Droppin' the 'Baum: Paying for college in a dismal job market may not be worth it

For the past two weeks, I’ve been scouring the streets in search of a job. When this goes to print, I will have handed applications and résumés to 26 different businesses.
At a low point last week, I signed up with one of those mystery shopper scams where they “pay” you to report your shopping experiences. Not only did they double charge my debit card for the initiation fee, but I then had to fight with their phone robot for an hour to keep them from billing me 20 bucks a month for their continued “services.”
This isn’t some fancy media stunt. This is desperation, and I’m not alone.
There are 13,000 other students currently streaming into this town, looking for work. This is Missoula, and a river of cheap labor runs through it.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been scouring the streets in search of a job. When this goes to print, I will have handed applications and résumés to 26 different businesses.
At a low point last week, I signed up with one of those mystery shopper scams where they “pay” you to report your shopping experiences. Not only did they double charge my debit card for the initiation fee, but I then had to fight with their phone robot for an hour to keep them from billing me 20 bucks a month for their continued “services.”
This isn’t some fancy media stunt. This is desperation, and I’m not alone.
There are 13,000 other students currently streaming into this town, looking for work. This is Missoula, and a river of cheap labor runs through it.
In my own search, the best offer so far came in at seven bucks an hour. Is that it? Am I the ugly guy at the bachelor auction?
Seven dollars an hour.
I was wondering what a college student could expect to buy with that, and after some careful research, I found that no matter how many hours you work, you can really only get one thing, debt.
Even if you somehow managed to work full-time and go to school full-time, having the Jesus superpower of being 100 percent student and 100 percent employee, you’d still dig yourself into a hole – one you probably wouldn’t emerge from after only three days.
In a year of working full-time with no vacations, no sick days and no taxes, at seven bucks an hour you’d earn $14,560. But as the UM Financial Aid Office figures, this year’s cost of attendance will be $16,606 for residents. If that number is right, you’ll actually have $2,000 less than when you started. And assuming tuition and fees don’t go up (ha!), you’d only owe $8,184 at graduation.
Now if you’re an out-of-stater, you may not want to read any further because this is going to hurt.
Working under the same conditions and pay as before, you’ll be looking at over $52,000 worth of debt if you can graduate in four years.
You might as well just quit college, get out of Missoula and find yourself a decent paying job. With the $108,000 you’d save (the projected attendance cost for out-of-state students at $27,000 a year), you could buy an acre of Caribbean beachfront property in Mexico. You could just disappear, spending the rest of your days lounging on the beach and playing Internet poker if funds started to run low. That, or you could spend the next ten years paying off student loans.
Trying to afford college wasn’t always like this. I’ve heard plenty of parents tell me tales of how they worked their way through college debt free – and that was back in 1980 when the minimum wage was only $3.10 an hour.
A lot has changed since 1980. Sure minimum wage doubled, but tuition costs at UM have exploded by more than 1,000 percent, while mandatory fees rose by over 700 percent.
According to the Financial Aid Office, if the federal minimum wage kept up with college tuition and mandatory fees, it would be illegal to for employers to pay anything less than $25.19 per hour. When you look at it like that, seven bucks feels like a stout kick to the groin.
But cheer up. Wipe that fevered look of impending doom off your face and put some ice on your gonads. Call Gov. Brian Schweitzer. He is in Helena right now fighting for a two-year freeze on rising tuition costs — that is if he’s not still gladhanding at the Democratic National Convention. If we can only get him to extend the freeze out to 28 years, maybe minimum wage will catch up, and our kids will be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just like dear old mom and dad.
alexander.tenenbaum@umontana.edu