Working His Way Through College With a Computer, VCR and a Saab

In the Midwestern college I attended, life was pretty strict. In loco parentis conferred authority on deans. When the school year began, we knew that blue jeans were forbidden on Sundays in the dining halls, that cars were forbidden on campus. So was dormitory sex. Violators were suspended or expelled. Zoe, for example, was dismissed in her freshman year for making out in a local movie house, where she attracted the attention of two dowagers who promptly reported her to campus authorities. Liberal arts colleges graduated innocents into the world and unleashed the rebels early. That’s the way it was in 1962.

More than a quarter-century later, deans no longer serve as parents and students are now considered adults. All adults, including students, seem to want to live in comfort these days, with styles, possessions and sex lives of their own. This means having personal mobility, evenings free--and lots of bills to pay. It’s difficult to live that way and go to school.

The greatest expense public college students face today is often not the cost of education, but making payments on the car and the cost of car insurance, not to mention rent. Public universities are out of step with this changing situation and oblivious to its effects on education. Expensive private colleges have a thing or two to learn as well. The old school days--authoritarian and ascetic--will not come back again.

Not every student enters college with Louis Vuitton footlockers. But the material needs of college life are different now, even for those who live in dorms, even for those without wealthy families. The standard of living has soared beyond clock radios, record players and Tensor lamps. Microwaves are considered necessities, so too, personal refrigerators. CD players and color TVs are a must, plus VCRs for self-help tapes and late-night movies.

In addition to creature comforts, there are expensive study aids. Computers and their accompanying printers have made typewriters obsolete. Some students have their own personal copying machines, many own tape recorders to do the work of lecture notes. Walkmen are ubiquitous, to keep the mind alive between classes or while wandering in libraries. I haven’t mentioned clothes or books.

Students who cannot afford the extracurricular cost of college living understandably feel out of it and, rather than stay out of it, most of them go to work to buy that car and pay that rent and acquire whatever electronics they need. As a result, many students, even on scholarship, work 25 to 40 hours a week to pay for adult living. Those who don’t have to work, thanks to their parents, often hold down a job anyway--to gild the lily they’ve been given. It’s hard to discourage acquisitions when the purpose of higher education is perceived to be the economic advantage it presents. Education then becomes a means, not an end.

Even in high schools, students work long hours after school to buy a car or pay for going to the prom. Once upon a less material time, students brought that money home to share with other family members--rarely, today.

Money matters; time for making money matters. Few hours are left for homework after school, and the squeeze worsens in college, where the bulk of academic preparation is supposed to take place outside class. Jobs come first instead.

Education cannot go back again to the days of parental deans but under the current circumstances it cannot go forward either. The hours students spend at wage-earning work are hours not spent reading or doing schoolwork.

In the University of California, a typical four-credit-unit course is supposed to require 12 hours of homework in a week--that’s 36 hours of homework for a minimum course load. College life is supposed to be--is designed to be--a full-time job. Such is the basis of accreditation. But today’s typical college student only spends a total of 12 hours on homework in a week. That student doesn’t have the time to read, because he or she has to earn and live the life of an adult. Being an adult is hard; ask any single parent who doesn’t go to college.

Banning cars on campus or imposing limits on personal possessions would not dampen acquisitive enthusiasms, especially when so many students come to college later in life. They wouldn’t put up with such authoritarian nonsense. The European solution also wouldn’t work--establishing a separate class between childhood and adulthood, with special restaurants, cafes and services to provide students with a recognized social status of their own. That would require a cultural tradition needing several centuries to cook.

The only sensible thing to do is recognize the reality that students have jobs, to offer classes at night and encourage more students to attend college on a part-time basis. That way, students could take only as much of college as they had time to give. Otherwise, the quality of higher education will continue to erode, as students have insufficient time to study. As things stand now, the time squeeze means that students make do, earning money to live on but earning degrees that in fact require less and less.

California’s Community College System understands the facts of modern student life. Many working students take courses one by one at night. By contrast, the University of California expects students to be full time. Given the hours UC students work at earning wages, the result is an inevitable academic demise, particularly among lower income groups, because they’re the ones who have to work the most.

The cycle of an undereducated, disadvantaged class repeats itself in college. There simply aren’t scholarships enough for school and for living too. Yet part-time students have little place in private colleges. Consequently, lower-income students are pressured, either to compromise their studies to pay for the kind of life their peers enjoy or to avoid the social life of college altogether.

Yes, young adults could always scale back their expectations, students could live like monks. But that seems unlikely in a world where the credit-card firms hustle students in campus cafeterias. Most everyone wants more, from whatever economic class they come; it is better, such people say, to be wealthy than be wise.

The ethos that transforms dorm rooms into model homes makes appearance paramount. This same ethos affects the classroom. Grades matter more than what is learned, just as possessions matter more than what is earned. The bottom of the bottom line is what you’ve got. The same might well be said of faculty, who weigh their publications by the page. So it’s only natural, I suppose, that students often try to reconstruct their academic records when performance in the classroom fades, as if courses were credit cards--bills to be negotiated later.

Recently I found myself, as a temporary dean, listening to a pre-law student pleading his excuse to drop a course long after the established deadline passed. He was sure to get a B-, he complained, or even worse, perhaps a C. Law schools wouldn’t like this. Worse yet, his father might take his car away and he might have to get a job to pay the rent.

I listened sympathetically and promptly turned the kid down cold. The following week a faculty committee heard his case and overrode me. The young man didn’t hold a grudge or gloat. He even waved when he passed me in his Saab as I biked home from work.