My student fees were less than $1200 annually, thank you California, my housing was typically $80-125 a month, and I was pretty good at semi-skilled labor like loading and unloading trucks or maintaining crappy student housing, usually for $6 an hour or more. That was a lot of money then.
As a bonus, my grandma sent me $100 a month for food, and popcorn at the movies with a date, whenever I was actually enrolled in school. (My grandma was a hard ass about school, I was the first in her family to attend university, and she expected to make a good show of it, even though I was as bat-shit crazy as she was.) I also got a few grants for textbooks and the like along the way.
I once flunked organic chemistry because I could make too much money cutting o-chem classes Tuesday and Thursday to move furniture. My first hundred dollar working day was moving furniture deep into overtime when I should have been studying o-chem.
My kids had very hefty scholarships but they still graduated from college deep in debt, and the employment they found while in school paid considerably less than what I got in inflation adjusted dollars.
I think college and technical school should be free for anyone at any age. In this modern world of automation and other technological miracles there are simply not enough good paying no-skill and semi-skill jobs to go around. College keeps people out of trouble and has great potential for graduating people who will make the world a much better place, not just the science, medicine, and engineering people, but the language majors, artists, and philosophers too.
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