Student Personal Finance – What does This Actually Mean to You?

Let’s face it an awful lot of students these days are given more or less a free ride to school. Mom and dad foot the bill and maybe they have a grant or two to help offset portions of the education but for the most part a vast majority of students have no clue what is involved in getting the education they are getting and they don’t really care.

I imagine to some degree as I was growing up it was much the same. The books got paid for and the clothes and lab fees always seemed to get handled by the long hours that my parents worked but the big difference was that I knew that it was no free ride. I understood that there was a cost to all of those things even if I was not directly responsible for the. Today more kids just think it is a right that is owed to them.

When I was going through school the supplies were fairly basic. There were no computers – yes I know I am dating myself here – we took real notes from live teachers and professors and wrote them on real paper from our spiral notebooks.

Today’s student is more likely to go to a class, plug his I-Pod into his ear and listen to the rap artist of the moth while the entire lecture from the bored professor is recorded on the hard drive of his or her laptop computer. Those notes are then later pulled up in a voice recognition software program and transcribed into legible notes that can be copied and pasted into a word processor and printed out as a report.

So student personal finance has changed, it has gotten a lot more expensive to get the things that you need to get through school. The technology is much more costly and it does affect the bottom line. The tuition is more expensive, the accessories that you need are more expensive and the lab fee, even for a very basic course are out of the realm of imagination for a non-educated person.

I can’t help but think that if students had to pay there own way things were a little more like they were when I was growing up that the finances would be paid closer attention to, there would less dependence on the electronics since they might be too costly to own and the student might actually learn something again.