Travis Dove for The New York Times Kelsey Manuel, a junior at Appalachian State University, earns enough at a restaurant to keep her from being eligible for much federal financial aid.

My article in the Sunday Business section two weekends ago, about the challenge of working your way through college these days without taking on any student loan debt or receiving any help from your parents, served as a Rorschach test of sorts for readers.

Some people were thrilled that I chose to focus on hard-working individuals who have managed to get themselves a degree (or close to it) without much debt and without much help. Others thought that by glorifying a handful of extraordinary individuals, I made their accomplishments appear all too easy to reproduce when, in fact, their stories represented the fringe of undergraduate financial reality.

Since this was an article in the news pages, and not a Your Money column, I should probably not say who I think is right. If you missed the article, please go back and read it and let us know what you think in the comments.

All that said, there were three other points of view threaded throughout the hundreds of comments that I wanted to highlight.

First, MJ from Iowa reinforced a point that Esther Manogin, Appalachian State’s director of financial aid, also made in the article. Here’s what MJ said:

Oh, come on. As of late last fall, average student loan debt was about $26,500. That’s for an education that will last you a lifetime, and we’re complaining and fretting as if it represented the end of the world. Yet, when we spend the same, or more, on a car that will be last but a few years, nobody seems concerned. Let’s have some perspective, people. This really is no big deal.

This is a good point, within reason, given the large economic return on obtaining a college degree. One prudent approach for undergraduates may be this: Borrow up to the federal loan limits but no more (which means no private loans from for-profit institutions). That way, you’ll be eligible for the federal income-based repayment program after graduation, which will keep your debt payments reasonable and forgive the remaining debt after a certain period of time if you can’t catch up with the remaining balance.

Readers differed on whether working a lot was, in fact, a strategy for success. Commenter “I” from Chicago, was skeptical:

Working your way through school is not realistic. You should be studying, joining interest groups and doing internships. People who “believe” one should work their way through school are holding onto some piece of ideology that stopped being applicable 15 years ago, when the cost of attending school outstripped one’s earning capabilities.

Perhaps. But even those who fail to graduate debt-free after many hours of work may still have a different kind of reward waiting for them from employers like andrewk829 in California:

When in my corporate experience, I have had a role in hiring recent college graduates, I have looked very favorably on those who worked in college, especially those who worked in jobs where their feet were tired or their clothes were sweat-soaked at the end of the day. I was usually less interested in the kid who had “internships” starting freshman year, many scored by way of well-connected parents.

The ideal profile was the student who worked part time during the school year and full time during summers. Whether it is a job as a waiter or waitress, working at a water or theme park, at a moving company, at a retail store … it’s all good. I have found that such individuals have a greater appreciation for the comparative comforts of life in the “professional” world (and hence are less likely to complain) and are more likely to use time efficiently and can better juggle multiple projects simultaneously.

Finally, I wondered about the built-in assumptions of relatively affluent readers like Hozeking in Naperville, Ill.

And what about parents like me paying for full tuition living expenses for my graduating sons to the tune of $300,000? Nobody or no government helped me and my wife. It came out of our pocket. The press NEVER writes about willing supportive parents that will have to work longer than they would like (I am 57). No whining, it’s just the facts of living a responsible and accountable life.

Somewhere along the way, we came to an understanding as a nation (without ever really discussing it) that if you can possibly afford to pay for your children’s college education, then you should. It became a “fact” for “responsible” people, so much so that many people who save or earn a bit less than Hozeking and his wife end up borrowing for their children’s education to be “accountable.”

At some point, even affluent parents will start to cry uncle, right? Perhaps it’s already happening, and you’ll tell me about it below.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/readers-weigh-in-on-working-your-way-through-college/?partner=rss&emc=rss