General Discussion

It was actually possible to pay for college and housing by working, especially if you had some useful skills.

Our government -- federal, state, and local -- paid for most of my education from kindergarten through my four year bachelors degree.

In my junior year of college my share of the rent for a crappy student apartment was $85 and my student fees were about $1,200 annually. I knew how to cook my own meals on a budget.

Paying for my textbooks was my greatest concern. When I started college I got grants for that, and later on my grandma helped out.

My major was evolutionary biology, not exactly a lucrative course of study, but it got me jobs as a lab assistant and later as a science teacher.

I made most of my money then as a skilled laborer however -- as a handyman maintaining crappy student housing, and as a furniture mover.

The first time I made a hundred dollars in a day was moving furniture. The first class I flunked in college was organic chemistry because I skipped too many classes to move furniture because the money was so good. I'd get a call at 5:00 AM from the moving company about a job that day, even though they knew I had classes on Thursday, and say "yes," imagining I'd buy the ASB class notes and catch up on what I'd missed. I never did catch up.

That world does not exist any more. Wages for the kind of work I did have not kept up with inflation and college costs have skyrocketed.

My children are college graduates, they worked in college too, but it was still very expensive, more than they could ever hope to pay for by working.