Working Your Way Through College

After a seemingly endless string of long days, Eliana Ulloa says all she wants to do is lie down. Most college students can relate to her exhaustion, including me. But unlike some, Ulloa shoulders the burden of working on top of her studies to aid the costs of attending Emerson and the city living that inevitably accompanies being a student here. 

Art by Olivia Kelliher

The U.S. Student Debt Relief website reports that the average tuition for private institutions in the country is 34,740 dollars––46,950 if you include the cost of room and board. But Emerson’s tuition alone is over 46,000 dollars, far exceeding the national average. 

Students sometimes have to work in order to cover tuition, rent, and other necessities, despite the way in which this additional responsibility can interfere with their schoolwork and health.   

The truth remains that the college is extremely inaccessible to hundreds of its students––some Emersonians found a way to make it onto the campus, but continue to struggle after arriving. 

Emerson’s Financial Aid Office helps these students “manage the cost of quality education,” as stated on their website, and offers individual counseling and workshops on debt management, budgeting, and saving. The office also plays a role in doling out additional scholarships and grants in order to economically diversify the student population. 

But though the college implements initiatives dedicated to expanding the student bodies’ income diversity, it is unarguable that the current system is simply not enough. 

For low-income students, tuition alone poses an exuberant expense. Through grants, scholarships, and scheduled payment plans may defray the immediate costs, the price of attendance exceeds some families’ income. According to 2017 statistics from the US Department of Education, tuition costs for students with a household income of 30,000 dollars or less is still $30,842.

Others, whose tuition is provided through their families, loans, and other avenues, set money aside for their eventual loan payments or personal expenses that come with living in Boston.

Riane Roldan, journalism ’20, spends up to 24 hours a week at Aritzia, a women’s fashion boutique in the Prudential to save up for these expenses. “It all kind of adds up...even course packs for my classes are like 30 bucks a pop. I’m not going to ask my parents for money to go out or buy myself a sweater when I could do that myself,” said Roldan. 

Conversely, Ulloa, a theatre performance major ’21, works as an usher at Arts Emerson, the on-campus company in the Cutler Majestic Theatre. Persistently, Ulloa dredges through tiring 13-hour day––10 AM to 11 PM, excluding homework. She said her money goes to whatever her family can’t cover. 

“That money mainly goes toward finances my parents can’t necessarily cover for me,” said Ulloa. “This is currently my only source of income, and I’m not in a place where I cannot be making money.” 

Students continue to make space for work in their schedule because of their financial need. But most are well aware that working systematically goes against Emerson’s active culture, where extracurriculars usually take up highly valued real estate on students’ list of priorities. 

For arts and communications careers like the ones Emerson students are pursuing, practical knowledge is essential. As a result, students value their classwork as highly as their extracurriculars and co-curriculars that often align with their line of study––like literary magazines, television productions, and more. 

Inevitably, when an hourly job is a sole way to make ends meet, acquiring and scheduling hours to work presents additional stress of its own. Finding shift work is a laborious task. Though she works on campus, Ulloa said she sometimes finds herself “fighting for shifts” in order to lock down hours to work and get the money she needs. 

Recently, when starring in Bulrusher, Ulloa’s job as an usher had to be put aside to accommodate the grueling hours of rehearsal. “Because my job is shift-based, I have to just not work when I’m in a show which is so difficult to do. So then, I do have to prioritize that over work. It sucks,” Ulloa said. 

Other times, jobs simply do not offer the flexibility a student’s schedule requires. Jobs are scheduled around class and activity times, but oftentimes class times are altered or other obligations arise. And because of moving schedules after long weekends, rapid group project deadlines, and more, Emerson students are often tasked to choose between their academic obligations and their occupational ones. 

Professors, advisors, and mentors preach “You are a student first.” But what about when rent, tuition, and other needed expenses are in question? 

“I guess I was like all that and studies just had to take a back seat. I definitely fell behind in a couple of my classes because of the hours I was working. I’m usually very on top of everything,” Roldan said. 

Students are also confronted with the obvious question: where should we work? On-campus jobs are increasingly hard to come by, as hundreds of students at Emerson are awarded work-study with only so many jobs and hours existing in reality. And off-campus work may hinder students from pursuing other opportunities or cut off the flexibility they need.

Rising public transportation prices since 2012 are only making it harder for students to commute to potential jobs and function independently in a city where the cost of living is

already high. In fact, Payscale found Boston’s cost of living to be 47% higher than the national average. 

Like many others, I’ve experienced many moments when the cliche rings true––there are simply not enough hours in the day. Having a job adds to the overload of commitments college students participate in. In fact, a University of Georgia study found students only get an average of six hours of sleep. 

Despite the endless struggle to be healthy amidst a crowded schedule, working students should take heed from Roldan who puts her own physical and well-being at the forefront of her priorities. 

“No matter what the situation is, I always make sure I’m getting enough sleep and feeding myself because that’s just of importance to me,” Roldan said.