As college students, we have to start thinking about money and how we’re going to pay for things like bills and loans.

Unless you’ve lucked out in the money department, it’s on you to pay for college. That cost is stressful for a student, working or not because even if you do work, it’s not nearly enough to pay for tuition.

Older generations tend to call us “lazy,” but a minimum wage job is barely enough to get by, unless you can manage to work and go to school full-time. Even the university recommends a maximum of twenty hours of work per week for full-time students.

Working twenty hours each week at minimum wage means that before taxes, a student’s weekly income would be $145. That adds up to $580 per month. That’s how much a semester worth of books costs alone.

The problem with minimum wage is that it is not nearly enough to survive on. A college student’s first priority should be school, with a part time job as a way to earn some extra spending money and to fill some free time. That’s not to say that students should expect their parents to help with finances. Yes, that’s nice, but not required.

For students looking to work, the jobs they are qualified for are almost always the jobs that pay minimum wage, or just above it. We can’t live off of this! The current minimum wage is too low to support anyone with expenses other than food.

This minimum wage doesn’t even cover waiters and other tip staff. According to the Department of Labor, the minimum wage for tip staff starts at $2.13 per hour in Kansas. That is a server’s guaranteed pay, and while they can earn a lot more with tips, the fact that they have to hustle for any more is ridiculous. Some days are slow in a restaurant and sometimes you just happen to get a bunch of people who don’t leave a tip.

That’s not right.

Whether you work for tips or not, working for such a small amount of money is extremely stressful. That time working takes away from time you could spend studying or hanging out with friends, all because the hours you work don’t result in enough money.

As future workers, we need to know just how much our time is worth so that we know when to pass on a job for low pay. Our time is worth more than that. Negotiating is difficult, but we need to live.

We can’t just accept what money employers are willing to pay us; we need to fight for a living wage.

With email and social media, we can contact representatives and senators to send the message that the minimum wage needs to change.

This is not just a college student problem; it’s an economic problem.