Megan Popke has a dream to help others by being a nurse at Saint Jude Children’s hospital, and that dream is expensive.
Editor's Note: This article is a part of the Degrees of Debt series. It explores one student's story, and how they are dealing with the rising cost of higher education.
Megan Popke’s dream is to spend her life helping children by working at Saint Jude Children’s
Hospital, which assists children and their families by not charging for treatment. To accomplish that dream, she has to work five low-wage jobs.
Popke is a sophomore studying nursing at Ohio University. In the summer, she works as a cashier at Home Depot and Meijer, as a breakfast server at the Maui Sands Resort & Indoor Waterpark and a nursing assistant at the Commons of Providence, an assisted living home, in Sandusky. Locally, she works as a do-it-all employee at the Athena Cinema.
Her dream of helping children began in 2006 when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“At 10 or 11 years old, I had to learn how to take care of a parent who was dying,” Popke said. “And my brother has Down syndrome, so it’s kinda like taking care of two people at the same time.”
After her mother died two years later, Popke wanted to start helping children dealing with life-threatening diseases as soon as possible.
That meant finishing her required high school classes before she was a junior so she could begin studying at the EHOVE Vocational Tech School near Sandusky. It meant earning 23 college credit hours before entering a university so she could lessen the financial burden of school, and it meant working hundreds of hours at her multiple jobs.
“Everyone is going to have their own disadvantages and their own problems, but someone is always going to have it worse, and you can always help that person and bring them up,” Popke said.
Popke isn’t alone in her struggle. The rising cost of higher education paired with the stagnant federal minimum wage is forcing many students to consider whether the cost is worth it.
Since 1978, when the wage laws were consolidated, minimum wage has increased 11 times. The last increase was in 2009 from $6.55 to $7.25.
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, buying power has decreased by $2.37 since 1978, even though the minimum wage has increased by $4.60 during that time.
That means a minimum wage worker in 1978 would be wealthier than today’s workers, despite the increases.
Other OU students have been feeling the same pressures as Popke. During Fall Semester, members of Student Senate demanded a university-wide wage increase to $15 an hour and a freeze in the cost of tuition.
“The fight for a $15 minimum wage, the struggle against tuition, the backlash against concentrated economic wealth — these must be understood as more than ends in themselves but as means to building a democratic society,” Ryan Powers, a sophomore and the East Green senator on Student Senate, said in a letter to The Post regarding senate’s demands.
Popke thinks the idea of a $15 minimum wage is “bittersweet.”
“I think it’s a decent idea, just because the cost of living has gone up the past few years, but I think it’s just going to cause everything else to jump up in price”
In addition to falling buying power, the cost of higher education has been increasing.
Since 1978, the in-state tuition for OU has increased by 910 percent, from $990 to more than $10,000. Nationally, the annual price of a public four-year institution rose 141 percent since the early ‘80s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
That combination has made attending university difficult for students like Popke.
In Athens, she works at the Athena Cinema in between studying for her classes and volunteering at the dog shelter on the weekends. She has to in order to pay for school, since her dad, isn’t able to contribute to her schooling. In addition to working five jobs, Popke has taken out two federal loans in addition to a Pell Grant in order to pay for her schooling so far. She has already begun paying for those loans with her job at the Athena.
Popke said she hopes to be working on completing her residency and starting a family a decade from now.
“I also see myself paying off my debt, definitely,” she said.
Now, however, she’s just trying to scrape by, as she is between $30,000 to $40,000 in debt.
“It’s like juggling, you’re trying not to drop anything because if you let one thing slip everything will come tumbling down,” Popke said.
@SethPArcher
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