IMPORTANT: Before planning to do nursing, baby-sitting, or even cleaning for room and board, spend a month doing those things in the prospective host family. Work-for-rent jobs are the best kind if you're compatible with your hosts, and can be the worse if you're not.)
At least find out whether you can dispense with club memberships, student government, yearbooks, etc., although at some schools you can't. If your healthy weight is less than 150 pounds, you can probably feed yourself better for less than the school cafeteria does. At some schools you can avoid paying "equipment fees" by choosing sports and elective classes that don't have them. You will not get a degree without paying to spend a certain numer of hours sitting in a certain room, but you may be able to save a couple thousand dollars by choosing no-frills options.
4, Some schools are more budget-friendly than others. Berea College is special because it's both a big name (academically) and committed to staying budget-friendly. McGill University is another big-name school that's famous for offering no-frills, frugal options. The fact that I went to Berea and my husband went to McGill was something that made us a little more willing to try having a relationship in spite of all our other differences, but that doesn't have to limit your options. Actually, the bigger the name, the more likely the school is to have some combination of scholarships, fellowships, and job opportunites that make it accessible to a handful of brilliant poor students, Just be sure you can keep up the work to qualify for the scholarships, etc. If you plan on using a teaching fellowship to pay for tuition, know that you are going to be teaching that class if the roof falls in and you have to meet standing up in a corner of the cafeteria. If your tuition package depends on military service, you are going to be drilling in a cast if you break a leg. This is the time to show that backbone.
5. Find out how many classes you're allowed to take online. It's possible, if your alma mater allows it, to do your entire furst two years of "core courses" via Coursera, Udacity, and similar sites. (Don't Zoom at home. You can probably get permission to take Zoom courses in the good old community college computer lab.) It's free to take the courses; it costs $50 to $200 per course to record your grades. Don't underestimate the work involved. If you're taking a Zoom course from Stanford at the Podunk Community College, you will be doing Stanford work, and you may want to check ahead and make sure the community college library has the right books, because even if you're only discussing some very familiar poem you read in grade nine, you know somebody at Stanford is going to be citing the Oxford or Cambridge literature book in per comments and you're going to want to cite whichever of those series that person isn't citing.
(A tip: You know all those scholarly journals that show only the summaries of recent experiments to the general public? University teachers subscribe to those things. They can download the whole study and print it for you. Most teachers will be favorably impressed if you know which studies to ask for, and will print off all the studies you can use.)
Take the free course online whenever possible, because $300 per credit-hour for a four-hour course is a lot more expensive than $100 to record a garde.
6, The College Level Educational Proficiency Tests are another huge time- and money-saver. Most schools limit the number of courses you're allowed to CLEP out of, but you should CLEP out of as many basic courses as possible.
(A tip: Sociology is super easy to CLEP out of. Don't be intimidated by the fact that you didn't take a sociology class in high school. Borrow a sociology book for the week before the exam, but you will be amazed at how much of the material you learned in history, geography, and civics classes.)
7. In many fields of employment, you can get an entry level job with either a trade school certificate or a college diploma. If you're serious about a career in the field, you want the diploma, but many people find it cost-effective to take the trade school certificate course first. They pay $200 for the trade school course, then qualify for the entry-level job and are workiog full-time for adult pay rates when they start paying for the college course...and the trade school course probably counts for a few major-field credit-hours, too.
8. Choose your hobbies wisely. Some of the things you did for fun in high school are things you can do for money, on your own or on behalf of your school, in college. Sports, performing arts, crafts, any computer-related pastime, and tinkering with machinery are ways to have fun that can also pay off a good part of a college tuition bill.
9. Look into your state's loan forgiveness programs. In Virginia this usually means a year or two of indentured labor in which you use your degree on a job the state otherwise finds hard to fill. Lots of people want to teach dear little five-year-olds the alphabet, so there's no loan forgiveness program for doing that. Plan on at least two years teaching math in either an inner-city school or a remote rural school. Then you'll be free to teach little darligs the alphabet without having a debt to pay.
10. Volunteer judiciously. You know those jobs that it sounds so cool to do, when you're in high school, so you sign up to do them, but in practice you're not actually getting paid to do them and the adults do see you as a child, so you might be tempted to give the adults what they're paying for in terms of service? Volunteering judiciously is the reverse of that strategy. For some, not all, fields of employment there exist volunteer jobs that are used to sort out exactly how much talent people have for the full-time career. Med tech is the classic example. Don't bother doing it if you're going to be just another guy who puts EMT training and volunteering on his calendar and then spends his weekends dozing in front of the TV at home. People who do med tech volunteer work judiciously are checking out whether they want to be emergency doctors or nurses. If they do, the adults down the fire house will notice, and they'll start hearing about scholarships for pre-medical, paramedical, and nursing courses at college. There are counterparts to this in many fields of work. If you want to go to veterinary school, lose no opportunity to clean cages at the local dog pound. If you want a MFA, sweep the local theatre like Helen Mirrin playing Cinderella.
11, Yes, it looks better if you finish a four-year degree in four years or even in three years, but it is better even than that to stay out of debt. There's nothing wrong with taking one course at a time, if that's the way you can afford to go to college without taking out loans.
The more students resist the banks' encouragement to start out their lives with a heavy load of debt, the more incentive schools will have to reduce the administrative expenses that have really inflated the cost of education. So never be ashamed to make debt-freedom a priority. You don't have to go into debt to get an education. If you even make this a religious rule (the Bible tells Christians to owe no one anything but good will!), that will help other young people like you.
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