School Work : Think college is a party? Get real. Rising fees and a no-nonsense attitude mean more time on the job.

What’s the point of going to school, if you have no time to be a student?

The thought must cross Joe Ponce’s mind as he stands amid the din of UCLA’s Cooperage cafeteria, wearing a blue work apron.

He loves to play basketball, and his student fees help keep the nearby rec center courts open. “But they close before I get off,” he says.

He wouldn’t have time to play anyway. After serving pizza and scrubbing pots, he’s got studying to do and an early class the next day.

Big deal, some say, he ought to learn the value of money. Working one’s way through college is an honorable tradition.

But it’s tougher than ever. While the price of burgers and books has tripled in the past two decades, minimum wage has barely doubled. Students must put in longer hours just to tread water.

Add to that the relative decline of grant funding and the burden of ballooning educational costs--UC Irvine fees, for example, are $4,049.50 for the year, more than six times the 1974 cost--and it’s easy to see why some students are sinking under the load.

Still, many students say they would rather pay as they go--and forgo running for student office, debating philosophy late into the night or playing basketball. Worried about their earning potential in an uncertain job market, they minimize debt by working long hours.

“It used to be a different ethic,” says a UCLA graduate student who was a freshman in the early ‘80s. “Today, students are less concerned about a growing experience.”

Ponce, a 21-year-old English major and aspiring teacher, rushes to the cafeteria after class and works until 8:30 p.m., then drives to the one-bedroom apartment he shares with two others to study. The alarm rings too soon for an 8 a.m. class. He takes three courses, a full load under UCLA’s quarter system, logs 21 hours--at $7.50 per--in the cafeteria and wedges in six more as a tutor each week. He needs to work more, he says.

Ponce gets grants that cover most of his fees. But even though he scrimps and saves, bills outpace his income. So, like many of his peers, he has made up the difference with student loans--$10,000 worth. And, when those weren’t enough, he rang up $3,000 on plastic--also a growing trend.

A junior, he is a little more than halfway to his degree.

“I don’t know how many units I’ve got, or how many I’ve got to go. But I just want to get out,” Ponce says in a tired voice swallowed by the clatter of the Cooperage. “I can’t afford it.”

More comfortable with her lot is Christine Cabiling, a 19-year-old sophomore biology student at UCI. Cabiling, a full-time student who lives in an apartment adjacent to the campus, works 13 hours a week in the UCI student center’s Anthill Bar and Grill and in P.V. Cues, a recreation center.

Her time behind the counters doesn’t cut into her study time, she says.

“The bosses on campus are really good about it,” she says. “If you really have to study, they work your schedule around that. They put studying first.”

Cabiling says she has heard, however, that off-campus bosses are not so forgiving.

“I think that would be a different story,” she says.

Cabiling is one of many students whose family incomes are high enough to preclude financial aid, but who still feel the monetary pinch. She says she uses her income from her campus jobs to pay her utility bills and “other living expenses--extra money for necessities like food and clothes and shoes.”

The majority of UC undergraduates work, and their hours on the job have been steadily increasing. Since the UC President’s Office began studying the trend in 1979, median hours have climbed more than 20%, to 17.6 per week.

Ten percent work more than 25 hours a week.

Campuses nationwide report similar findings, says Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, who has studied the issue.

Public school officials are quick to point out that financial aid has risen along with fee increases. That tends to help the poorer students, but those from middle-class families receive only self-help aid--loans and work-study--not cash grants. As a result, students whose parents make $30,000 to $60,000 work longer hours--a median 18.8-hour week--than their richer or poorer peers, according to the same UC study.

An increase in such self-help aid has created a “perverse incentive” for colleges to raise tuition, says Patrick Callan, director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, an independent think tank in San Jose.

This fall, UCI’s tuition increased nearly 10% from 1993-94.

“Colleges have been trying to justify raising tuition,” he says. “They’re not interested in hearing how tough it is for kids to go to school.”

He also says colleges and universities have avoided studying the impact of work on students’ intellectual and personal growth. “More and more, we are changing the ground rules without any discussion,” he says.

But Dennis Galligani, a UC assistant vice provost, says an upswing in graduation and retention rates suggests work habits are a non-issue.

“One would assume that we have more dropouts because of the economy,” Galligani says. “But the data show that students are persisting and getting through.” And, he adds, loans are available to qualified students who don’t want to work. “It’s an individual choice.”

Many struggling students, particularly those at community colleges, say they would much rather keep their full-time jobs than cut back on their hours enough to qualify for financial aid.

Darren McDowell, 27, is studying criminology at Los Angeles Southwest College while working at Northrop. He attends classes in the morning, then drives a forklift from 4 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. “It’s kind of hectic studying,” he says. But financial aid is not an option. “I make too much money.”

Margarete Allen, a Cal State Northridge graduate student, says she has noticed a growing work ethic among young people. She went straight to a job out of high school in 1964 and theorizes that, as women began trading home for the workplace, families came to accept, even to expect, that children would do the same.

“When I was in high school, the students who worked were considered the boneheads--not college material. Now they’re all expected to work,” she says. “It used to be that students were students. Now everybody does two things.”

Not Mark Earhart. He does four.

He studies business administration at Cal State Northridge, works as a file clerk 25 hours a week at Kaiser hospital in Panorama City, has an internship with Fox TV and referees football games on weekends.

What amounts to a 37-hour workweek has led to worse grades than he might have gotten otherwise, he says, but he will trade A’s for the sense of security a job brings. Besides, he enjoys spending money.

Earhart wishes he had worked less and gone into debt to buy a full college experience at a private college, he says. Then quickly adds: “I guess it would depend on how long it would take to pay it off--on how much I could have made when I got out. I didn’t want that (debt) hanging over my head while I was trying to establish a career and a family.”

*

Hal Pruett, director of student psychological services at UCLA, has watched rising prices translate into higher stress on campus. Over the past 10 years, and particularly over the past five, complaints of depression, anxiety disorders, relationship problems and inability to concentrate have multiplied.

“They don’t come in saying, ‘I’m working too much,’ ” he says, but it isn’t hard to figure out.

Many also suffer from lack of sleep, either because they are too busy or too worried about deadlines or finances.

Time-management and stress-reduction techniques may help, but some anxieties persist. “At one time, students were confident that a job awaited them after graduation,” Pruett says. “But now futures are uncertain.”

As vice president of the National Sleep Foundation, Mary Carskadon knows where students find the time to do more and more. Although sleep deprivation has been linked to heart disease, automobile accidents, even the Exxon Valdez oil spill, busy students don’t seem to worry about it.

Carskadon, a Brown University psychology professor, sees a macho attitude toward lack of sleep. “You never hear students brag about how late they slept or how much sleep they got,” she says. “It does become a point of honor to be getting less.”

But sacrificing sleep for studying may be a bad idea. When the body is in a “low ebb,” such cognitive functions as memory operate at reduced capacity.

After a freshman year spent nodding off in early classes, Ponce tries to get at least five or six hours each night, at the expense of study time.

And his busy schedule ultimately does more than shave points off his GPA. It keeps him in school longer. “If I had more time to study, I would be a fourth-year senior, instead of a fourth-year junior,” he says.

*

Experts are uncertain how much work is too much. According to a national study by Alexander Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, student performance slips slightly as work hours top 10 per week and clearly suffers with 20 or more on the job.

Astin says those in the workplace for long hours score lower in everything from graduation rates to grade-point averages to satisfaction with the college experience.

Curiously, a number of studies, including Astin’s, also indicate that students with a moderate work schedule, say 10 or fewer hours per week, do better than those who don’t work at all. A part-time job, preferably on campus, can be a good thing, honing time-management skills and offering peer interaction--”the single most important influence on a student,” Astin says.

“If you’re hanging out with your peers a lot and they’re talking about attending graduate school, you’re going to be much more likely to attend yourself,” he says.

But the Astin study does not distinguish among types of jobs or types of peer interaction. It is unclear whether an on-campus job slinging burgers is better than an off-campus one.

Nick Peters, 22, manages four restaurants on the campus of his alma mater, Stanford University. He never applied for financial aid, he says, because he thought his parents’ income made him ineligible. But because they had two other children to educate, Peters had to help pay his way.

Holding a college job as a restaurant manager was an invaluable experience, he says, offering a challenge that led to a career. “A lot of what you’re learning here is how to deal with people, how to communicate your ideas,” he says of his overall academic experience. “A job is just an addendum to your education.”

But, he warns, some students get so carried away with work they forget why they’re in college. “Especially with some of the professors well-connected with Bay Area entrepreneurs, you can find yourself with a lot of power at a young age, and the academic side kind of loses it,” Peters says.

Graduate teaching assistants at UCLA say work clearly interferes with some students’ performances. To help, many allow student workers to switch to already full evening classes, leaving daytime classrooms cold and lonely. Some assistants also report giving failing students extensions on assignments--or even passing grades.

Rather than await the outcome of students’ conflicting allegiances to work and school, the faculty of Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., adopted the Hamline Plan. It seeks to integrate student working experiences into lectures and discussions, leading to such course titles as “Cultural Perspectives in the Workplace,” in the anthropology department, and “The Helping Professional at Work,” taught by a psychologist.

Dean Jerry Greiner says the program, up and running for eight years, was designed to attract those who want a liberal arts education and a job. The students, he says, “aren’t just interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

While the UC system isn’t planning any curriculum changes, Regent Ward Connerly says, it is trying to create more student job opportunities, courting private business for internships and encouraging administrators to fill more campus jobs with students. The regents have also discussed raising admissions standards to reduce enrollment--and the demand for financial aid.

Meanwhile, barring drastic change, many young people will continue their dual lives as students and employees. And whether work adds to or detracts from their college experience will depend on the individual.

For USC’s Erin La Combe, 21, who gave sororities and football games a try but found them uninspiring, the chance to work is a blessing. Internships and research jobs have given her a jump on the career track.

But for UCLA junior Audrey Wong, 20, who was on her high school volleyball and track teams as well as the student council, a job in the Cooperage is a necessary evil. “I wish I could work less, but you have to pay those bills,” she says.

Although Ponce would have liked more time for basketball and academics, the soon-to-be fifth-year senior is just grateful to be in college.

“I’m glad to be in school and to be able to pay for everything, or, at least, borrow to pay for everything.”