That’s how it worked for me. I opened a separate savings account just for my financial aid payment so I could transfer a fixed monthly amount into checking for all my bills and expenses. That reduced the risk of losing track and going over budget.
There is an issue that they usually cap the additional amount you can borrow for housing/food, so if that figure doesn’t accurately reflect the cost of living in the city where your school is you could run into issues. I really wish it had occurred to me to get food stamps while I was in college. They aren’t that hard to get in Oregon and I easily would have qualified. Instead I went into a lot more credit card debt than I should have when I had trouble finding work over the summer. The financial aid and loans I had for the school year did not easily stretch to cover 12 months, but $200/month in food assistance would have saved me $7200 in debt across 3 years as a full time student. Growing up as a middle class kid I never even realized that kind of assistance would have been available to me even though my family’s financial situation had changed a lot.
Universities are in an obscene arms race to build more and more lavish facilities to lure students precisely because they want to tap those student loans. It’s ridiculous. My school recently tore down my dorm to replace it with one that’s easily 2-3 times the size. Still gonna be about the same amount of people living there, but they’re gonna have rooms and facilities that are designed to get kids to sign up to live there. (And, believe me, there’s no shortage of people applying every year, so it’s not like they’re trying to lure students in general). God forbid you live in a cramped room with a hot plate, warming up ramen, anymore.
I’ve got a friend in grad school and she has a fucking student loan app that lets her get more and more money with a few taps. It’s obscene. She hates to use it, but she has little choice because grad school and living in Seattle is so damn expensive.
The damn thing is turning into a giant, credit swap-like bubble. There’s absolutely no restraint on the growth.
You’re assuming they can GET enough on that portion of the loan, too.
(It’s also becoming an issue in the UK, since student living costs are rising far much more sharply than the government loan portion for that…and there’s basically no way to get other loans as an undergrad here, and in fact Universities have had to cut over 90% of the financial aid THEY could give to students beyond the government loans…)
I think this might be the way to go: though the article stated some students were denied because they didn’t work enough or were considered dependents, I don’t think enough students realize food stamps are a legitimate option because of their upbringing (or are too proud/stubborn to accept them, but not much can be done in that scenario). Ideally schools would stop inflating their rates so damn much, but we all know that isn’t going to happen.
What I have learned about USA, is that when people is angry or sufficient discontent, he walk to the desert and die there. Apparently, theres a big “outback”, where the Usanities sent their unhappy people. So no problem is ever fixed. And theres huge mountains of dessicated bodies piling somewhere. USA can’t solve his problems, even the simple ones.
If you can’t secure the level of loans needed to subsist, you should be looking at a cheaper college option. Yes, the cost of higher education has gone up astronomically. But, this story isn’t about that directly, is it? Rather, it’s about students who can’t pay for food because they are either scrimping for reasons that aren’t sound (e.g., avoiding a few more % of loans) or are stretching further than is reasonable (e.g., in their school choice).
College students who can’t pay for food are not in the same position as a minimum wage family. The first is, to a large degree, a matter of choice.
Ya, as I said previously… I can totally understand how trying to support a family is virtually impossible, if not literally impossible, on a minimum wage job.
But living as a college student? That is absolutely doable… I’m not so old that the world is dramatically different from when I graduated.
As a college student, you simply do not need that much money to survive. Food is not expensive. Rent is not prohibitively expensive, as long as you have room mates.
I’d need to know more about the specifics of these students who need to go to a food bank before I was willing to accept that they aren’t just doing something stupid.
Seriously, you can eat well on a few dollars a day. That’s like ONE hour of work at a minimum wage job. You can eat POORLY for less than a dollar.
Rent + Food + Utilities + Transport (because living next to college campuses is more expensive) + Second hand books in NYC (where I lived) can get very expensive very fast. Rent is pretty crazy unless you start commuting 1+ hours, and that eats your work + school time. Maybe if you work 8 hours a day you could scrap by, but that’s not always compatible with getting a degree (depends on the degree).
Add to that other extra expenses you might have (buy a new computer, for example, if you are studying CS and because you work you can not use Campus computers at convenient hours) and I can see it being unmanageable…
I do agree that (sadly) it’s a matter of choice for the individuals involved, but minimum wage does not always guarantee a bearable living standard, specially when on top of work you need to do school work.
There’s a very obvious way this bubble pops, though. Sadly it involves many, many people filing for insolvency… If loans are rising faster than salaries (and it does seem they are) I think that’s where this is heading.
Yeah, but the thing is that while those other costs could potentially add up, they don’t really change the fact that it only costs a college student a fairly trivial amount of money to eat.
I dunno, I just think about how I lived in college. 3 of us lived in an apartment that probably should have been condemned, and we basically lived like paupers. It was actually part of the reason why I went into industry instead of going to grad school… because I wanted to earn some real money and not live like a person in a third world country.
I’d just be curious to see what kinds of stuff these folks are spending their money on.
Is this like those criticizing welfare recipients for daring to have one luxury item? “You paupers shouldn’t have your iPhones and tablets and laptops; suffer like I did!” Except you pretty much can’t be a college student without a smartphone and laptop/tablet. In fact, most schools require a laptop, at least, and presumably books still cost ludicrous amounts of money, though maybe everything is an eBook nowadays and cheaper… haha, right.
(You do realize you’re just doing the standard “back in my day” shit, right? Your parents probably didn’t have to go to school to secure a great paying job in multiple fields that also paid them a lavish pension after retirement, so you were probably being a slacker and wasting money with your schooling. The employment world has radically changed in the last decade.)
But those things required by the school would generally be covered under the student loan.
But yes, generally I do feel that luxury items should be cut from one’s budget prior to turning to charity. At least, that’s what I would choose to do.
For instance, when I was in school, I chose to eat crappy food like Ramen on a regular basis, so I could then spend that money on other shit. This is how the world works. I guess some folks don’t like that. Oh well, whatever I guess. I don’t see such an idea as some kind of terrible thing. For me, perosnally, I would rather do without luxury stuff if it means I am less dependent upon others.
But I’m not simply doing the “back in my day” shit. Because I actually go to the grocery store TODAY. I know how much food costs. The stuff I ate in college is still cheap to the point where you can eat for a few dollars a day.
The amount you can get for non-tuition won’t change significantly though. All your plan does is mean going to a less-reputable University. The only way to avoid the issue of being offered insufficient loans for the non-tuition portion is not to go, or to go to a community college part time and work - some “choice”. (Forget the decent Universities as someone poor, blah blah…)
(In the UK, same deal - and almost every university charges the same anyway, ~$14k/year)
Timex - Except Student Loans non-tuition portions are not expanding to cover them, and people from poor families don’t have them - but they’re mandatory for modules, etc. And you have access to a cheap grocery store - that in itself can’t be assumed in America. (Should Universities be ensuring those are available near student dorms? Yes)
But I’m not simply doing the “back in my day” shit. Because I actually go to the grocery store TODAY. I know how much food costs. The stuff I ate in college is still cheap to the point where you can eat for a few dollars a day.
Except everyone knows just how bad that food is for you.
I dunno, saying, “You should eat sustenance food because, damnit, I did” smacks of get-off-my-lawn-ism old man-ism. Shouldn’t we want a better world in the future? Is suffering a key part of the college experience?
Eh, kinda?
I mean, I dunno really… living like a poor college student kind of IS a thing… On some level, I think I benefited from experiencing it.
And eating Ramen isn’t gonna kill ya. But honestly, you can actually eat GOOD FOOD for only a few dollars a day. This is probably something that a lot of college students may not actually know, but it’s absolutely a fact. Real, wholesome food is actually not expensive at all. It’s dramatically less expensive than pre-packaged food, which tends to be bad for you.
I cook pretty much every night now, and I learned most of those skills while in college, because we were broke and couldn’t really afford to get takeout much. But you could scrape together a few bucks and buy enough fresh food to feed the whole house. And it was generally a good, communal experience.
Honestly, the unwillingness or inability for folks to cook food like that is a big problem for folks… because if you don’t know how to cook at all, and aren’t interested in learning how to, then food is more expensive… and it’s also less healthy for you.
I’m having a hard time with someone saying eating Ramen every day in college is a beneficial experience, then in the next paragraph bemoaning the fact that people don’t cook their own nutritious delicious meals in college.
Well, we absolutely did eat Ramen all the time… we’d buy those huge pallets of ramen, where each one was like 7 cents.
But the thing is, regular food like produce was also super cheap… And we bought cheap food. Hell, you can actually take ramen, and add other stuff, and then have food which is ACTUALLY REAL FOOD.
And like I said, we cooked a lot… I personally did a lot of it, because I enjoyed it.
I’m just pointing out though that you don’t actually need to eat food that will kill you via malnutrition in order to live on a few dollars a day. I think I’m more aware of the nutritional aspect now than I was in college though… generally in college, the reason we cooked food instead of literally just eatting ramen every day with nothing else, was because eventually you got sick of ramen.
Not explicitly. Loans are generally granted for the amount of tuition, and then students can opt to take out more for living expenses. It isn’t baked in to the cost. For most students this is their first experience with actual, real world budgeting and having to figure out costs for a whole semester/year upfront is asking more of them than most adults are capable of – and that’s assuming they’re offered that much in loans.
You’re working on the assumption that all students have access to a full kitchen with cookware and storage which is a very lofty assumption. Part of the reason ramen is so popular is because you only need a microwave, water, and a bowl which can be stored damn near anywhere.
Again, this strikes me as a “no one can possibly be hungry in America, because crap food is cheap” thread now. I’ve heard that one before. With strong accents of “the poor in America aren’t really poor even though I’m not trying to live on their income,” which is another tune I’ve heard before. Not just limited to college students. And yet we know we do have hunger here in the US. My best guess is that someone who makes such an argument doesn’t really know what the hungry are going through, or what their real choices are.
I’ve never priced Ramen, so I don’t know what it costs now, or what it cost then. I have my doubts that Timex has seriously priced Ramen recently unless he’s eating Ramen now, but it’s hard to argue this decisively since I’ve not priced it recently either. Why would I? All I can say is it’s easy to get a vague, but wrong, impression of prices if you’re not looking in earnest.
What I do know is I paid $15 / week for food back in the 80’s, and pay $50 now. I have trouble understanding how any pre-prepared food can be cheaper than buying ingredients and cooking, but again, I haven’t taken a hard look at the cheapest of prepared foods. Of course, college students generally don’t have stoves or pots and pans, so they can’t save money preparing food.
