If not having enough money food was bad enough, Mandel has also had problems paying for her textbooks.
“It's been tough,” she said. “I have to resort to buying my books online because they're cheaper. The drawback is it takes like a week for them to get to me and by then, I'm behind in my studies. It has a big affect on me.”
John Ruiz, another student at Kingsborough, has things a bit different, as he is a full-time worker and a part-time college student, but he too nevertheless understands that the situation with our economy has him a lot closer to the breaking point than he should be.
It's a feeling he doesn't like one bit.
“Right now it's not that hard because I work full-time, but it's still scary,” Ruiz said. “If they cut my hours and I'm forced to balance the cost of living with school, it's not going to be a great situation for me. I don't even want to think about taking fewer classes to save money. I'd really like to get my degree.”
Things are so bad right now that even the luckiest students understand how dire the situation is.
“Things would be really difficult if my parents didn't pay for everything,” said Simon Lam, another freshman at Kingsborough. “As a matter of fact, I don't even want to think about how tough things would be if I had to pay for everything.”
These problems aren't just beleaguering to undergraduate students either.
Even professors are having problems paying the bills.
“I'm only working part-time right now. The only way I was able to pay for my classes was to take out a loan. All my books went straight on my credit card,” said Adjunct Lecturer Samantha LoSapio, who is working on her Masters Degree at Brooklyn College while tutoring and teaching at Kingsborough during the day. “It's a trap that I'm going to be stuck in for a while. And since I work in a field that is entirely dependent on students registering in the first place, if they can't afford to register, the turnout decreases steadily, and eventually it trickles down to me not getting an assignment next term.”
LoSapio however does see one good thing coming out of all these problems.
“At least we have one silver lining, at least in a field like mine,” she said. “You can be sure that some great literature is going to come out of this era.”
