dajo9 said:
SFCityBear said:
CAL6371 said:
No - it was highly subsidized at Cal, but there were no quotas, no "everyone deserves to get in" attitude, no "College is for everyone" attitude.. It was ,merit based and no one asked you race, parents' income, etc. I worked my way through college and never got a dime from my parents. It was a good life-long lesson. I strongly believe in strongly subsidizing the University of California system as long as admission is merit based.
Why don't you believe in kids having to work their way through college now? At least to pay part of the expenses. I worked two jobs and worked summers while at Cal, and my parents still paid a good share. I hazard a guess that there are far more jobs for kids now than in the mid-1960s (looking at MacDonalds, Walgreens, and on and on). And the life-lesson you can learn doing that is needed more now than ever before in our history, as we graduate more and more kids who have little idea what to do now that their schooling is finished, and no idea what to do with their time. So they move home with their parents.
The concept of working your way through college is just not something that exists any more - at least in the sense that older generations talk about it. The disparity between part-time minimum wage pay and the cost to go to college has grown enormously. Working your way through college nowadays might consist of working to pay for your books. That's really what you are arguing for. Plenty of kids work while in college.
I don't buy it. It was no cake walk to "work your way through college" in the 1960s, but it was doable. Even then, it required ingenuity and energy to do it in 4 years. Usually students who worked during the school year still had to take a semester or a year off to work to foot the entire bill. It looks to me that the same is true today, even though to everyone the amount of money needed to attend Cal looks astronomical, and I can't fathom the costs for private school, just as my parents could not fathom it for me in 1959. I got accepted to MIT, Cal Tech, and Cal, and my father asked about the first two, "How do you plan to pay for it?" So I went to Cal, where it was still too big a stretch for my parents to entirely pay for it.
Today, according to the UC Financial Aid Office, it costs approximately $34K to attend Cal for a year, living in an on-campus apartment, and probably less in an off-campus apartment. $35K in the dorms. So let's say it costs 4 x $35K = $140K for 4 years. If the student works 20 hours a week at Berkley's minimum wage of $14/hr ($15/hr for UC jobs) that is $10,900 for 9 months. Then if the student works at a summer job at the same rate, that is 3 months at 40 hours a week, and is $7,300. So the student earns about $18K a year, or $72K over 4 years, leaving the student a $68K shortfall. The student who wishes to pay the rest by working would need to earn that money before or after college, or by taking time off from school. Hopefully, the student could find work at a higher wage, but even at minimum wage, he would need to work two years at 40 hours a week to make up the shortfall, and pay for his entire education by working. The student would pay a few hundred in income taxes each year, so he or she would have to work a few months more or take a second job in the summers or years off to pay their taxes. It is doable, isn't it?
Comparing that to 1959-1965 when I attended Cal, it looked like this: Room and board was about $1200 for 9 months, UC Fees about $120, books about $100, food $100, personal expenses $200, transportation $100, totaling about $1800 per year. There was no minimum wage until I was heading into my junior or senior year, but I usually made $1.00 per hour during the school year and in the summers. One summer I made $1.25.
So by working 20 hours a week during the school year, I could make $800. In the summer, working 40 hours, I could make $500, totaling $1300 for the year, and leaving me with a $500 shortfall per year and a $2000 shortfall for 4 years. Working at the same $1 per hour, I could have taken off a year and made up the shortfall. As it was, I got lucky. The UC Engineering Dept had a work-study program where students could take a semester off to work for any of a number of California companies. I worked at a defense plant at a better salary for a semester and stretched the job into the following summer, where I made enough to cover my shortfall.
So the only difference I see between then and now is that the student today might have to take one more year off to work than the student of 1960. It is still all quite doable, IMO.