Absolutely, accessibility is very much linked to money. But usability of an education that's provided to you is, too.
For example, time spent working. I recall every vacation, every weekend and at least 1-2 mon-fri days or nights working, to help pay my dad's bills, pay for college, or just pay for things my parents couldn't help me out with even though I lived with them as an 18 yo, like medical insurance. There was never any downtime for me where I had a full weekend off, or a spring break to wind down after a few months of school. Barely any time was available to simply relax, have fun, remove stress or hell have time for my 'identity project'. Being ill for a day and missing a day of school work would mess everything up because I couldn't skip work, and I had no time spare in a given week as a buffer to 'catch up' up on stuff. It's a constant level of stress, which affects your studies, too. I was actually one of the lucky ones who lived in a nice neighbourhood where the median person had 5x our household income with free state subsidised education, it was great. But even then, I couldn't make full use of it like I could've if we had more disposable income. There are a lot of indirect factors, work was just one of them.
It is frustrating that education requires so much wealth. As a young adult I was completely focused on getting a paid position out of my degree and took internships based on pay alone. Despite a professor pushing me to stay onto further education and easily getting a 1st, I couldn’t justify the costs of continuing.
Having seen what poverty can do to someone I have always put securing my future financially over my education, in the hope that one day I can return to university and resume.
And I am one of the lucky ones who could afford / was explained benefits of an education from a young age.
I worked a full time job during my undergrad for the same reason: my parents' income was above the threshold for government support, even though my parents didn't support me. It was frustrating that other people whose parents earned a tiny bit less but did pay for them to live and study, would also get a huge lump of free money from the government each year. But ultimately, not getting free money made me independent and forced me to learn to manage my time and make money from my skills. That lesson is going to pay dividends for a long time to come.
Sometimes the issue isn't time - it's money and access to schooling. Just because you've had the access, doesn't mean others do - and there are many, many who don't.
Fine, and good for you. Opportunities aren't uniform, though, and there are students who don't even have those necessities you mention, and have to work for those. I likewise was fortunate to have the opportunity to make my own money at a young age, and so I don't begrudge you that. What I take exception to is the implication that all students have such opportunities, are aware of them, and enjoy the familial stability required to exploit opportunities as they arise.
This was my situation. Not only did I have to work during school, but I couldn't attend any of the Ivy League or private schools that accepted me due to not being able to get enough loans on my own (blessing in disguise in retrospect).
For people with that experience it makes sense to just separate the student from the parents but I'm not sure how to fairly account for people with rich parents who contribute. Just make college affordable for everyone!
Considering how it's quite literally impossible to get through college today without external financial support anyways, I would be pretty surprised if there wasn't a correlation.
I went through basically this. Worked full time while I was at school at various jobs to make ends meet.
But I don't resent the school system for denying me aid. I understand that I represent a very small population of people who:
1) Want to go to college
2) Had very wealthy parents
3) Wanted nothing to do with said parents
In basically every other case, the system works reasonably well, and I'm not sure we should be making financial aid easier to get for the wealthier folks just because a few folks like me come along every year.
Yes, but living off-campus isn't free either. That may get one out of hiked room/board/meal plan fees, but not out of the basic obstacle of affordability that stops many low-income people from going to college. Total cost of attendance can be prohibitive with or without tuition.
Yeah, there are more ways around it. One can work part-time. But my experience is that this is all a bit mythologised and represents a kind of superhuman best-case scenario.
Admittedly, I'm biased as a native Russian (in US since early childhood). In our part of the world, making school and university-age children work is still often regarded as a kind of violation of their human rights. "They need to learn financial responsibility" doesn't resonate strongly in cultures without this national folklore of individual self-reliance.
However, as far as I can tell, "working through college" isn't as easy as it's made out to be. In the real world, a good chunk of the kids that have to work enough alongside school to actually _support_ themselves (housing, food, necessities), rather than just earn some discretionary "spending money", don't end up doing well in school, for obvious reasons of nonlinear tradeoffs in human activities. After a 6-hour shift on my feet at the pizza joint, I'm probably going to want to come home and veg, not soar to the snow-capped summits of my survey of Western intellectual history until 2 AM ...
Being in tech, I got so engrossed in my work I dropped out to pursue my (at the time) meteorically ascendant career! :-) But that's a different — and decidedly luxurious — problem.
To some extent, it is true that finances (or the lack of) play a big part in whether or not a student goes to university. However, if you were born under those circumstances, like I was, the best thing to do is to work hard to make sure you reach that goal. I was born in an environment where attending university is not a necessity but a privilege. People from our neighborhood would rather have their children working after high school. Why? Because working rakes in money for the household, while attending school means having to spend out of what is left of your household's allocated budget. I thought differently. I knew that if I thought the way my parents did, it will be a never-ending story. My son and his sons will suffer the same fate. I didn't want that.
While I was still in high school, I knew I wouldn't be able to attend further schooling so I started to save. After graduating, I tried hard to look for scholarships. While waiting, I enrolled myself in http://preply.com/en for some private tuturing because it was more affordable. I didn't want to get left behind. As of the moment, I am still waiting, I am behind by 1 year but I believe that I will get there.
If I ever get into university, I will have proof that sometimes, it's only just a matter of working hard for your dreams. If not, I will make sure that my son does.
I knew I was covering my college tuition and even in 2000, I couldn't understand how I could ever afford out of state tuition and room and board. I had near perfect grades and solid test scores, but the financial obligation scared the hell out of me and I had no idea private schools handed out big scholarships for good students.
I ended up staying in town and going to my local state college and had a good experience, but I completely missed out on the prospect of going to a top university where I would meet other ambitious and curious people. I worked part-time to full-time for four years to pay for my tuition, and it was tough. I wish I could've been immersed in college and academia and even college-life, but the cost just felt like a huge barrier when I was 18 years old.
TL;DR: I fear poorer people may be more afraid to attend college because of the costs, causing an even greater gap between the haves and have-nots.
My family was making about $150k/yr when I was in school. We didn't get any assistance.
It's great that children from lower income families are getting subsidized, but with these kinds of policies there's always a hard cutoff point, and the people just above that cutoff point are the ones who get screwed.
Money shouldn't be in education period. If whether or not you can study is even partly determined by the finances of your parents, then the system is wrong.
I second this (U.S.). I came from a middle class family but college came straight from my pocket. I sunk nearly $75,000 into college and struggled to get a comfortable paycheck for a long time. I'm now 32 and feel that I can make ends meet but it came at the cost of destroyed credit, inability to purchase a home/car, etc. Slowly things have recovered and I now own a home, married, kids.. but I had never felt more depressed than when I realized the true cost of college. Teenage me didn't quite understand what I was signing up for, adult me regrets the decisions I made. (I went to school for Graphic Arts, I shifted to Software Development in my late 20s).
Because access to cheap student loans is key to many of us being able to afford college? Tuition and even room + board aside, there's other costs like books ($$$), supplies, transport etc. that cost money — money that many from poor backgrounds don't have.
Without being able to borrow (or making it very expensive to do so), it would require a part-time job on top of a full coursework, or taking longer to get a degree, which has it's own costs associated with it via lost earnings.
I absolutely could've. My college offered student loans to me as a means of paying for my education but if I had $0 to my name upon hitting 18, my life would've been radically different. As I mentioned in another comment a lot of that money went towards helping my family with FAFSA supplementing my school costs. I was effectively responsible for supporting my entire family and given my other health/mental issues at the time I don't know if I would've survived a full time job as well. Suffice to say dealing with a lot of these issues as a kid leaves your outlook fairly bleak without ways of helping yourself.
If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt.
In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
Yes and no. Obviously there are some rich kids whose parents give them spending money, and don't need to work at all during school. But plenty of parents, even from wealthy families, expect their kids to buy their own booze/gas/concert tickets/etc., and so, at least at my undergrad school (Williams), plenty of upper-class kids held work-study jobs and there was no stigma to it. I'm sure this varies by school, though. (as does the surrounding environment of what you can spend money on: big-city urban schools provide lots of opportunities for conspicuous consumption, whereas at small-town rural LACs like Williams everyone is equalized to some degree by living in the same dorms, eating in the same dining halls, and going to the same parties because there are no other options, so your work-study money really does go pretty far).
I grew up in a lower-middle-class family, and my parents were only able to support me during college with a monthly $100 check. Not wanting to go into debt, I went to a Cal State school, lived and commuted with roommates, and worked 2 days/week to pay for rent. I paid tuition bills by working full-time during quarter breaks. I also volunteered significantly at church.
All to say, my grades and ability to engage fully at school were strongly impacted by my financial situation. I wouldn’t wish my college situation on others. But I have no regrets. For me, it was character-shaping. That’s more important than economic opportunity and success.
Even with education loans, some people can't afford it, because they have to support the family financially now and you lose that opportunity when you're at university.
When I went to college in the late 70's, my parents paid a portion, I got a few small scholarships and worked every summer and part time through the school year. It was enough to pay for 4 years at a private university and then I spent two years elsewhere trying to get a masters, which at least was cheap as I worked as a graduate assistant.
That is impossible today without either full scholarships or massive borrowing; the inflation of the cost of a 4 year degree from a private school from then to now wouldn't allow me to duplicate this any more.
I spent 10 years volunteering at a local public university and most students had a similar experience (working, some help from parents, a few scholarships) although a few had to borrow a small bit of money. The difference of course is it was a public university which isn't as well regarded as mine, but in the end I bet the actual educational benefit was similar.
Going to college is a great benefit socially and educationally but spending a fortune on it is only useful for a small set of careers (like go to Stanford for CS). I never used any of my 6 years of college studying Chemistry. But I never had to borrow to get my degree. Unless you are talking about medical school I can't see the benefit to going into massive debt just to get a degree.
For example, time spent working. I recall every vacation, every weekend and at least 1-2 mon-fri days or nights working, to help pay my dad's bills, pay for college, or just pay for things my parents couldn't help me out with even though I lived with them as an 18 yo, like medical insurance. There was never any downtime for me where I had a full weekend off, or a spring break to wind down after a few months of school. Barely any time was available to simply relax, have fun, remove stress or hell have time for my 'identity project'. Being ill for a day and missing a day of school work would mess everything up because I couldn't skip work, and I had no time spare in a given week as a buffer to 'catch up' up on stuff. It's a constant level of stress, which affects your studies, too. I was actually one of the lucky ones who lived in a nice neighbourhood where the median person had 5x our household income with free state subsidised education, it was great. But even then, I couldn't make full use of it like I could've if we had more disposable income. There are a lot of indirect factors, work was just one of them.
reply