KANSAS–In its idealized conception, college is an ivory tower where students through quiet contemplation or raucous self-discovery ready themselves for “the real world.”
But as college student Korchi Yang can attest, and as 2 million college applicants awaiting their financial aid packages may soon discover, being a hardworking student these days means precisely that.
Work.
Not just the on-campus work-study variety. This is real-world work: 20 or 30 hours a week or more.
One out of every five college students works full time, 35-plus hours a week, all year long, according to the most recently released census figures. With college bills at record highs, students say it’s not a choice. It’s a must.
Average student debt now sits at $26,600. The cost to attend a public four-year college, with room and board, on average: $17,860 per year. Private: $40,000.
After subtracting grants and scholarships, tuition paid by students at public universities jumped 8.3 percent last year, the biggest increase on record, according to a report released last week by the State Higher Education Executive Officers association.
College bills have become so onerous for some, in fact, that last month The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a brisk market for students selling parts of their physical selves: plasma, sperm, eggs, their bodies for medical clinical studies.
“It’s fast, easy money,” said Nikki Hill, a 25-year-old, full-time online student at Missouri Southern State University who previously attended the University of Kansas.
While at KU, Hill said, she sold plasma twice a week while also working at a coffee shop to pay her bills.
“College is expensive. I was making $60 a week donating my plasma,” said Hill, who said she earned thousands of dollars over three years this way. “All my friends were doing it, too. I used to round everyone up and drive them all with me to the plasma center.”
For the majority of students who don’t go to such lengths, however, the daily working world has become the prime option.
For years, studies have found that holding a job for 10 to 15 hours a week during college can actually help students perform better in the classroom.
But students today are going far beyond that limit, experts say.
Too many hours has a price all its own.
“The toll it takes on students is pretty significant,” said Josh Gunn, president-elect of the American College Counseling Association and director of counseling and psychological services at Kennesaw State University. “Students are depleted, exhausted, and something has to suffer.”
At Kennesaw, Gunn said, “it has been quite evident that more students than ever are carrying a full load of classes and a full-time job at the same time.”
When students become too run-down to make it through even one more day of double duty, he said, they usually will choose to go to work over class to pay the bills.
Consider Yang, 23, who scrambles each week to keep her life in balance.
She attends Kansas City (Kan.) Community College, but next year she will pay much of her own way through Pittsburg State University _ about $12,500 a year if she lives on campus.
Born the eighth of 10 children to immigrant Hmong parents, she is the first in her family to attend college.
Her father died, disabled, in 2010 after a stroke. Her mother, who doesn’t speak English, moved to California to farm after her husband died. Yang lives with a brother in their father’s home.
While taking 12 credit hours at college, she works four nights, 28 hours a week, at a Wal-Mart store from 3 to 10 p.m.
When she’s done at the store on Friday nights and also Saturdays, she changes out of her blue Wal-Mart shirt and into an entirely different outfit.
She puts on heels and a T-shirt or a form-fitting dress to work crowds as a model and hostess in Westport or the Power & Light District until about 2 a.m., recruiting pretty and personable young women for CQC Promotions.
The Olathe, Kan., home-based company provides models and party hostesses to companies. Yang, who is studying fashion merchandizing and wants to be a model and designer, is featured in an ad for a coming California car show.
For her, the job offers modeling credit and fun along with the $20 to $25 an hour she makes to help save for college. She uses her Wal-Mart money to pay for her car, phone, food, gas and utilities.
“When I first started going to college, it was really hard for me,” Yang said of working full time and studying.
“I never got any sleep at all. I had to work almost as much as I went to school just to pay for school.”
It was so exhausting, she said, that she urged her two younger sisters, Pachia and Seenhiam, to do everything they could in high school to get great grades and scholarships.
“I didn’t want it to be as hard for them,” Yang said.
She said Pachia, 22, is now in her third year at St. Catherine University in Minnesota. Seenhiam, 20, is at the University of Central Arkansas. Both, she said, have scholarships that have saved them from her work schedule.
Working has costs in terms of time, psychology, social life and, for many, grades.
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But not for Quentin Savwoir, who has a 4.0 average as a senior at Rockhurst University.
Savwoir, 26, of Kansas City works full time and attends school full time too, while also co-launching a business, Nuts and Bolts, featuring environmentally friendly custom underwear for men.
His 40 hours-a-week job as a youth advocate at Synergy House, serving homeless teens, is necessary.
Rockhurst’s tuition alone is $30,000. He has already mounted more than $10,000 in loan debt. He has a Pell grant for low-income students. The maximum amount is $5,500.
Savwoir brings home about $1,500 a month before taxes. He has rent, food, utilities, and on and on.
“It’s a real struggle,” he said. “I feel like I have a purpose in life, and to achieve that I have to be educated. In order to be educated, I have to work. It’s not ideal, but I have to work.”
Savwoir spent his spring break last week with a stack of books, seated in front of a laptop at a desk in his River Market apartment getting a jump on several projects due at the end of the year.
“I don’t even have time to enjoy my 4.0,” he said. “I don’t have a social life. It’s all about work and school.”
Colleen Monaghan, 22, an Overland Park, Kan., senior majoring in journalism at KU, said she also had no choice.
Her parents, she said, told her, “’You have got to get a job.’ Not working is not an option.”
Monaghan tends bar 30 hours a week at The Wheel. Her hope is to someday work in London, and she has a job interview there next week during KU’s spring break.
Until she moved back home this year to save money for London, most of her paycheck went for rent, along with her car and other bills. Some nights she works until closing and grabs a little sleep before heading back to serve the bar’s opening crowd and work into the dinner shift.
“Some nights I only get four hours sleep,” she said.
- Eric Adler and Mara Rose Williams, MCT Campus