College students: How do you afford this madness?!

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

The math is off. It's $400 a term for books. There are 3 terms. $1,200.

And the $925/month isn't always $925. It can be much less.

So if we keep the income the same and have the full book price, that's $1000/year.
If you say the $925/month isn't accurate, then maybe it's $2000/year?

$2000 / year for a college education including all living expenses?

Is that more accurate?

I have a feeling that you probably think that the people saying "life is going to be a wake-up call" or "back in my day... we did X and Y and we happy" are exaggerating or just picking on you.

If you think that an out of pocket living expenses total of roughly $270 is "madness", then I would have to agree with those other posters.

I don't know why you'd trust any of us that your sense of reality is warped, but I submit this evidence that I am trustworthy.

With a minimum wage job, you would be able to cover that with about 10 hours of work a week.

Many on campus college jobs pay quite well and have very flexible hours. You might be able to work a single shift on the weekend 1 day a week and fully pay for your college experience.

Compared to what most people experience, this is a VERY LOW personal cost. At best, most people have tuition paid for them through scholarships based on hard academic and volunteering work they showed in High School. I seem to remember that this personal fortune you've been given is not actually an academic scholarship based opportunity, but one based on your family situation not directly related to you.

I would evaluate the situation as you've basically been given a gift of $500 - $1000/month for nothing you've done directly. This is on top of free tuition. Getting tuition covered by scholarships is what most people would dream of for starting to cover expenses.

So to start off, you'd in the best possible situation that you could reasonable hope for by having your tuition covered (which most people have to work a whole lot harder for). On top of that, you've been given enough free money to cover most of your living expenses including a car and buying new books (which is terribly inefficient... buy them used off amazon or something at least).

So then you complain about the situation as being unreasonable.

You could work one day a week at an easy college job and be totally neutral financially.

Imagine if that was your real life after college...
If working one day a week covered all your living expenses... would you be complaining?
You'd have 80% of your income from a regular 5 day work week to do whatever you wanted to.

If that's your idea of unreasonable, I don't know what you think would be.

Based on this information, you either have to be trolling, or have one of the most warped senses of reality I've ever seen.

I acknowledge that I had it quite easy in college financially. I had a bunch of scholarships that made tuition quite affordable and my parents were nice enough to pay for a lot of what was left.
My last couple years of school I was working 20 hours a week (for HomeBrewerDude) in addition to classes and was able to just about break even for living expenses (not including tuition).

I graduated without debt and because scholarships and my parents took care of tuition, I was in very good shape coming out.

It sounds like in your situation, you have a choice of taking out $2000 in loans during the year (which could VERY EASILY be paid for by a summer job), or work about 1 day a week during the school year and not incur any debt at all. If you somehow found a way to buy used books and use mass transportation instead of your car, you wouldn't even need to worry about the working 1 day a week requirement.

This is a VERY FORTUNATE situation to be in. You should not be complaining about this. It is unreasonable to think that you should be in a better situation than this.

TridenT, what do YOU think would be fair in this situation? How much should they be paying you to go to college?

 

[MrPickins]

OP - punch yourself in the cock.

This.

How many things have to be handed to you on a silver platter before you'll quit whining?

 

[Oil]

I have no sympathy for you.

 

[AFurryReptile]

Uh, student loans? It's basically free money until you have a job to pay them off.

 

[Q]

*delete*

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I guess I'll put in my two cents.

First off, I go to UCLA and live in the dorms. The estimated costs that the official school site gives is a bit high. Its for people who pretty much dont know how to budget and live poor. My total costs for a year is about $22k, with 14 meals a week. (Meals and housing are counted together). Tuition is about 10k, which leaves 12k for the meals and housing. Its pretty expensive which is why I am not living on campus next year.

My EFC is 0, which you could say is good or bad however you look at it. My family is shit poor. They dont know how to keep money and make stupid investments and gamble so thats what I have left to work with. However since my EFC is 0 and I get decent grades, I get a lot of aid. $17k in fact, leaving $5k in loans. I typically have a lot of left over money since I budget. I dont spend needlessly. I search around for books and only end up spending like $20 a quarter for books. I dont have a car since I dorm. I dont eat out much. I dont usually go out unless I can get it for free. I put all my left over money back into my loans so I wont have a crazy principal when I graduate.

This is all without a job currently. I will be working soon so that would be my spending money and my money to pay back more of my loans. I pretty much have it nice for the school I'm going to.

All the shit you complain about having to spend is mostly extra. Its not going to kill you to live without it. Does it suck to live without it? Yea. Think about the other people who dont have tuition waived. Who dont have aid because the federal government classifies them as high middle class. They are fronting all of their costs for school. They'll eventually end up with $20k in loans by the time they graduate. Shit you're even getting money to go to class. Instead of someone paying you to work for them, someone is paying you to work for yourself.

 

[nageov3t]

dorm room, dining hall, and misc university fees = covered under student loans... my food budget way maybe fast food or pizza once a week and some junk food from walmart (plus like $30/week in alcohol, but that was senior year only)

you don't "need" a car... I didn't even have a drivers license until 2 years after I graduated college.

you can save a ton of money by getting your textbooks used and online. ask your profs if there's anything relevant in the newer editions. you can get an older edition or two online for a steal and more often than not never notice a difference.

 

[JimmiG]

Anyway... Car is mandatory because I might not even live near a bus stop, and I don't want to sit on a fucking bus for 50 minutes each way. Fuck that. Time is important. Having that car is important. >.>

If you don't live near a bus stop, you can get to it by bicycle. 50 minutes each way isn't so bad, especially if it's the same bus the entire stretch and there are seats available. Then you can, you know.. study. Or if you feel too tired to do that, listen to music or read some fiction or even sleep.

I have between 1hr 15min and 1.5 hours to/from school. You get used to it. No one said it was going to be easy

If owning a car is something you consider important, then study hard and get a good job. Then you can realize this goal.

 

[Kanalua]

Get a job...seriously...most colleges have stupid part-time jobs for people like yourself. I worked full-time after the first couple of years...find a job that lets you sleep or do homework and you're fine.

And apply for all scholarships, grants, etc. available...save student loans for grad school if you have to...

 

[ebaycj]

Get a job...seriously...most colleges have stupid part-time jobs for people like yourself. I worked full-time after the first couple of years...find a job that lets you sleep or do homework and you're fine.

And apply for all scholarships, grants, etc. available...save student loans for grad school if you have to...

This.

I got paid $10/hr for 20 hrs/week (40 hrs/week in the summer) to sit in an air conditioned server room, by myself, and my only duties consisted of picking up a phone when it rings (rarely), and fixing the stupid law professors' computers when they were actually broken.

So basically 90%+ of the time I was there, I was getting paid to do one of the following:

• playing NES emulator with a gamepad in fullscreen with sound fairly loud
• exploiting the fuck out of having an unmetered, unfiltered 100mbit connection to the internet (back when 768k dsl was FAST)
• IRC chatting / AIM chatting
• surfing
• doing homework
• writing code for class
• writing code for self
• learning linux/bsd with the stacks of hardware sitting unused around me

Not to mention that 10 years later (to this day) I still have a SWEET historical piece of hardware from there (that I was allowed to take, because they were otherwise going to toss it) : IBM PS/2 55. 386SX/16mhz, which I modded to 8mb RAM, 1gb scsi hard drive, 10mbit nic. I got it to run linux, which was pretty freakin' difficult. Still works to this day, to my knowledge, though I haven't powered it on recently.

 

[Wheezer]

Let's break this down real quick:

~$900/month for rent/food/transportation x ~7.5 months for the year = $6,750/year

$6,750 + $0 for tuition + ~$400 for books = $7,150 per year

Take out a loan or get a job, preferably both.

Either way, you need to shut the fuck up and stop crying like a little bitch.

LMAO....this and I love the avatar that goes with ^....nicely done, could not have said it better myself.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

i'd just like to kindly point this out again, in case anyone missed it.

My tuition cost was around $13k/yr.



yes, back in 2008.

epic.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Yes, I don't pay for tuition. I also get about $925/month for going to school full-time.

Where do I sign up?

 

[BoomerD]

When voc-rehab sent me back to school for re-training, not only did they pick up 100% of tuition, fees, and books, they also picked up all supplies I needed, paid me the impressive sum of $5/day for transportation & meals, as well as paying my weekly disability check...Which, by ATOT standards, is a mere pittance, it's enough to pay my bills & mortgage, and still live relatively comfortable...and it's 100% tax-free.

 

[frostedflakes]

The last two years of college I actually made a small profit on books. First rule, never never never buy the book new. Second rule, never never never sell your book back to the campus bookstore. Third rule, always check to see if your book is in the library or on interlibrary loan (you'll be surprised how many of them are, I did about half of my text books that way). Fourth, if you need to buy, buy online and used. Fifth rule, get the previous edition if possible (sometimes the differences between editions are in chapters you'll never get to, or just minor error corrections). Sixth, sell your books before the beginning of the next semester, NOT at the end of the semester (everyone is selling at the end of the semester, so prices go down. Everyone is buying at the beginning of the semester so prices go up)

I'd actually buy used on Amazon and sell back to the campus bookstore, wasn't a terrible system. I never made a profit, but usually I was able to mostly recoup the cost of books as opposed to losing a good chunk of money on them every semester.

Some bookstores also offer rentals and/or digital editions a lot cheaper than buying the hard copy. There are also websites that offer similar services. Worth looking into, could probably save quite a bit on books doing this.

 

[Pegun]

I fear for the future of America. I blame the public education systems for not teaching people like this management of funds and giving students a kick in the @$$ when they tried to use excuses like having "depression" for not being able to get a job.

 

[txrandom]

College isn't for everyone. If you major in something useful that should help get a good job, then don't be afraid to take out loans.

 

[destrekor]

College isn't for everyone. If you major in something useful that should help get a good job, then don't be afraid to take out loans.

He won't know how to even get a job period.

He's acting like such an entitled bitch, I can't actually see him even working 20 hours a week without complaining about something.

From what has been deduced thus far in this thread, his entire college education and living expenses combined will cost less than $500/year. And he's bitching like a little schoolgirl whose mommy bought her the wrong color Mustang.

 

[clamum]

Ugh. I know for a fact your dad thinks this:

 

[Jeff7]

Huh, surprising this hasn't been done yet....



Madness?....
This! Is! FAFSA!

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

STFU. I paid $785 / month for my apartment, and that was considered cheap for getting your own room. By the time I graduated, my friends found an apt for $2400. Same complex as mine. 2 BR. Shared with 4 people. I got lucky with my $1490 rent or whatever.... LOL

 

[JM Aggie08]

Loans. Copious amounts of loans.