I am essentially getting no help from my family to go to college, but am confident that I can pay off the debt once I graduate. However, I’d like to minimize that debt by working while I am in college. How much work is too much in college?
Thanks
20 hours a week is the limit, and healthcare laws won’t allow you anymore as a part-time worker.
I worked 20 hours a week while at community college. It was a really exhausting routine as a STEM major. Luckily I did lab work on campus, so my paycheck was maximized without having to drive elsewhere to a second job. But I was just exhausted most of the time since I sometimes worked 10 hours per day. And getting home was an ordeal since I still had homework to do.
Per week, 20 hours if you have lots of coffee and melatonin, 10 hours if your college expenses aren’t too high.
20 hours is the limit, but I’d say 15 is more comfortable. Or perhaps 10 if you have more than 16 credits or so (I’m working around 10 hours a week with 20 credit hours and a longish commute to school, and that’s about all I can handle).
While you want to help get yourself out of debt, you don’t want to work so much that you start slipping in your classes. One of my friends works like 40+ hours a week between her job at the writing center and her job as a waitress, and she inevitably became quite exhausted. She started skipping class to catch up on homework and sleep and she ended up having to drop a course because she missed too many times to pass (our department has a strict policy).
So, moral of the story is don’t work so much that you can’t keep up with school. Find that sweet spot where you don’t waste tons and tons of free time doing nothing but that you don’t spend all your time working and so have no time for anything else.
Where is anyone getting the 20 hour limit thing from? You can certainly work full time in college and many people do.
Honestly, working ~15 hours a week or so is really only going to pay for your basic day-to-day expenses. Don’t expect it to really contribute at all to your tuition costs. With that said, I wouldn’t really recommend going over 15 hours/week though it is certainly doable.
I am also wondering where the 20 hours a week thing comes from.
I’m a sophomore and I work anywhere from 20-30 hours a week between various jobs. At one point I was babysitting 4-6 hours on a saturday, hosting an 8-10 hour shift sunday and working about 15 hours at a daycare.
Now I’m doing about 20 hours at a daycare and 4-6 hours as a tour guide
How many hours do you think I could work if I wanted to be heavily involved in one or two extracurriculars? 10 hrs per week?
It depends when they meet. I am super involved with campus recruitment, the Organization of Latin American Students, I hold an e-board position for a recruitment club and I volunteer with the community and action committee; it really is all about time management. My job at the daycare assures me that I won’t ever get out of work past 7, and clubs at my school meet weekday nights.
I would recommend starting with 10-12 hours a week for an on campus job, if you can get one (many on campus jobs at my school had a minimum of 12 hours/week, but others could be less). You can adjust up or down as you need. In my opinion, everyone has 10 hours/week for a job, unless you have other commitments like caring for family members or something like that. You’ll figure out quickly if that is too much or too little after your first quarter/semester.
The 20 hour limit is in regards to the new laws regarding labour and the affordable care act, particularly with part time jobs. With a single job, most jobs will keep you at 20 hour hard limit since they’d have to pay you benefits for time worked over. That’s where the limit comes from. If you work more, your employer could owe you benefits.
There’s no limit on working more than 20 hours, especially at multiple jobs. But I was speaking in terms of what’s most likely to be found for work for a college student.
First of all, it is 30 hours a week, not 20 (and ONLY if the company has 50 or more FTE employees). Second of all, WS jobs are excluded.
And yes, most of us who worked that many hours were cobbling jobs together. I usually had 2-4 jobs at a time which equalled roughly 30-50 hours depending on the week.