Paying the Way

By Kathleen Holder

Comparative literature senior Rebecca Miller works 15 to 20 hours a week as a Unitrans bus driver in addition to taking a full course load and managing the Aggie Marching Band-uh!

Miller’s parents paid her student fees and rent for four years up through this spring quarter. “But I’m still on my own for books, power, water, groceries, gas, etc., and all of fall quarter will fall on me, which is why I work,” she said.

She considers herself lucky that her student loans will total only about $5,000 by the time she graduates in December. But she worries about a credit-card debt she incurred last summer and is slowly paying off.

For more students, like Miller, going to college requires that they work as well as study. And more are graduating in debt.

It now costs nearly $70,000 for four years of fees and living expenses. To help cover the costs, 65 percent of UC Davis undergraduates rely on financial aid, said Katy Maloney, associate director of financial aid.

Nationwide, slightly more than half of the funding undergraduates receive comes in the form of loans, up from 41 percent in the early 1980s, according to the College Board. At UC Davis, the average yearly loan award is $4,500. Those loans do not include credit-card debt, which some students may use to cover college expenses.

Most students who don’t receive financial aid rely heavily on their parents. In a recent survey of students who don’t get financial aid, 61 percent said their parents were paying 90 percent or more. At the other end, 20 percent said their parents paid 9 percent or less. The rest fell somewhere in the middle.

In another survey, 54 percent of undergraduates said they work an average of 15.1 hours a week, with nearly twice as many seniors working as first-year students.

Another poll found that, by senior year, 88 percent of students own credit cards, and while most of them paid off their entire balance each month when they were freshmen, only about half continued to do so as seniors.

“I used to say to students, ‘When you get to medical school, you’ll figure out a way to pay for it,” said Janice Morand, an Internship and Career Center coordinator who advises science and health students. “Nowadays, I understand there are people who can’t go to medical school; they get in, but they can’t get a loan because of credit-card debt.”

Miller said about 80 percent of students she knows at UC Davis work while going to school. “I think that it’s nearly impossible to be a middle-class student in 2005 and not have to support yourself to some degree.”

But she added that there is an upside to working. “It gives me a sense of pride to know that, even though I’m still leaning heavily on my parents, the food I eat, the books I read and the light I see by are things that I earned myself.”

Making a difference

Plays well with others

Helicopter parents

Stressed and depressed

A shift to the left

In the spirit

Beyond black and white

Born to be wired

Where’s my job?

Return to introduction

Kathleen Holder is associate editor of UC Davis Magazine. David Owen and Joanna
Robinson contributed to these stories. Photos by Debbie Aldridge and Rachel Van Blankenship.