My son will turn 20 this spring. He’s finishing up his second year of community college and planning to transfer to a 4-year university this fall. His grades are pretty good; it took him a while to figure out how hard he needed to work and how to study efficiently. Now he’s making As and Bs consistently.
He plans to study business, and - being handsome, a sharp dresser, and persuasive - will probably end up in sales or marketing, unless he unexpectedly falls in love with finance or something. His experience in low-end retail has opened his eyes to what jobs he can expect without education in a practical field!
He previously worked as a lifeguard, about 40 hours a week. Since he started this job last August, he’s consistently worked 20-30 hours a week.
Congratulations to him. I presume the lifeguard work was basically a summer job as opposed to a year round job, correct?
And as for his work in community college, I think that we are now seeing much more people go to community colleges and it is becoming a much smarter decision. Now, working 20-30 hours a week can cover all one’s expenses at a community college. Nowadays, if a student is living away from home, working 20-30 hours a week even in most state schools covers maybe a small fraction of the combined cost of tuition, living expenses and other fees. I might have considered community colleges an option when I was in high school, but my fellow millennials and their baby boomer parents had this mindset that you simply have to have the best college possible and go into any kind of debt necessary to get it. Ideas like starting at a community college or alternating between semesters of work and school or working while taking night classes - these were never considered options for a second (actually, taking night classes to get your degree is often not an option period, the majority of colleges and grad/med/law schools simply do not give you the option of working while taking night classes, for various possible reasons).