College is expensive. There’s no way around that. Most families cannot afford to pay for a college education outright. And this means a serious limitation on which college you can attend, working your way through, or finding a way to get the money together.

I worked my way through. Looking back, I should have gone ahead and applied for loans, as this meant I took extra years to graduate just because I had to cope with a work schedule. Getting something like a federal stafford student loan probably would have been a smart idea.

Today there are a lot of ways to research how you can pay for college. The Internet wasn’t widely available when I started college. That really made researching information a lot more difficult. These days the resources to learn about the stafford college loan, as well as other loans and grants is much easier to find.

It’s hard deciding to take on debt for your education. You have to decide how much debt is worth it to you. Graduating with $50,000 worth of college debts is not a fun way to graduate. You’re probably better off finding grants if those are the expenses you’re looking at, or a more affordable college. But only you can analyze how much debt your education requires.

Working through college is not a bad thing, but if you have to work too many hours you are limiting how quickly you can get done with it and on to the kind of work you really want to do. Think carefully about your needs in terms of your long term success.