Cory Schler is at work.

He is at his new job, an internship, writing for the Downtown Akron Partnership Web site.

This is his morning job, not to be confused with his afternoon job, washing cars at Akron-Canton Airport for Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Or his other job, covering high school sports for the Suburbanite newspaper. Or his other other job, working at Promold-Gauer, the machine shop his uncle owns.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Cory Schler is a full-time college student. It's also a very telling way.

He is at work, and his picture holds his place here in the family living room in Green: a smiling, dark-haired young man whose image soft-fades in and out of other family photos on the digital picture frame propped near the sofa.

EVEN IN PHOTOGRAPHS, HIS MOTION IS PERPETUAL.

It might seem that this is an old American story: a young man in the land of opportunity working his way through college on his way to a better life. The problem is, although he works and works and works, his paychecks are thimblefuls of water splashed at a forest fire.

He made $14,000 last year, and after rent and other expenses, there wasn't much left. He drives an 11-year-old Chevy Lumina with a big dent in the door, thanks to a sloppy driver in a University of Akron parking lot. He's counting down the remaining months under his parents' health insurance.

He moved back home last summer, after four years sharing a series of college houses with four roommates, including his brother, Joey, a UA senior. Both sons have returned Please see Burden, A10

temporarily, sleeping in their childhood bedrooms, briefly appearing in the kitchen each day for something to eat on the way to and from school and work and work and school, the endless loop that tests the seemingly bottomless reserve of young people's energy.

They moved here in part to squirrel away some money, which suggests a paradoxical accounting — they're trying to save up money, even though they're both tens of thousands of dollars in debt, with loans already on the table and deferred loans ready to kick in after graduation.

Meanwhile, with both boys set to graduate in the spring, their parents are glad to have them back for a while. Although they weren't far away, it felt that way sometimes.

''Cory moved out of this house as soon as he graduated,'' his mother, Tina, says, sitting on the living room sofa, laughing as she dramatizes her response. ''I was crying. I was holding his legs — don't leave your mommy! It was awful. I was downstairs, holding a pillow. Oh, it was awful. Thank God I have him,'' she says, reaching down to scratch the fur of Huckleberry Hound, the family's big mongrel, '' 'cause I would have just lost it.''

''The first time they left, it didn't bother me,'' continues her husband, Joe. ''This time — it'll be tough. This time, it'll hurt.''

They talk this way because they know what's coming soon. Both of their children, 22-year-old Cory and 24-year-old Joey, will graduate in May — Cory in communications and Joey in education — and it won't be long until both will leave home again, most likely for good.

The Schler family is approaching one of those generational milestones that raise sharply divergent spikes of emotion in a parent: pride, heartache, relief, concern.

You want them to go off into the world and you also want them to stay home. You want them to be self-reliant, and you also want to take care of them forever. You want these to be the best days of their lives, and you want their best days to be ahead.

But these days, and with disorienting suddenness, most middle-class families approach this milestone with one particular spike of concern — the stress of an expense that, just 15 years ago, would have been almost unthinkable. Although the Schler boys attended the relatively affordable University of Akron, and although both will be graduat-ing in relatively efficient fashion — each in less than five years — the burden of their college debt will have a profound effect on their family's life for a decade or more.

Although both young men have worked throughout their college years — Joey, in the midst of a student teaching assignment, works as a trailer attendant for Goodwill Industries — and have put as much as they could toward tuition and other college expenses, about 90 percent of the cost is in loans, totaling more than $70,000.

Their parents have agreed to split the cost, and they hope to pay it off in 10 years. All four members of the family will be focused on that goal.

The $70,000 figure, which is split about 50/50 between the two sons' tuitions, is the best estimate Joe Schler can give. Although he and his wife have carefully tended to this process, the ways they have consolidated and deferred various loans has turned the actual amount into a sort of cloud, looming, but with a changing and indefinite shape.

Even now, having had years to absorb this reality, Joe and Tina Schler seem taken aback when they talk about how much it costs. Both of them briefly attended the University of Akron after graduating high school in the late 1970s, before settling on other careers, he as a construction laborer, she as a secretary with a certificate from Hammel Business College. The cost of a semester's tuition at UA was nothing a summer job couldn't cover.

Since then, and especially within the past 20 years, the cost of an American college education has tested all laws of proportion. The change has woven itself directly into the fabric of this Ohio family.

Except for their mortgage, the $500 monthly student-loan payment is the largest bill in the stack on the desk near the front window, and it will spike even higher when deferred loans and higher interest rates kick in after graduation.

Tina Schler, who shattered her left elbow in a bad fall nine years ago, is on permanent disability, with a misshapen arm and a complicated trail of pain that extends to her shoulder and upper spine. She's been putting off more surgery, but it's coming soon. Working college loan deals, negotiating the reams of paperwork — this has become something of a second career.

''I've got a rapport with this guy from College Loan Corporation,'' she says, adding a laugh. ''He's my buddy. I think he knows our Social Security numbers by heart.''

Video: Student Stories

Tuition soars

In the 1989-1990 school year, the annual cost — tuition, fees and room and board — for a full-time University of Akron student living on campus was $5,622. Now, it's more than three times that — $17,254.

The cost for commuter students nearly quadrupled in that same period, from $2,672 to $9,503.

In 1965, a student attending a public university full time would have to work about 21 hours a week at minimum wage to pay for tuition. Last year, that same student would have to work more than 70 hours a week. Even with last July's increase in the minimum wage to $5.85 an hour, a University of Akron student living on campus would have to work 60 hours a week to cover the cost.

It doesn't take a doctorate to do the math. There aren't enough hours in the day to work one's way through school.

A college education, which once was seen as a passport into the middle class, has now pushed countless families into an unsettling paradox — to put a young person in a position to get ahead in the world, that person must start way behind, often with debt that will affect every aspect of his ostensibly middle-class lifestyle, often carrying well into middle age.

This imbalance has moved to the heart of the American conversation. In February, Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic proposed selling the city's sewer system to create a college fund for the city's schoolchildren. That same month, amid the presidential primaries, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama promised tax credits to help pay for college tuition.

Most families would agree: Something has to be done.

Joe Sr., a 51-year-old who lays sewer pipes for Kenmore Construction Co., is eligible to retire next year. Even if he does, he'll have to go right back to work somewhere else.

If not for his children's college loans, he could slow down.

''I could retire and sit here and talk to you all day,'' he says.

He doesn't mind continuing to work. He says he'd go stir crazy otherwise. But he also doesn't have a choice. For his sons to get started in their careers, the father will have to extend his own working years indefinitely.

''You gotta give 'em a chance,'' he says, then repeats himself for emphasis. ''You gotta give 'em every chance.''

Meanwhile, with Cory hoping to become a sportswriter (average starting salary: $26,000) and Joey planning to become a high school math teacher ($32,000), both are about to enter an anemic Ohio job market that threatens to push them far from the place they'd prefer to stay, which is near home.

''When I get on the Web sites, the jobs are there,'' Cory says one day between classes, ''they're just not here.''

Making ends meet

Jennifer Samardak is at work.

She's in the warm, brightly lighted kitchen of the Donatos pizza shop in Montrose, working a loose-limbed, well-rehearsed choreography: in one moment, she's folding perforated cardboard into boxes like mundane origami; in the next, with swift chops of a long blade, she's changing the geometry of fresh-baked pies from circles to triangles. In a fluid motion, she slides the pizzas into the boxes and turns down the lids.

The phone chirps incessantly and a half-dozen workers carry a robust conversation interrupted by questions Please see Loan,A11

about whose turn it is for a delivery and which orders are ready to roll.

This is not her job. Or, rather, it's not her career. She's 33 years old, married; she has a master's degree in social work and works as a guardian ad litem for Summit County Juvenile Court, advocating for children too young to negotiate the process themselves.

She delivers pizzas, she says, because she genuinely likes the work. A couple of Saturday nights a month, it's a diversion from an emotionally demanding day job. But it also brings in a little extra cash, and once you learn about the way Jennifer thinks about money, you can't remove that factor.

When she was a child, her parents divorced, which jarred her mother from a relatively comfortable existence into deep financial distress. Jennifer, her sister and her mom spent the summer at a Jellystone Park campground near Aurora. The girls thought it was just an extended family vacation. They had no idea they were homeless.

Samardak shrugs off the suggestion that this was a life-altering experience. Mostly she remembers getting pinkeye and roasting marshmallows.

But still, it's hard not to take that experience into context as she describes the fastidiousness with which she approaches her household finances — with spreadsheets and time spent attending financial seminars, with a careful savings plan and deep relief that she and her husband have finally reached a point where, if they lost a month's income, they could survive.

''Yeah,'' she says, ''I am very particular. I know where all of the money is. I know where it all goes. I know when it's leaving. I know how much I need to come in. I know when it needs to come in. I have a spreadsheet that I have set up with different formulas in the spreadsheet so that when I take off 'X' amount for savings, how much does that cut into the gross income of the household, which would then make it the net income after you take it out. And then — when each credit card is due, when each bill is due; I have an estimate of how much is going out and how much is coming in. It gets adjusted at the end of every month and then I save it. So — yeah — I know where everything is.''

Video: Student Stories

It's hard not to take that childhood experience into context when she describes how she applied for all the college grants she could, how she managed her money carefully, ''almost obsessively,'' while attending the University of Akron, balancing her checkbook down to the penny so she'd never get hit with an overdraft charge that would undo all her penny-pinching.

It's hard not to take it into context when she begins to talk about her college loans and reveals a startling, almost incomprehensible fact:

If she makes the minimum payments of $319.58 a month, she'll be paying for her college education until she is 60 years old.

She earned a bachelor's degree in music in 1999, $21,000 in debt. After reconsidering her career — with the loans deferred — she returned for the master's, bringing the total debt to $57,000 by the time she completed the degree in 2004.

Always, throughout her schooling, she endured an internal struggle, a way of justifying this debt.

''I could have worked more hours,'' she says, ''but would have had less time to dedicate to all of the papers and reading I had to do. I would have been doing the assignments just to complete them and not to actually learn from them. So I chose a more expensive route, but also feel that I gained more from having the time to research and complete the assignments properly.''

In return for that decision, she will be near retirement and still paying for the schooling that established her career. This expense skews almost every aspect of the life she is settling into — how to afford improvements on the Cuyahoga Falls house she and her husband bought last July, when and whether they can afford to replace a car, even which brand of food to buy for their three cats.

Life itself is enough. Her husband, Dwayne Soblosky, is a National Guard soldier who does military honors for veterans' funerals and is a Boston Heights volunteer fireman. He has been deployed twice to Iraq.

She doesn't even have a child yet and already she is worried about not being able to send this hypothetical child to college — partly because she fears tuition will be completely unaffordable by then and partly because she could still have years of payments left on her own college education.

In conversation, she comes across as well-educated, witty and well-spoken, yet when the subject turns to the cost of education, her language turns visceral:

''It scares the crap outta me.''

Failing grade

Ohio's higher education system received a grade of ''F'' for affordability in a 2006 study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The independent, nonprofit research institute issues a biannual study of post-high school education.

Ohio does fairly well in other areas, scoring in the ''B'' range for preparation, participation, completion and benefits. But, the report's authors say, ''since the early 1990s, higher education has become considerably less affordable in Ohio. If these trends are not addressed, they could limit the state's access to an educated, competitive work force and weaken its economy over time.''

The cost for low- and middle-income students to attend a four-year college represents 62 percent of those students' family income.

Middle-aged adults in Northeast Ohio — people like Joe and Tina Schler — will tell you about when they attended the University of Akron, or Kent State, or Cleveland State in the 1970s and '80s, how they could generally get by with a part-time job, maybe some help from their parents, maybe a grant or small loan. It was within the reach of most middle-class teenagers who wished to attend college, and the cost of school was low enough that paying the bill didn't paint itself all over the college experience.

This context allowed for a certain amount of intellectual wandering. There may be just as many ''undecided'' majors these days, but the cost of a side road into Introduction to Philosophy or Film Appreciation is a costly one. Three-hundred eighty-four dollars a credit at Kent State, for instance.

But now — and especially in Ohio — the possibility of higher education is veering sharply out of reach. Last year, Ohio's four-year public universities had the fifth highest tuition and fees — averaging $8,445 combined — among the nation's states, according to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing.

This year, Ohio dropped to seventh highest, thanks to a freeze in undergraduate costs.

But the question remains: Is it worth it?

That's hard to quantify. Having a college degree may be expensive, but the picture is even worse for Ohioans who earn less than a four-year degree.

A Beacon Journal analysis found that from 1999 to 2006, median pay for Ohioans, ages 20 to 29, who had some college — including those with two-year associate degrees — dropped by more than a fifth, to $20,124, after adjusting for inflation.

Life experience

Cory Schler is at work.

On a raw February afternoon, the water from the carwash has frozen into a thick floe outside the garage door. Inside, Cory sprays carpet cleaner onto the floor of a Mazda sedan and drags over a big vacuum hose.

He's working with his friend Deke Ruffner, a UA education major, whom he's known since kindergarten. Riding together, they take the car up to the lot next to the airport terminal and walk inside to the Enterprise service counter to check on the day's stack of contracts.

Cory's circle of friends is unusually tightknit. He and his brother are only 18 months apart, more like close friends than siblings. They share the same social circle; the roommates they had at the university were people they'd grown up with.

His whole family is that way. Joe and Tina Schler began their married life in a house on Brown Street in Akron's Firestone Park neighborhood, across the street from the house where Joe grew up. They could have stayed there; if they had, Tina probably could have stayed home with the kids instead of working. But the extra paycheck allowed them to build a modest three-bedroom home in Green, where the school system was better. Even so, they built on a lot cater-cornered from the yard of Tina's twin sister, Terri Edwards, who had two daughters almost exactly the same ages as Cory and Joey.

Nowadays, the adult sons and their father all play on the same softball team.

Cory recognizes that he has had an insulated life. That's why he's glad he lived away from home for most of his college years. There was a rite of passage, an education beyond the classroom:

''I always make the joke about our friends that when we started college, we were like 8-year-old kids. Now — we're like 12-year-old kids.''

With the wind whipping snow across the rental car lot, the few moments of warmth inside the terminal are precious. Cory and Deke often talk about how they'd rather be in the airport to fly away somewhere, instead of to see how many cars they'll have to wash that night.

They want to get out into the world. They want to take what they've learned these past several years and grow and thrive.

And there's no reason to believe they won't. They joke that by the time this story appears in the newspaper, they may not even be $7.75-an-hour carwashers anymore; that instead they'll be impoverished rookie professionals.

They're at the end of one thing and beginning of something else — something more, they hope — working toward a promise they hope America can still keep.