This was true in my case, but it depends on the university. I got a part-time college job just by walking into the office of the campus dining hall and asking. But this was in a tiny little rural college town where there wasn’t a huge amount of competition for jobs. I earned somewhere between $100 and $200/month, which was plenty. But it was hard to blow a lot of money there – tickets at the town movie theater or most campus events were less than $5, and it cost about $25 for a meal from the really expensive restaurant in town.
All I can say is
Do You Want to adopt me? 
My sister was shocked to learn that I was not sending my son spending money. She apparently gives her kids hundreds per month in addition to paying for everything else. She actively lobbied me to give him at least $100 a month because he “has to have money.” In my opinion, since she gladly pays for any legal expense, she is encouraging her kids to buy beer and pot.
I should confess - When I think of someone going off to college I can’t help picturing of Booker T. Washington in his book *Up from Slavery *. Read that - then the idea of a student “needing” free beer money becomes absurd. Not a fair comparison I know but the image of B.T.W. sleeping under a house still arises whenever one of my kids tells me about how they don’t have money for a new snowboard or some such.
Its probably worth while for someone who chooses to give their college kids an allowance to sit down and budget. In my dorm, there was no Saturday night dinner, so you needed to be able to throw in your $5 for pizza and if you weren’t going home for months, you needed enough change for the laundry. If you are buying their clothes, their books, and their meal plan - and there is ample free or really cheap entertainment through movies at the student union and bands at the student union, you probably don’t need much. But budget.
If the large line items on the budget are beer and pot and several MMORGs subscriptions, you probably aren’t doing your kid that many favors financing his college PLUS his partying.
If its money for the coin operated laundry, money for that not included Sunday dinner, money for the cell phone bill, money to cover the $2 cover charge at the student union, some extra cash for needing new pens or a trip to the copy store - and a small amount of unitemized expenses - the umbrella you forgot to pack, the “we won the Rose Bowl” sweatshirt - you are probably fine.
And if the laundry gets done in extra large batches and Saturday dinner is whatever was smuggled out of the cafeteria at lunch time so that he has extra money for pot and beer - he’s learned a lesson in budgeting and being frugal.
Thank you for keeping it in prespective Dangeosa. Budgeting and open communication about expenses - it’s so crazy it just might work.
I have to ask … when you say: “If the large line items on the budget are beer and pot and several MMORGs subscriptions…”. Do you know my son?
The important point is that the student get an agreed upon amount and must learn to live within his/her means. They don’t teach that stuff in school.
I have the privilege of having a front row seat for a woman whose young adult children are both blowing up in her face now - the 21 year old is on her first divorce and has an 18 month old that the grandparents are basically raising, since she has moved back in with her parents. The 20 year old owes them thousands of dollars, and has stormed out of the house in a huff because they were demanding that she start paying them back (after she had already screwed them over for a re-finance on their house that their daughter’s debts was messing up - the daughter’s debts are in their names, apparently). Suggesting to this woman that perhaps, just maybe, a little tough love would go a long way with these useless adult children is just whistling in the breeze.
I thought I had a point that related to this thread - oh yeah, don’t give them everything unless you want to keep on doing so (and for their children that they’ll bring home, too).
The only thing that I suspect has really changed about college since I went is now you need a MMORG subscription. And I suspect that really only the details have changed since the middle ages when you could be thrown into the student prison for chasing pigs through town (don’t tell me there wasn’t a beer budget involved before you chased pigs).
I misread this to be “I worked in the meth lab…”
My first two years, my parents paid tuition, dorm, food (meal plan), fees and books. I worked for everything else - in a convenience store in my dorm. My last two years, I managed to turn my convenience store job into a job managing all the convenience stores on campus - I got better money AND free dorm and meal plan. My parents continued to pay tuition, but I slowly absorbed fees and books. I also worked every summer and saved money (this was way back in 88-92, no cell phone plans, etc).
I had no problem with my grades - maybe because I didn’t consider partying as important as school? Not to be snarky, really, but I really felt grateful to my parents for paying for school and knew how lucky I was to get out of college with a degree and zero debt.
I still had a lot of fun 
Heh. I saved a lot of money by smuggling chicken and vegetables out of the cafeteria at lunch for my “Klepto Curry” dinners, senior year. And I still make the curry! (Though now, sadly, I need to pay for all the ingredients. Stupid laws.)
BTW, something else to consider - even if your kid can’t chip in much to his/her living expenses now, there is nothing at all wrong with having him/her take out student loans to offset at least some of the expenses.
well that would be one way to finance college …
I think $35/week sounds more than adequate if a kid is living on-campus and has a meal plan. It covers laundry, dinner, and a movie once a week plus little incidentals like school supplies and toiletries. This is on top of all the free shit to do there is on a college campus–movies, plays, games, lectures, cook-outs, dances, all sorts of stuff. If he can’t manage to amuse himself adequately with all that, he gets to get a grip.
No, he’s not going to be able to drink or smoke much on that budget. But do you really want to be financing his drinking and smoking?
I would give him the bare minimum ($150 sounds fine to me). If he doesn’t like it, he can 1) do some essay-writing and get a scholarship (scholarships provided me with tons of spending money), 2) get a job (I had a part-time job during college as a research assistant, and it helped my grades rather than hurt them), 3) or hang out with rich friends.
Seriously, you’re paying for everything else, which is generous enough. Spending money should be HIS responsibility.
When I was in college, my parents paid tuition, room and board (including full meals and additional spending money), and most (if not all) needed books and supplies. Travel for breaks as well. The way it worked was that I had two checking and two savings accounts with my credit union. One account was for any money I made working summers, breaks, student jobs, and so on. That was the money I used for whatever I wanted, but also paid for my cell phone and other obligations. I occasionally wrote a check out of the other account (it depended on how Dad was distributing the money being pulled and what the source was) but mostly used it at the start of each semester to buy textbooks and when booking train and plane tickets.
This was a small residential college where I was nearly 2000 miles from where I grew up. So travel was minimal and I actually needed a full meal plan. I didn’t even have a car for the first three years, I didn’t get myself a cell phone after I burned through a $50 phone card on one “trip from hell” home, and my own sense of honor kept me from getting into the other account.
I realize I was extremely lucky. My parents had been planning for years (for instance, I cashed savings bonds that had been bought in my name just a few months after I was born) and were financially able to cover the difference. I got out with no student loan debt at all. But I didn’t expect them to supply me money for discretionary spending. I did have to ask them for money from time to time during grad school when my stipend got screwed up (which was guaranteed to happen at least twice a year) and I still owe them money from that. I actually have the amount listed in Quicken and will pay them back with imputed interest, though they don’t expect it.
Anyway, the point of this long rambling is that while others will say that you don’t have to give him anything (and I somewhat agree) if you want to, do so. I wouldn’t make it too much, I’d expect him to provide the bulk of the money he has to spend by himself, and I’d make sure to talk about it beforehand. I’d also make any such funding contingent on academic performance.
I don’t know when and where you went, but most schools are not this lively. You might find one or two of these events per week that isn’t invitation-only.
Big schools often are. I was on the Student Union board at the University of Minnesota. We had at least four films a week for $2 (with a student ID), a band every Friday ($2). Almost every week there was at least one guest speaker coming through the school, usually more - and some of them very good. Those were free. That’s just the student union.
There were plenty of “rec” sports to watch for free - the varsity teams had high ticket prices. There were a wide variety of clubs - from chess clubs to D&D to GLBT student alliance to the local SCA chapter to… that you could join and participate in, with their own events and schedules. Dorms had their own events - often a small charge - we went for hayrides (that was Iowa).
She said “free shit”. I went to a bigger school than you did and we had one free film a week. There were often guest speakers, but most of them were the kind nobody wanted to go and see on purpose - the director of the Translyvanian Chamber Orchestra, the world’s foremost authority on basket-weaving, and so on.
Most of the clubs were free - there were over 300 of them. Most of the speakers were free - and ours were interesting, at least to me. Watching rec sports was free. Some of the theatre was free. And with a little volunteer time, a lot more stuff was free.
University of Minnesota had an enrollment of 80,000 students when I was there - I think its a little smaller now - 65k. There are bigger schools, but not many of them. Where did you go to school?
UCF - it’s the third largest university in the country. Looks like UM is a lot bigger than I thought it was, actually, and it was probably bigger when you were there.
I went to the College of William & Mary, which is a small, isolated campus of 7,000, and there was loads of free/cheap stuff to do. A capella choirs, the student Improv troupe, theater offerings (from official Mainstage performance to student-directed one-act plays), and sports – particularly soccer games – were all popular, frequent events. Intermittent appearances by high quality speakers were well attended – both Stephen Jay Gould and Jane Goodall drew standing-room only crowds in a large auditorium. I didn’t often attend musical performances but they were apparently enjoyable to people who like that sort of thing. My roommate was in a student ensemble.
Not to date myself, but the University Center cafe also showed The X-Files on its bigscreen projector, if you just felt like getting out of the house for an hour (today, it is probably Lost or Heroes they are showing but the principle remains).
We had one movie theater which changed up their movies every 3 days – from old twelfth-run popular stuff (The Princess Bride always drew a crowd) to new release movies to arty foreign films. $3 for students. So there was always something new on tap. One coffee house. A total of three bars.
Was there something going on every night of the week? Oh, hell no. But most people are busy with their own shit in college – something cool to do a couple nights a week is plenty.