Broke college students are getting increasingly creative in their efforts to make money while balancing their studies. These innovative approaches enable college students to support themselves financially while gaining valuable skills and experience.
1. Drive for a Rideshare Company
College students need designated drivers, so take advantage of this particularly demanding market by signing up to drive for a rideshare company. While Uber and Lyft don’t pay as well as they used to, it’s still an easy way to make money while listening to music and driving your fellow students around. Don’t have a car? Use your bike and be a delivery person for Uber Eats or DoorDash!
2. Freelance Writing Gigs
Despite the rise of artificial intelligence, writers will always be in demand. If you have a penchant for savvy sentences and engaging the reader, you’ll be blown away by what you can write and be paid for! From real estate photo captions to blog posts to editing people’s novels, freelance writing gigs are some of the most lucrative side hustles in existence. Of course, you’ll have to hustle for the best gigs!
3. Make an Etsy Shop
If you consider yourself creative, you should take advantage of your unique skillset and set up an Etsy shop. People love buying authentic, hand-made items, and most shoppers love to support college students. It doesn’t matter if you’re handy with wood, have a knack for calligraphy, or are great at upcycling gently used items; Etsy is a proven money-making method!
4. Sell Something Crazy on eBay
True story: In college, my friends and I were strapped for cash and needed a get-rich-quick scheme to be sufficiently prepared for that weekend’s festivities. So we put up an eBay auction where we offered one phone call daily for a month to whoever won the auction. Each one-minute call was filled with positive thoughts and comments toward whoever won it. A man in Minnesota won the auction for the princely sum of $63. We all drank very well for the next few weekends, and the winner was blasted with positivity for the next month. It was a win-win situation all around!
5. Start a Blog
Blogs will still be in vogue in 2024; billions of internet users can’t get enough of reading articles on the web. If you have a passion (or even a passing interest) for a particular topic, let the world read what you say about it! Blogs are perfect for college students to hone their writing skills; you never know when your blog will blow up, go viral, and earn you significant money!
6. Start a Newsletter
Digital newsletters delivered to your email inbox each week are becoming increasingly popular in 2023, and for a good reason: They’re an all-in-one solution to whatever you’re interested in! Curating a customizable newsletter can attract a large audience if you consider yourself an expert on a subject. Hopefully, over time, your newsletter will become popular enough to sell ad space, attract sponsors, and become a profitable side hustle.
7. Donate Your Body to Science
If stereotypical 90s sitcoms taught us anything, college-aged men and women can always fall back on donating their bodies to science to make a few extra bucks. Whether it’s volunteering for experimental drugs or signing up for a sleep experiment, college campuses are the Wild West when it comes to handing over money to people if they agree to be at the mercy of science and technology! I would never do this personally, but I don’t judge anyone who would.
8. Offer a Range of Services
If you’re a handy, dependable, or otherwise hard worker, you can offer your services to whoever needs them! “Depending on where your campus is located geographically and if there is a suburb nearby, you could make some nice side cash shoveling snow, raking leaves, or power washing driveways. It might require a small investment up front for materials, but marketing could be free with programs like Canva, your college printer, and pages like Facebook or the Neighborhood app.” Whatever talent or skill you have, you can put it to good use on campus and make decent money doing it.
9. Work on Campus
Your local college campus has plenty of job opportunities. From working in the campus bookstore to coffee shops to on-campus facilities like the gym (and everywhere in between), colleges always look for able-bodied men and women to join their ranks. Most jobs will work around class schedules, sweetening the deal even further. Even if you only want one or two shifts a week, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make serious cash!
10. Sell Your Plasma
Forget about selling blood; selling plasma is what all the cool kids do nowadays. You can receive upwards of $150 each time you donate plasma to your local blood bank; I don’t need to tell you how much adult beverages that kind of money can buy you and your friends, do I? While there’s certainly a limit on how often you can donate, this overlooked money-making method is very underrated in 2024.
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