Beating the College Debt Trap by Alex Chediak

Author:Alex Chediak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

PART 3

TAKING CHARGE

EARNING AND MANAGING YOUR MONEY

TRAP 6

I CAN’T GET MEANINGFUL WORK AS A STUDENT

Be creative and resourceful — you’ll set yourself up for long-term success

Let’s start with the obvious: Fewer and fewer parents believe they can help their children pay for college.1 Even if Mom and Dad are helping, there’s a good chance you’re planning to work part-time while going to school. That’s great, but it’s not enough. You want to be strategic in order to maximize the work part of your life. Beating the college debt trap requires taking the bull by the horns, thinking differently, and living strategically. You don’t just want to accept any odd job that comes along. Now’s the time to pursue meaningful work — the kind that pays good money and/or allows you to develop the skills and track record that will command the attention of future employers. Setting yourself up for long-term success begins today. This chapter will give concrete ideas about how you can pay for college, leverage your current skills, develop new capacities, and build a network of strategic relationships — all before graduation.

First, let’s consider how many hours you should work when classes are in session.

How Much Should You Work?

There’s a real danger of overtaxing yourself, especially if you’re maxed out on classes. Many colleges charge the same tuition for a student who takes anywhere between twelve and eighteen semester units.2 To speed things up and because it makes good financial sense, students load up their schedule to eighteen units. And then they also land a twenty-five to thirty hours per week off-campus job and wonder why they never have time to study. This is becoming a bigger problem as college expenses go up and students feel increasingly squeezed. What to do?

I used to take the view that since being a full-time student was a full-time job, full-time students should not seek another job while classes are in session. As a professor, I have a bias for wanting my students’ undivided attention. The historical rule of thumb for studying is “two hours out of class for every one hour in class,” which means that if you’re taking fifteen semester units, you should be studying thirty hours per week. That’s a forty-five hour per week commitment.

But as I said in Trap 4, study times these days are closer to twelve hours per week. Even in 1961, full-time college students studied twenty-four hours per week, not thirty hours.3 While I’m concerned that students who put little into their education are unlikely to get much out of it, the flip side is that it’s probably unrealistic to expect today’s students to live in their books for thirty hours per week. Unless you’re in an especially demanding major, you probably don’t need to study that hard to do well; at some point there are diminishing returns to extra studying, and — most importantly — there are essential skills and habits that can only be learned on the job, especially co-op/internship-type jobs (see below).

So

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