The Pros And Cons Of Traditional College Students

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Traditional college students leave home after high school, live in the dorms on campus, and many get part-time jobs, most likely, on campus. However, there are those non-traditional college students with a full course load and have to find a way to work full-time. Thesis.? Being a full-time student and full-time employee is harmful to one’s health and well-being. With having 15 course credit hours and each class requires two hours of studying for every hour one is in class and working 40 hours a week, a student/employee is lucky to get seven hours of sleep. This kind of schedule requires heavy planning. Martin Kramer, editor-in-chief of New Directions for Higher Education, says, “the present generation of students can surely be labeled the …show more content…

The reason is simple, things are not cheap. Jonathan Orszag with Upromise found that “working students can be categorized into two groups: those who primarily identify themselves as students but who work in order to pay the bills, and those who are first and foremost workers who also take some college classes” (Orszag). Martin Kramer says, “College costs, especially tuition, have risen much faster than real wages in the kinds of jobs students are likely to get, so it takes more hours of work to cover even a constant percentage of costs (Kramer). Jonathan Orszag agrees to say, “the evidence shows that as one response to the financial burden of college tuition, students are working more while in college” (Orszag). In College Costs: FAQs, it states, “public two-year college for in-district students is $3,347, public four-year college for in-state students is $9,139, public four-year college for out-of-state students is $22, 958, and private four-year college is $31,231.” Kramer states, “aid offices often have less grant money to award relative to rising costs, so aid offices expect students to cover a larger percentage of their budgets through earnings and loans to meet expectations of “self-help.” . . . Students deal with the self-help dilemma by working more because they want to borrow less” (Kramer). “A job . . . can often enable a student to afford a standard of living well beyond the costs the student aid office recognizes as essential” (Kramer). “In 2000, nearly 830,000 full-time college students worked full-time” (Orszag). There are many scenarios of working college students and why they need to work despite the struggle. Jenna Johnson, a reporter for the Washington Post, documents the story of Tiffany Wilt, “she is a 19-year-old graduate from her high school and in her second year of her college’s honors program.

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