Struggling with College Tuition after Excelling in High School

Elisha Brown, “Struggling with College Tuition After Excelling in High School,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, A23 

     Ms. McNair received $27,000 in scholarships for the current academic year in addition to $9,500 in federal student loans. She also received nearly $6,500 in grants, including a $6,195 federal Pell grant A job at the campus library is paying her $2,000 for the school year through the federal work-study program.  But she still owed a few thousand dollars each semester to cover the $57,000 annual cost of attendance, including tuition, fees, room and board. 

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     Ms. McNair, who is from Harlem, studies Health Science at New England College in New Hampshire.  She wants to go to medical school, but if the student loans keep piling up it’s hard to see how that will ever happen.  A student job at the library is part of her aid package, but the article says she is planning to work at a grocery store after the work-study money is gone.

     There are many fewer student jobs at the library than there were before so much information was online -- no longer the need for so many people to shelve and check out books, file periodical subscriptions, and catalog cards or order books.  The result is that many fewer students get to experience library work.  That's a problem both because student jobs were a way to attract people into the profession and because people who have worked in a library have more knowledge of and respect for information systems.  The student jobs vanished unnoticed, except perhaps as a cost savings the annual budget. Few librarians considered what might be lost along with all those student jobs.  I have thought that academic libraries should make student jobs part of their mission, creating paid internships that let students work with librarian mentors.  If we truly believe that libraries are centers for creativity and innovation, these library internships would be the best jobs on campus.