Oran Hall | Securing tertiary education with some independence

The high cost of tertiary education calls for good planning, patience, and funding from a variety of sources, including debt, family, scholarships, grants, bursaries, and income earned by the student.

Some students find it necessary to generate income to contribute to the cost of their education because of the limited ability of family to give financial support and the challenges to borrow. Others choose to work to contribute to the cost of their education.

One student who chose to work to contribute to the cost of her tertiary education is Hope Grant, not her real name. Hope is 18 and has completed the first year of her four-year course in teacher education, which is expected to cost $400,000 per annum if annual tuition fees remain unchanged. Her parents provided the funding for the first year, but Hope engaged in the Work and Travel Programme to fund the second year of her studies and intends to fund the rest of her course of study by that means.

Living at home in St Andrew means that her parents cover a significant portion of her living expenses and the cost of transportation to and from classes as well as the cost of food at university. Recognising that she has younger siblings and that funding her education has added significantly to her parents’ expenses, she opted to ease the burden on them by working in the summer while getting valuable work experience, travelling to and exploring another country, learning new skills, and meeting people from other cultures.

She identified a sponsor to provide the range of services needed to take her successfully into and through the programme, for example, securing a US visa and identification, and ensuring that she got the required health insurance coverage that the employers were responsible for providing. The employer was also responsible for getting her social security number.

Before departing from Jamaica, Hope paid the sponsor approximately US$2,000 to cover the programme and embassy fees and the sponsor’s fee of US$470. She was responsible for her air fare to and from the United States, but some students had to borrow to cover that expense.

She worked for three months at a hotel and water park resort in the cabana, a specific area of the hotel that guests can reserve. Like the other hosts and hostesses in the cabana, she provided a range of services to the guests. In preparation, she was trained for a few days. The students worked for five to six days per week, generally for eight hours per day, but they could work up to 15 hours per day.

The employer provided rental accommodation near to the workplace for 200 to 500 students, many of whom were Jamaicans. But there were students from countries like Russia, China, France, Venezuela, Dominica, and Colombia. Social life included cultural activities, movies, and trips and baseball games sponsored by the employer.

Hope found the experience beneficial. She earned enough money to carry her through the second year of her programme and plans to return for the next two years of her course. She is very satisfied that she was able to earn to fund her education, thus enabling her to get some independence while reducing the expenses of her parents so that the funds saved can be redirected to other family needs.

There are other things that gave her satisfaction. She believes her experience will help her as a teacher. For example, she has learned to speak to people with more confidence, to deal with different personalities, to understand the different ways in which people learn, and to be more confident in understanding people’s emotions.

Hope treasures the experience she had to travel overall and the opportunities she had to meet and make friends with students of other nationalities, some of whom she is in contact with. She finds this beneficial as it has helped her to hone her communication skills. Her only regret is that she did not get to work more hours so that she could have earned more.

Although she acknowledges that not everybody will have the same positive experience she had, her advice is that other students should “go for it”. In particular, she urges rural students who have to contend with rent and several other expenses in the city to see the Work and Travel Programme as a useful means of earning to fund the cost of tertiary education.

Oran A. Hall, author of Understanding Investments and principal author of The Handbook of Personal Financial Planning, offers personal financial planning advice and counsel.finviser.jm@gmail.com