By: Dustin Summers

There’s a romanticized ideal that is as common to college movies as toga parties and overwrought fraternity presidents.  Picture the hard working student who juggles multiple part-time jobs.  These characters are usually featured dashing to an exam through the falling leaves of some quad in full autumn bloom.  Just as the door to the lecture hall begins to close, these out of breath students arrive in the nick of time to ace their exam.

But how accurate is this portrayal today with issues of college affordability plaguing the young people of America?  Could a college student in 2012 really finance a degree by:

• Picking up graveyard shifts at Applebee’s?
• Delivering pizzas?
• Snapping the occasional picture of a masked superhero?

Or is this just a plot point as implausible as Elle Woods getting into Harvard Law? Let’s take a serious look.

Rudy  (1993)

Premise: Sean Astin plays lil’ Rudy Ruettiger who stubbornly refuses to give up on his boyhood dream of playing football for the Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish. Rudy didn’t enter college directly after high school.  He waited approximately 3 years, and in the interim, he worked as a steel mill hand in Joliet, Illinois.

The $$ Matters: 

• Today the average salary of a steel mill worker in Joliet is $35,000 according to Simplyhired.com.
  •  That’s roughly $17.50 an hour assuming you get 2 weeks off for vacation and sick days.

• In 2013, the annual tuition at Notre Dame will be $42,971.

To finance your education, you’d have to work about 50 hours a week on top of your class schedule, study time, and long brooding evenings hugging your letterman’s jacket in your dorm room.

Rounders (1998)

Premise: Matt Damon pays his way through law school by playing No Limit Hold ‘Em in sleazy underworld poker clubs.

The $$ Matters: 

• The average salary for a poker player in New York City (where the movie is set) is $30,000.  The tuition costs for CUNY School of Law (my best guess as to where Damon’s character was enrolled) is $13,000 a year.

• This scenario is at least mathematically feasible, until you consider rent in NYC, food and the very real possibility of blowing your bankroll when an opponent slow plays a full house. 

Spiderman 2 (2004)

Premise: Peter Parker works through college by moonlighting as a freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle where he develops a knack for sporadically capturing the arachnid-esque hero en route to a looming disaster.

The $$ Matters:

• Most freelance journalism jobs have a low pay rate of around 10 cents per word or 75 cents per picture.  Although this movie made close to a billion dollars, the reality of financing college in this manner is as realistic as Toby Maguire passing for a superhero.

Speaking of a billion dollars…

Social Network (2010)

Premise: Mark Zuckerberg schemes his way to wealth and notoriety by creating Facebook while sulking in hoodies.

The $$ Matters:

• As of today, Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $12.1 billion or approximately 311, 850 years of Harvard education. Since Zuckerberg spent less than two years at Harvard in the first place, he would have a difficult time finding a job to pay off his tuition bill without a college degree – or a ridiculously cool idea.
• In fact, the unemployment rate is over 50% higher for individuals who don’t finish college (6.5%) compared to those who do earn a degree (4.0%).

College affordability isn’t just an issue of students not having enough to kick around the Frisbee.

Due to the rising cost of higher education, more and more students are realizing their inability to finance a college education in the way that their parents or Spiderman did. Sixty–one percentof college students work at least 20 hours a week, but often these jobs are not lucrative enough to finance a college degree. If nothing else, Peter Parker shows us that we need big reforms in the way we finance college today.  In the meantime, students too can do their part, getting smart about the choices they make when that part-time job doesn’t cut it and they have to turn to grants and loans for help.

We certainly can’t be reliant upon side jobs involving superhero hoods… or Zuckerberg-esque hoodies…