An Alternate "College Experience"
It’s Friday evening in Pullman and the week long anticipation starts breaking out. Music starts playing all over College Hill and within the next few hours most frats and bars will be packed. For most students this is the start of the weekend ritual. Maybe a fun night out on Friday, the football game on Saturday, and a balance of studying and recuperating is left for Sunday. For Conner Donovan, Friday is the transition from his school week to his work week. He dresses in all black and goes to his first eight hour shift, waiting and busing tables. He’ll have at least two more of these shifts by the end of the weekend.
Donovan’s situation is representative of many students who come to Pullman without the financial help of their parents. It’s his first semester here and he is already what many students hope to one day be: financially independent. Of course for a 22 year old who has only worked minimum wage jobs, college tuition is only attainable through the help of financial aid and loans. The problem is that FAFSA, or the free application for student aid, will not consider him as an independent from his parents. This means that he gets no federal grants and is only offered loans. This semester he took out the first loan of $5,500, but he will have to take our more loans in coming semesters for the next four years.
“It’s a daunting experience,” says Conner, “the whole time I feel like I’m juggling between work and school and if I mess up either of them, I either won’t have money for rent or my loans could be cut.” In 2009 the research group Public Agenda published a study that cited “an inability to balance work and school” as the most reported reason for young adults that drop out of college. The study stated that almost three quarters of students who graduated had a household income of over $35,000 while more than half of the dropouts had an income below $35,000. These students are not represented in the college brochures and, in a college town such as ours, it’s easy to forget that they even exist.
This can lead to what many would consider a worst-case scenario, thousands of dollars in loans without a degree to show for it. This is currently the case for Zack Water’s, a W.S.U. student who lost his grants and is now working a minimum wage job with $10,000 of student loans that he has already had to start paying back.
Waters explains that he lost his grant because he “messed up one semester, and then retook the classes [he] did bad on the next semester.” Waters was receiving the cost tuition from the FAFSA and taking loans to cover all of his expenses. He didn’t meet the requirement for total credits in a year, a requirement that he claims to not have fully understood.
Waters still lives in Pullman and intends on completing his degree but is having a hard time going back to school. He believes that he can easily appeal to FAFSA for more loans and grants, but says that he’s hesitant. When he returns to school he wants to keep working to help with his expenses, but he knows that if he messes up again his current situation could become a permanent one. He’s also expressed interest in online classes, saying that it might be a lot easier to fit into a work schedule.
Mark Grinell, another W.S.U. student who works while getting his degree, says that this has worked a lot better for him. Mark moved to Pullman in 2013 after going to Bellevue College. He wanted what he describes as “the full college experience” and so he joined a frat and became a full time student. He also got a job at Southside Cafe, along with $7,600 in loans a year to help cover tuition. Grinell believes that he could be getting a full grant from the government but he cannot file as an independent, despite the fact that he supports himself.
“The frat would get frustrated that I wasn’t involved enough” he explains “and work would accommodate for classes but not for Greek events.” He found himself making work the priority because he needed to pay his monthly expenses and because of this he would take shifts that conflicted with classes. He would try to make up for this during any time he had off, “if you ask anyone from the frat, they’ll tell you that I was the person who was in the study rooms the most. I just couldn’t keep up.” In the end he got kicked out of the frat for not attending events and put on academic probation because of low grades.
He moved back to the Westside because it was easier to find work and he had people that could help him a lot more than here. By the end of 2014 he was enrolled full time as an online student. During his last semester in Pullman his G.P.A. was a 1.9, in the last three online semesters he has averaged a 3.7. He says that this is because he can study on his own time and that it’s easier to find well paid work closer to Seattle, so he doesn’t have to work as much.
Yet, to some extent, all of their college experiences are limited compared to what they could be. All three of these students said that Pullman offered a more complete college experience and Donovan says that he’d love to get more involved in extracurriculars, but that time and cost is keeping him from doing so. They also all said that they wish FAFSA was more flexible and clear. The process doesn’t consider those under 23 who don’t get help from their parents and still is overly bureaucratic. The financial aid department helped them but they all stated that FAFSA should require meetings with a loan supervisor every semester.
But more than anything they all conveyed the same point, that the cost of university is crippling and part-time minimum wage jobs don’t cover expenses. While in Pullman, their priorities were on working to cover their monthly expenses and not on school. Meanwhile, all of them dreaded the prospect of being thousands of dollars in debt for a degree they didn’t finish.
Sources:
Conner Donovan
(425) 894-2071
Mark Grinell
425 736 1567
Zack Waters
206 313 9553
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