How much work might be needed to work your way through college?
According to one observer, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing, and housing could be had by working a minimum-wage job an average of twenty-two hours a week throughout the year. (This might mean working fifteen hours a week while studying and forty hours a week during summers.) Today, the same expenses from a low-wage job require fifty-five hours a week fifty-two weeks a year.Bousquet goes on to note that faculty salaries are not the cause of rising tuition:
At a private university, those figures in 1964 were thirty-six minimum-wage hours a week, which was relatively manageable for a married couple or a family of modest means and would have been possible even for a single person working the lowest possible wage for twenty hours a week during the school year and some overtime on vacations. Today, it would cost 136 hours per week for fifty-two weeks a year to "work your way through" at a private university. In 2006, each year of private education amounted to the annual after-tax earnings of nearly four lowest-wage workers working overtime.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008), 152.
The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and student labor: over the past thirty years, the price of student and faculty labor has been driven downward massively at exactly the same time that costs have soared.[Bousquet is relying on a spreadsheet by Tom Mortenson, "I Worked My Way through College. You Should, Too. 1964–65 to 2002–03," available to subscribers only at Postsecondary Education Opportunity.]
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