this is kindof tied into my other thread ‘what careers offer part time work or 3rd shift work’.
If you did manage to support yourself and go to college at the same time how did you do it? did you just take out 25k a year in loans and never work while in college? did you have a job that worked with your schedule? how did you do it?
Both. In six years of college (I was a wee bit undecided on my major) I held 17 different part-time jobs. Some were on-campus, some off. I never had a car; I walked, biked, or took the bus to work. I also worked full-time every summer. During the school year I worked about 20 hours a week while carrying a full course load. And yeah, I was pretty broke. Mom slipped me some cash once in a while when she could, but mostly I was on my own.
I was fortunate enough to have won a four-year Merit Scholarship sponsored by my mother’s employer. $1,000 a year for four years; it covered tuition for those years. I had loans for the rest; came out to about $13K. (I went to a cheap state college.)
Paid off the student loans AND my first car in December 2000. Yay! Another couple hundred bucks in my pocket every month. WRONG – two months later my husband lost his job. You just can’t win.
My husband and I get Pell Grants that cover most of our college expenses and we live on student loans. I also clean house for someone occasionally and get paid pretty well for it, and every now and then DH’s family helps us out (not real often, though). We’ll be about 15-20k in debt (each) when we get out, but we’ll have degrees, without which in West Virginia you are doomed to making $7 an hour for life.
I respect the hell out of people who work full time and put themselves through school. I cannot handle a job and school at the same time; I’ve tried. I really admire people who find a way to do it.
There’s a woman in one of my law classes who deserves a medal. I swear if I won the lottery I’d set her up. She’s a single mom, divorced because her ex is a complete jerk. Drops her kid off at the babysitter’s at 8am, doesn’t get him back till 8pm every day. She HATES leaving her kid for so long every day. She busts her ass at school, this semester she’s taking 21 hours (3 of them is an internship so I guess technically it’s 18 hours of classes, but still) – she had to get special permission to do it. She says she’d rather have a semester from hell than to be in school even longer and be poor that much longer and keep having to take her kid to the babysitter. AND she has a job on top of that (part time, though, I think). AND she commutes an hour a day to school. She is the hardest worker I’ve ever met in my life. I have no idea how she does it, I’m assuming lots of caffeine, nicotine and prayer. I pray for her a lot myself.
I’ve worked on and off throughout college. My mother helps me out a bit, but not completely. She pays for the things that give her peace of mind. Which are my cell phone, car payment and car insurance. If I get really low on money, birth control. (She apparently thinks I have a lot more sex than I really do.)
Tuition I pay for with loans. I get $5500 a year to cover that and books. I’ll be about $20k in debt by the time I’m finished with school.
Right now I work Friday through Monday and go to school Tuesday through Thursday. I’m putting in 7-12 hour shifts a day waiting tables. I went from Labor day until October 12th without a day off from either school or work.
As for spending, I just don’t do it. I don’t go out to eat. If I want some one else to prepare my meal, I order food from work where I get a 50% discount. That’ll cost me between $2-5. I still don’t do it every day I’m there. On the very rare occasion that I order food, I normally split something with my neighbor.
Somehow I live off of about $600 a month with a $400 rent.
The difference between paying for college now and when I was a student is night and day. To say tuition has outpaced inflation is an understatement.
But I did pay my own way thru grad school as a TA/RA and people still do that. The wages for such jobs have mainly kept up.
Taking out a loan in my era was just plain stupid. But I guess it’s needed nowadays. Sigh.
Did it. Dont’ know how, but I did it. 
Worked full time, manged to have two kids along the way. My last semester of graduate school, I had a 3 month old, a 2 1/2 yr old, and an abusive alcoholic husband. Whee !
My salvation was student loans. I’m still paying them off. In retrospect, it was well worth it.
Bottom line: you’ll do what you have to do. Natch. 
I worked most of the time I was in school, but I just couldn’t manage all the pain in the ass of working retail AND the PITA of being a commuter and college student.
I finished my Degree last year - worked full-time (overtime a lot of time too) and managed to get a 1st (which I am still stunned by). Not sure I’d ever do it again and not sure I’d advise anyone that its the way to go but I did it and got the reward I wanted so I’m happy.
Ain’t no way I’m doing an MA though !!!
For the first three years, I paid for everything myself. I was lucky in that I had the skills and previous experience to land myself rather high-paying summer jobs, so I’d work my ass off all summer, and would deposit my pay to an account held in trust by my mother. (I was notoriously bad with money, and knew better than to let myself be trusted to save it and later dole it out to myself.) In a summer, I’d make enough to pay for tuition and books (tuition being around $2000/year here), and most of my living expenses for the coming school year. The first summer job I got in Montreal - after my first year of school here at McGill - I was able to parlay into a part-time job during the school year, and that took care of the rest of my living expenses. In fact, with this income, I lived rather well, all things considered.
Things started going bad for the company I was working for, so for my last year and a half of school, I applied for and got huge student loans, which covered everything. Those have been paid off.
I used to resent friends of mine whose parents paid for everything, or who had huge trust funds that paid for four years of university, because they didn’t have to worry about finding jobs that paid well, or they didn’t have to work at all, and could smoke pot and travel all summer. But in the end, the further experience and skills I acquired through the job I kept for most of my university career helped land me my first post-university job, which in turn gave me more skills and experience etc. etc., which were pivotal in my getting the job I have now.
Meanwhile these friends of mine are either bohemian drifters at 30, or stuck in really shitty, lower-paying jobs. Not to sound nasty, or anything. Just that my hard work back then - when I would have liked to have been travelling Europe while Mommy & Daddy paid for everything - was worth it in the long run, and I’m more secure now than any of them, in terms of employment and finances.
supported myself, first 2 years i kept on my bar job, doing 4-5 shifts a week, although living at my parents.(i did pay rent, college was a 40 min bus ride). moved to where college was, in with a fellow student, worked at blockbusters.
i was the only person i knew there without any kind of student loan. even the rich kids took them out, but then again they could pay them back. out of all the people from there (i did a BA in illustration/painting), very few are employed in a job that has something to do with their degree. most of them are temping or working at banks. im in graphic design. because thats where the cash is.
I had a combo of loans, grants and worked. It was tough but I got out with 10k in loans while my peers at the time were generally 2-3 times that level. Then again, I went to the University of California, which at the time was about a grand a year in fees. It was a huge deal.
I did. I went to a “working” college. We worked for our tuition, and if you worked on campus in the summers it paid for room and board, then you only had to worry about books and extras. Was a great deal for me. I graduated without any student loans.
Kind of.
Well, probably not- I still live at home, and my family helps out with half my college expenses. I really do want to be completely supporting myself, but at the same time I want to be as debt-free as possible. At least this way, when I graduate, I’ll have no student loans, own my own car, and have a financial safety net in case anything goes awry.
I’m doing it now. I work full time (days) in high-tech, and go to school two nights a week. Due to some scheduling conflicts, I was only able to take 3 classes this semester, but I’m planning on taking 4 (or maybe 5) next semester. I’m fortunate in that I can work from home, and SmithWife stays home with our (15-month-old) daughter, so it’s nice to be able to spend time with them.
I survived the undergrad years without any loans, and without any major source of cash, somehow. I had a full-tuition scholarship that required a 3.75 gpa for continuation, so I spent a good deal of time studying. I paid for living expenses by working full time in the summer (the same retail job for about 5 years.) I spent summers at home with the 'rents. If I recall correctly, the total for food and dorm room was about $2,500 a year (really 9 mos.), all in all not too bad.
For the first year or two mom and dad covered pocket money ($10 a week, lots of high living there) as well as major stuff (keeping my old car running, insurance.) Then I started working on weekends/evenings as well and worked 15-25 hours a week all the time, more during winter break and summer. On a related tangent, this was a good “work-while-in-school” job. It’s a really cool store that does a lot of different stuff and they could handle flexible hours. I’d work something like 4-8 Friday night, 9-5 Saturday, 12-6 Sunday, maybe one other evening 4-8. Left me just enough time for studying and minor social life. I also learned how to drive fast.
Towards the end of undergrad and the beginning of grad school, after getting an apartment w/roommate, I took on fairly well-paying jobs as a personal care attendant (by registering at the U’s disability office) in addition to the other job. I took out a loan ($17,000) for grad school and used all my work earnings to keep myself fed and sheltered. I have no idea how I could have paid for tuition - I’d certainly needed more than the whopping $10,000 I earned in a year! However, I still feel happy that my loan payment is completely manageable and that my grades were decent.
My parents had no money whatsoever to send me to school, it was all they could do to pay a hundred bucks or so for my insurance and pocket money. They bought both of my cars (which were, to put it nicely, very economical.) I now make more an hour than my father (though I work fewer hours.)
In other words, it is possible to survive college with little or no money. Just remember these important words - State schools are good. Even if I had taken out loans for all the tuition I never paid, I’d still be able to make the loan payment.
I had a small inheritance that was piddled out to me over 4 years that covered tuition and books, but little else. My parents were recovering from a bankruptcy, so they helped not at all. I had to work for my food and my rent.
I lived cheaply and was lucky enough to get good jobs (I had good job skills from my job in a computer store during high school). I tended to work about 20 hours a week while I was going to school, and full time in the summers. Still, I remember lots of late nights studying because I had no time during the day. I also remember being on a VERY tight budget - things like buying a bagel for lunch instead of bringing it from home was a luxury.
I went to UCSD with full scholarships & grants. But for food $$, I worked at the Salk Institute with the lab rats (about 50 at a time) for $4.25 per hour. I would check the rats & if any were suspect, we would grind them up, put that mixture in testing tubes, run them through the machine & I got to clean all the tubes.
I did it and I warn you, it wasn’t much fun. Took me about 6 years to get a four year degree. I took loans, grants and an amazing amount of part time jobs. I have worked about every job imaginable. I worked in the student book store, as a phone solicitor, a bartender, cocktail waitress, fast food, at a time share, at a gator farm, at a drive thru beverage market, a surf shop, I cleaned a bank after hours, I cleaned houses after the construction crews were done…those are just the few that come to mind…basically ever semester I had to change jobs to fit my new schedule and if I found that I couldn’t carry the job load and study (I got exhausted a lot) I would have to make other arrangements. I didn;‘t have a lot of problems with tuition and books, I qualified for Pell and and got loans but my biggest oroblem seemed to be groceries. I did not eat well in college. By the time I paid rent for my off base apt and I did have my share of party money…(skewed priorities in those years) then I didn’;t have much food money left over. I ate a lot of Ramen noodles.
Both. When I was an undergrad I’d roughneck on oil wells during the summers and took one year off to work on a wireline logging truck. When in school I had an after hour job as well in a restaurant.
In grad school though, 9 years after undergrad, I’d saved enough to make most ends meet, plus had a teaching stipend and took out a couple of loans. The work load there was too intense for afterhours employment.
I did.
I once had three part time jobs while carrying load of classes.
I did take out a couple of small loans and it was worth every penny of the interest.