But the financial aid slowly ran dry. One reason: Kryszak's husband's salary went up, increasing the expected family contribution. Aid calculations also counted the money Nielsen saved working summers in fast-food and telemarketing jobs. Nielsen lost the Pell Grant this year, and the institutional aid didn't keep pace with rising tuition. Nielsen borrowed $4,000, up from the $2,000 and $3,000 loans she relied on her first two years.
Eventually, Nielsen wants to join the academic world and is hoping to earn a Ph.D. in history. But she's learned her lesson. Next time, she'll go to a cheaper college: a state university in New York.
Working girl Natalie Nichols, who hails from tiny California, Pa., didn't want to graduate from college weighed down by student loans. But in the beginning, it looked inevitable. Out-of-state tuition and room and board at the University of Akron, which she entered in 1999, cost roughly $18,000. She received about $6,200 in institutional aid. But that was it. So Nichols took out a $3,000 student loan and got a job on campus. Her mother, a seamstress in a bridal shop, and her father, a maintenance supervisor at a kitchenware company, then did their best to take care of the remainder for their only child.
But as a chemical engineering major, Nichols was expected to enroll in a co-op program, a curriculum that allows students to alternate semesters of classroom study with semesters of work related to their majors. It takes five years to complete at Akron and is available for a variety of disciplines at almost 500 colleges and universities around the country. During her sophomore year, an on-campus recruiter for Houston-based Equistar Chemicals offered her a $19.13-an-hour summer position with the firm's Morris, Ill., plant. (Typical co-ops for sophomores at Akron's college of engineering pay between $11 and $18 per hour.) That summer Nichols drafted cost-savings plans and troubleshot glitches at the polypropylene plant and eventually earned $9,300--enough to buy a used car and give Mom and Dad $4,000 toward her junior year.
Nichols worked three more times for Equistar during college, upping her hourly rate as she gained experience and schooling. A strict budgeter, she was careful to set aside 40 percent of her co-op earnings for tuition and living expenses. During Nichols's co-op semesters, instead of paying tuition, she had to pay only a $55 fee to Akron to earn credit--and Equistar picked that up. "It definitely would have been a lot more stressful without co-op," says Nichols. "I was on such a tight budget in the beginning."
But the big payoff was yet to come. Today Nichols, now 23, is a production engineer at an Equistar plant in the Houston area, making $63,000 a year.
Family freebie When Becky Cromwellheard about an opening for a student nursing coordinator at nearby Jacksonville University eight years ago, she didn't exactly jump at the opportunity. But the former church secretary from Rockledge, Fla., quickly changed her mind. Jacksonville, like many colleges and universities, boasted an enticing perk: It waives tuition for employees and their dependents. For Cromwell, a 49-year-old mother of four, it was "a real answer to our prayers."
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