How I Paid For College.

Quite often, tenants ask me for advice on how to make money in college. There is no one answer that is right for everybody, but the story below may give you some ideas.

When I first arrived at the University of Maryland, I had no idea how I was going to pay for college. My father gave me no money at all. He was a nice guy but not a great father. I had a little money of my own, but it wasn’t even enough to get me through the first year, and in those days, student loans were not as easy to get as they are today. Then a small incident occurred that gave me the idea that paid for college.

One day, I was in my dorm’s recreation room. There was a small kitchen in the back of the room where a guy was trying to make mashed potatoes. He had peeled several potatoes and was trying to mash them, but without success. Every time he pressed down on a potato, it slid out from under the masher. One potato shot across the counter and hit the wall. He tried again and again, but the same thing kept happening. I laughed. He said: “Why are you laughing? Do you know what I’m doing wrong?” I said: “Are you kidding? You mean you really don’t know?” He shook his head ‘No’, so I told him: “You don’t mash potatoes and then cook them. You cook the potatoes first and then mash them.” A light went on in his face. You could see that this idea had not occurred to him before.

After the mashed potato incident, a lot of guys in my dorm started coming to me for advice on cooking, mostly simple things like how to boil an egg. I realized that I had a big advantage over these guys because I already knew how to cook before I went to college. My mother died when I was 10 years old, and my father worked long hours, so I frequently had to make my own meals. Out of necessity, I learned how to cook at an early age.

The mashed potato incident gave me an idea. I started making and selling submarine sandwiches in my dorm’s rec room at night. Ultimately, I made enough money selling sandwiches to pay for college. Fortunately for me, the food at the University of Maryland dining halls was just awful. The worst thing they made was their infamous ‘surf cake,’ an imitation Maryland crab cake. Real crabmeat was too expensive for dorm dining halls, so they made ‘surf cakes’ out of a combination of dried fish and bread crumbs. I sold a lot of sandwiches on ‘surf cake’ night.

There are far more opportunities today for a college student to make money from his dorm room than were when I went to college, mainly because of the internet. Here is an example – I had a tenant who had a girlfriend at UCLA. She ran a very profitable business from her dorm room selling Disney character jewelry to ‘Disneyana’ collectors around the world. She went to Disneyland every Sunday and bought things at the stores around the park. She had a season pass, so she didn’t have to pay daily admission. She bought pins, bracelets, and figurines at Disneyland and then resold the stuff on E-Bay. Most of the jewelry they sell at Disneyland is made just for sale at Disney theme parks and is sold nowhere else, so she had pricing power. She made over $2,000 a month while she was in college, and when she graduated, she married my tenant, and they continued running the business together.

There are a lot of opportunities out there to make money – but you have to find them for yourself. Unfortunately, opportunities don’t usually come to you.