Tales of Tuition

--Madeleine Brand

We reported today that parents are having trouble paying for college in this economy. The average tuition for a four-year private college: $23,000. And that's before room and board.

How do you pay for it? Are you taking out loans? Is it more difficult to get a loan now? Did you have to tell your kid, "Sorry, we can't afford your top choice?" Students: are you working to help pay for your schooling?

Tell us your story; these Day to Day team members did: Jason DeRose told us about being paid to go to church while in college. Heather Murphy shares the story of a a work study that involved the occasional "machine gun" and burning jacket. We even got Day to Day Executive Producer Deborah Clark to share this brief recollection of her own work-study: (Call it Trouble with Truffles.)

For a very brief period -- and by brief, I mean MAYBE two weeks -- I had worked for a woman who made truffles. My job was to take the orders that had come in, sprinkle chocolate powder on the requested sweets, pack them delicately into boxes and ship them out. Completely boring AND I don't really like chocolate. (This is not so much an active dislike as more a "if chocolate disappeared off the face of the earth I wouldn't care" kind of thing.) But that was all rather moot, as I managed to get myself fired within a couple of weeks by calling in sick twice. One sick day was real, and one involved a previous obligation I didn't want to miss and hadn't negotiated out of ahead of time.

Just out of curiosity, I just checked to see if her business still exists. It does, so I guess she survived without me. But my disinterest in chocolate endures 20 years later.

Thanks, Deborah! But what about you? How did you pay for school?

Tags: call out | education

12:21 PM ET | 10- 2-2008 | permalink

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