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Comment by sloanesturz | Hacker News Reader

I'm a current Stanford undergrad. Most Stanford kids are able to pay for their "student contribution" by getting on campus work-study jobs (like in the Library or career development center), working as dorm staff in the underclassmen dorms, or working as paid researchers in professors' labs.

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I've had on-campus jobs throughout college, and making $5000 from those jobs alone would require working somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 hours a week. Certainly possible (and many do it), but at that point it starts to have a pretty noticeable affect on your schoolwork and personal life.

What? $5000 a year is a straightforward, achievable contribution, especially with work-study jobs. When I was an undergrad at an ivy league school I made significantly more than that working at the dining hall during the year and the course review guide in the summer, and this was in the mid 90s.

Here's my math:

15 weeks / semester * 2 semesters = 30 weeks. $5000 / 30 weeks = $166 / week. At $8 an hour, that's 20 hours a week; at $10 an hour it's 16 hours. (Ignoring taxes, which are low but still push the hours needed higher.)

This is not accounting for summer jobs, but my original point was that having the student contribution at that level will make some students take a paying but dead-end summer job over an unpaid internship or other opportunity that would benefit them more in the long run. (Another reason unpaid internships are questionable ethically...)

Wages for campus jobs for undergraduates at Stanford start at $13.25/hr, and can go quite high. http://financialaid.stanford.edu/aid/employ/wage_scale.html

And there are plenty of off-campus jobs (SAT tutoring, etc) that can pay $35+/hr.

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