With the cost-of-living surging and families hard-pressed to make ends meet, there is a growing disparity between aspiration and reality, and this is influencing college students. For generations now, parents have urged their young to go to college and get a degree. After all, everyone else has one, so if a young person wants to compete on a level playing field, they must be similarly equipped.
The trouble is, the Bank of Mom and Dad is under pressure like never before, and students are finding out for themselves just why this is. The student loan, one of the pillars of the education system, is a fact of life that makes the college years possible, even if it must be faced head-on when college is through, and employment beckons. What students are finding, though, is that they are having to scrimp and scrape just to survive.
Take the cost of books. Many young people have never read a book for pleasure but for college they must read them whether they like it or not. Because they may never have bought one before, the cost comes as a shock. There are alternatives, though. The online world, in which they have frolicked while their elders raised an uncomprehending eyebrow, does offer electronic versions of books, including many that are on the curriculum, but they’re not free of charge.
Yes, the world is saving on paper and ink, but publishers still reserve the right to make money, and the trouble is, unlike a physical book, electronic ones can’t be borrowed so easily. There may be ways around this, and the technologically astute probably can’t believe that everybody’s not doing it, but the fact remains that publishers are no fools and the online systems such as Kindle, etc. give them the ability to control sharing.
That fine old institution, the public library, badly hit by the tech revolution, may be able to help here, and many do have an online reading facility. As a welcome side effect, the median age of library users is falling for this reason. An additional problem for students is when actual printed books are required. Then they absolutely do have to be bought, but again there are options, in this case getting used books.
Colleges may have stocks of old books and newspapers gratefully turfed out by graduates and destined to be recirculated among the new intake, complete with scribbled notes and underlining. If what a student needs are not available through the college, there is always the vast contemporary marketplace that is the social media group. Whatever you need, someone somewhere has got it.
With the educational chunk of the grant ripped from the student’s bank account, they then face the daily grind of feeding themselves. When such basics as cooking oil, vegetables and herbs and spices can be alarmingly expensive, it is little wonder the take-out or delivery option is still so popular. Health and nutrition hardly get a look in when hunger and speed are calling the shots. Even if a student were in favor of cooking, their low-budget accommodation probably doesn’t have the greatest facilities, so in addition to their fledgling skills, they may have to contend with cheap cooking pans that tend to burn food no matter how careful you are, plus a raggedy old collection of flimsy, inadequate utensils that hardly help the quality control process.
Getting a credit card may seem like an unlikely consideration for students, given their lack of income, but with all these things to buy, how are they expected to pay? And when the online world is their preferred supplier, a credit or debit card is not just desirable but essential. You can choose an option for making repayments more manageable with favorable rates and there are comparison sites where the relative merits of different credit cards are spelled out, so students can weigh up their options and choose the best card for their needs.
So with this list of hidden financial challenges growing at an exponential rate, what does the future look like for students? The truth is that no-one knows as the rising costs of inflation is forcing students into uncharted territory. The only thing we are sure of right now is more borrowing, higher interest rates and a steady rise in inflation.