First Post: The Strangulation of the Independent American College Student

by George Lorenzo

I had an awakening the other day. I had always thought that a traditional-aged, single,
self-supporting college student working and living on his/her own could manage to earn a bachelor’s degree with federal grants and a relatively small amount of student loans.

I was completely wrong!

This awakening started with a conversation I had with a newly minted college graduate currently on her way to graduate school. She explained how every one of her independent friends who had dropped out of college could not find the means to return because they were too financially strapped struggling to make ends meet to survive the cost of food, clothing, shelter, transportation and health insurance, let alone the added cost of college tuition. 

I mistakenly thought a self-disciplined individual with a full-time job that paid little more than minimum wage could meander through the traditional broke-college-student lifestyle and ultimately complete a four-year degree. I thought it was possible because I did it back in the early 80s, living on my own and paying my way through four years of undergraduate school, renting out a studio apartment and working full-time as a desk clerk on the night shift at a hotel. When I graduated, I had accumulated about $5,000 in student loans. I had additional financial assistance over various years in the form of Pell Grants, a tuition scholarship in my junior year, a number of part-time work-study assingments in which I tutored, and a job on the student newspaper as editor-in-chief, for which I got a small stipend and a tuition fee-waiver. It was not easy, but it was doable. In hindsight, it was actually a lot of fun (although I did not think so at the time), primarily because I was fully focused on earning a degree. In the end, to this day, almost thirty years later, I take great pride in this accomplishment. I consider it one of the greatest individual accomplishments of my life to date, over and above starting and operating a business.

What a shame that doing something similar today looks inconceivable without incurring an enormous amount of student-loan debt. Our American political system that is supposed to support higher education should be totally ashamed. Many members of Congress have consistently been trying to come up with ways to increase the interest rate on student loans and, for the most part, decrease federal grants. What a shame, indeed! 

As I researched this topic of how a traditional-aged, independent college student could pay his/her way through the completion of a four-year degree at a public, four-year state college, I calculated that rent and tuition ate up 25 percent of my annual income back in the early 1980s.

Today, in a fiscally similar scenario, rent and tuition would eat up 65 percent of a person’s annual income. That’s pretty sad – and I’m using as my sample the cost of going to a lower-than-average, public, four-year institution.

Some of the factors causing this sad state of affairs include that the minimum wage is too low, finding a decent full-time job with health benefits for high school graduates is next to impossible, and the  availability of reasonably priced studio apartments rentals seems to be non-existent. I discovered this through a conversation I had with a19-year-old freshman who just dropped out of college and entered the job market. His search for a simple, full-time, low-paying job that is not at a fast-food restaurant has taken him down some strange paths. I advised him to be aware of people who would try to take advantage of his vulnerable position. The first interview he had was with a person at a coffee shop who placed an ad in the help-wanted section for house painters. The interviewer asked him if he’d be interested in a management-level position that paid 3 dollars more than minimum wage and then explained that he’d give him a call in the near future once he had some houses to paint. Needless to say the phone never rang, and who knows what the interviewer was really up to? A second interview was with an apartment cleaning service. This time he was told that he would be called and hired the following week to be trained for a full-time position at the wage of $10 per hour. As things turned out, he was called four weeks later; there was no training involved; and he was thrown into some disgusting apartment-cleaning situations and wound up getting paid less than minimum wage because the pay was determined by a flat fee for each apartment assigned. The number of hours he was paid for this enterprise over two weeks - after quitting - turned out to be less than 20 hours each week, although he had actually worked about 30 hours. 

This young man did get hired as a convenience store clerk at 75 cents over the minimum hourly wage – but they only hired part-time help because otherwise they would have to offer health benefits. The same kind of part-time hiring scenario applied to the local supermarket chains in the area – only part-time opportunities existed for inexperienced high school graduates. In short, as I have already noted, there are no decent full-time jobs available to high school graduates, especially where I live in Western New York State in a suburb of Buffalo, the third poorest city in the US according to the Census Bureau. 

If the 19-year-old were to go to a local community college, the maximum Pell award would cover about 95% of the cost of tuition, fees and books for one academic year (two semesters without attending during the summer months). If he were to attend the local state four-year college, the maximum Pell award would cover about 70% of the cost of tuition, fees and books for one academic year, leaving him with approximately $2,500 that he would have to come up with on his own. When you factor in the cost of food, clothing, shelter, transportation and health insurance, he would not be able to make ends meet at the four-year state college while working a full-time job paying minimum wage. He would more than likely have to take out, at minimum, approximately $5,000 per year in student loans, leaving him with a minimum of $20,000 in debt upon graduation with no decent-paying career opportunities on the near horizon. The prospect of going on to graduate school brings another fiscal nightmare with more debt upon debt. 

What’s the solution to this challenge facing independent college students today? Is our higher education system doing anything in the area of affordability? What about educating students for real job opportunities? What kind of job prospects are really out there for college graduates? Where are the good jobs located? What fields of study have the best rates for employment? Which colleges offer the best bang for your tuition dollars? Which cities have the best cost-of-living scenarios? In short, what paths do young college-age students need to take in order to live a decent life, without incurring enormous debt?


These questions and much more will be answered in the “The Changing American Workforce: How to Get Educated and Find the Right Job, in the Right Place, at the Right Time.”
In the meantime, please provide your insights and comments, especially if you are a struggling, independent college student and/or an educator who can provide advice.