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Uphill both ways: the myth of working your way through college

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Many college students have heard lectures from their elders saying "I worked my way through school, why can’t you?" Randy Olson, an MSU graduate student, decided to calculate if it was still possible to work your way through school. He concluded - it’s not. Since posting his findings to his blog he’s received hundreds of comments, and The Atlantic wrote about his post.

According to Olson, today’s students have to work seven times as many hours as their 1979 counterparts to pay for tuition alone.

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