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In college, being well prepared for an exam is not enough. You have to take care of everything else as well. This includes your financial state.

With a third of young adults being financially illiterate, and Americans owing 1.5 trillion in student debt, it’s about the time to embrace financial responsibility.

Here are 7 steps on how to save money in college.

Grow up before the college

Nowadays, a college degree will cost you anywhere between $30,000 and $200,000 in student loans. This is not a small sum, as you may imagine.

The starting salary in tech may be around $60,000 a year, but you want to get into journalism, marketing, or any other profession where it’s significantly lower, you have to measure the risks.

When you’re looking for a college, answer these questions:

• Does this degree give me marketable skills?
• Will this degree be relevant in 10 years?
• Will I be able to find a job in the field straight out of college?
• Does the price allow me to pay off the loan in a couple of years?

Be very honest with yourself when you are answering these questions. It’s not just a couple of years of your life that are at stake. If you make a big mistake, you may find yourself with no skills, no experience, and with a $100,000 in debt.

If you’re not sure, you can always go for courses, apprenticeship, internship, or go to a cheaper college.

Find scholarship opportunities

Are you a bright student? You shouldn’t pay for your education yourself!

Find a range of scholarships and apply for all of them. If you do get one, your problems with finances in college are pretty much solved.

Some scholarships will cover the full cost of tuition. They are normally merit-based and are awarded to those students who show great skill or talent in a particular field. Some will only give you a couple of thousands of dollars for studies. Some are given to minority students or kids from military families.

Either way, even a small bonus to your tuition cost counts. Discover what scholarships you can apply for and do it.

Find a job

Going to college is about adulting and becoming financially independent. The basics of financial literacy for college students is getting a job to support yourself and rely on your parents less.

But don’t rush to become another student waitress. You may earn a ton of money in tips, but long shifts are not the best thing for your studies.

Before you hit the local bars looking for work, try to get a freelance position at a company that can help your professional growth. Before long you’ll start asking yourself “is edusson legit?”, and  thinking about buying a paper because you work such long hours.

If you get an assistant’s position at a small company, you can earn a bit of money to get by, and a lot of experience. This will help you be the first among your classmates to get a really good job once you graduate.

Have an emergency sum

As a result of financial illiteracy, many people don’t have spare money. They just live from payday to payday. This results in people getting payday loans, overspending from their credit cards, and driving themselves deeper in debt.

How to save up money? It’s easier than you would imagine. You have to budget your spending.

It may be hard to pass on some of the things that are so great about youth. You may not be able to drink every Friday or give your girl a great date, but the result is worth it.

Set aside a bit of money each month and don’t touch it until you really need to.

Don’t eat out

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This may sound awful, but eating out can destroy your budget. Sure, eating at the college canteen is okay, but spending each evening eating at a restaurant will leave your finances in ruin.

Even if you’re going out to have drinks, you’d be better off in a bar that doesn’t serve too much food. Otherwise, you can spend half the check on eating expensive gourmet meals.

Live cheap

Housing is in big trouble these days. Most people can’t afford to rent a flat alone, not to mention the students.

If you can live on campus, do it. Especially so, if you live in a big city like LA or San Francisco. It’s probably impossible to find a decent room for a bargain, even if you have a roommate.

If living in a dorm is not an option, go for the cheap and humble flat in good condition. You don’t want anything above the bare minimum, but you don’t want to spend a fortune on repair either.

Have fun for free

While drinking all night is quite an expensive thing to do, this doesn’t mean you can’t have cheap fun.

Most of the good things in life cost you nothing. You won’t see people paying to cuddle with their significant other, to swim in the ocean, or to participate in a student play. Add a couple of free art exhibitions that you can find in pretty much every city, and you have all the fun you need.

What you can’t get for free, you can get cheaper. Just ask if the place offers student ID discounts.

Do I have to be frugal?

Making it through college doesn’t mean working all night long and living on bread and water. You will have to cut on some fun, but you shouldn’t withdraw from social life.

Being financially stable and having a great college experience is possible!

As valuable as higher education can be, can you imagine that statistically speaking, obtaining it indebts you more than credit cards and auto loans? That’s right, student loans account for the second highest consumer debt, passed only by mortgage debt.

In the U.S. alone, student loan debt amounts to the staggering $1.5 trillion, distributed between more than $44 million people, according to Make Lemonade. In 2016, the average student owed $37,172-worth in student loans.

When you let those startling numbers sink in, and add to them the mounting disappointment of higher education and its lack of real-life value that many students trumpet, one can’t help but wonder, “Is it worth going to a University anymore?” especially considering the increasing flexibility technology enables in various aspects of our life. 
Rise in Enrollment for Online Courses

It’s no wonder then that between 2012 and 2016, the number of university students who attend a strictly physical campus dropped by more than a whole million, 6.4%, Make Lemonade’s research shows. To a large extent, this is attributed to more and more people acknowledging the sweeping benefits of online education.

Enrollment for online courses is at an all-time high and only keeps rising. 2016 was the 14th year in a row in which Babson Survey Research Group reported growth in online enrollment. According to Babson, more than 6.3 million students in the U.S., most of which undergraduates, signed up to at least one online course in the fall of 2016, which was a 5.6% increase from the previous year. For public schools and universities, that increase was even higher – 7.1%.

And an interesting trend that surfaces amidst the statistics is of online students actually residing in the same state as their institution – going from 50.3% in 2012, to 56.1% in 2016. For strictly online students in public schools, this number is even higher – 84.2%. In fact, previous Babson surveys reveal that a large portion of online students even live within a 50-mile radius of their university’s campus.

While that trend may seem somewhat counter-intuitive at first, on second thought, it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider a certain advantage which online education has.

Why Study Online

To help you navigate the changing educational landscape, James Cook University, which also offers online courses has outlined a few of the major benefits of studying online.

The likely reasons why so many online students actually live in the same state as their institution are two. The more obvious one is the potentially lower in-state tuition fees. The other reason is that online education can actually be a blend of the best of both the virtual and the physical academic world, meaning students can generally study online, but they also get access to on-campus resources.

But besides that, studying online has some things to offer which traditional education simply can’t.

First off, it’s important to clarify one common misconception up: there is no mention of the word “online” on a degree from an online course. An “online” degree weighs just as much as an on-campus degree. 

The flexibility is perhaps the most universally coveted attribute of online education, especially in the case of mature professionals who are looking to take it to the next level without sacrificing the life they’ve worked hard to build for themselves. Online education allows you to fit studies into your schedule rather than the other way around. That doesn’t go to say the studies come second or require less effort than they would in a traditional environment – they’re simply not confined within rigid time slots that can’t be moved and around or adjusted.

An extension of that benefit is the autonomy you get with online education. Autonomy isn’t for everyone, but for those who can harness its immense potential, this perk is simply invaluable.

You can tailor the structure of the education to both your schedule and your learning style. It’s basically like freelance work – you are measured by your performance and the quality of your work, not by the amount of hours spent or the time of day when you spend them.

Another major benefit is the elimination of all the indirect costs of on-campus education like travel expenses, paid parking, childcare, buying food outside, and a myriad of other little expenditures, in addition to the extra time it takes to go back and forth.
Something else that can sometimes go overlooked is the higher level of teachers’ personal attention which online education can paradoxically provide. Raising questions and voicing concerns can generally be harder in a room full of other students, both from a social standpoint and from a time-related one. With online education, you can often get more direct assistance, adjusted specifically to you, in a more comfortable manner.

The world is changing fast, and the traditional notions of education and work are no longer tied to trivialities like geography. Whether you obtain a degree online or offline is not what’s important. It’s the knowledge and skills that the degree represents that matter, and more often than not, online education is a more cost, time, and energy-efficient way to get them.