Exorbitant tuition costs mean massive decisions loom

    It’s that time of year. Throughout the country, 17- and 18-year-olds will soon be expected to make some pretty major choices about their futures. Early decision deadlines for many colleges will be here in November, and even those students who are waiting for traditional application deadlines will need to decide soon.
    All at once, they’re asked to consider where they would like to live, what field they want to study, whether they’ll live in dorms or not, what they’ll do for meals. And the resulting price tag can easily be well over $100,000 to get a four-year degree.
    For just about anything else, the idea of a teenager dropping a hundred grand on a purchase seems ludicrous. Think about a high school senior buying a Dodge Viper or two-bedroom house or an established pizzeria.
    Of course, students go to college with the expectation that they will earn more with a degree than without, so  it’s an investment. But $100,000 is a lot of money, and a decision to spend it — even on college — isn’t made lightly.
    
Paying for college isn’t as easy as it used to be
    Parents and other adults who are basing their college advice on their own experiences may be surprised by how much things have changed in the last 40, 30 or even just 20 years.
    In 1978, one could earn $5,512 in a year of full-time (40 hours per week), federal-minimum-wage work. A year of tuition, room and board at a public institution averaged $1,994. That’s 36 percent of the annual earnings, meaning a student who worked 15 hours every week or who fit in 19 weeks of full-time work during school breaks could pay their tuition. Even the $4,514 average for private colleges wasn’t completely out of reach.
    In 1988, annual earnings went up to $6,968, while public colleges were up to an average of $4,274. At 61 percent of the earnings, tuition could still be paid by working 25 hours each week throughout the year. By that point in time, however, the private college average had far surpassed annual earnings at $11,189.
    In 1998 and 2008, annual earnings remained higher than the public institutions’ average, but that gap was narrowing at 66 percent and then 90 percent.
    By 2013, average tuition had surpassed what one could make by working an entire year at the federal minimum wage. The prospect of a young adult being able to pay their way through college by simply working concurrently with their studies became little more than a distant memory.
    To be fair, there are currently 29 states that have a higher hourly minimum wage than what is federally mandated. Colorado is one of them, at $10.20 right now and set to be $12 by 2020. Even so, in the most recent school year, undergraduate tuition, room and board at a public university averaged $18,390 (and $44,820 for private ones). Working full-time at Colorado’s minimum wage would earn a person $21,216 in a year. Historically, however, tuition has gone up much more steadily than minimum wage has, so students shouldn’t expect annual earning potential to stay above public college costs for long.
    Even while annual earning potential remains higher than annual tuition, it can be a challenge for a student to find a job that fits their needs. Is it 40 hours each week? Are the hours compatible with a class schedule? Do transportation costs need to be taken into consideration? Can tuition be paid in installments throughout the year or does it need to be paid all at once before the school year begins? It may be necessary to defer enrollment for a year to work and save up money beforehand.
    All of which is to say that high schoolers may need to do some serious planning ahead if they hope to work to pay for college outright.

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