While taking 12 credit hours at college, she works four nights, 28 hours a week, at a Wal-Mart store from 3 to 10 p.m.

When she's done at the store on Friday nights and also Saturdays, she changes out of her blue Wal-Mart shirt and into an entirely different outfit. She puts on heels and a T-shirt or a form-fitting dress to work crowds as a model and hostess in Westport or the Power & Light District until about 2 a.m., recruiting pretty and personable young women for CQC Promotions.

The Olathe, Kan., home-based company provides models and party hostesses to companies. Yang, who is studying fashion merchandizing and wants to be a model and designer, is featured in an ad for a coming California car show.

For her, the job offers modeling credit and fun along with the $20 to $25 an hour she makes to help save for college. She uses her Wal-Mart money to pay for her car, phone, food, gas and utilities.

"When I first started going to college, it was really hard for me," Yang said of working full time and studying. "I never got any sleep at all. I had to work almost as much as I went to school just to pay for school."

It was so exhausting, she said, that she urged her two younger sisters, Pachia and Seenhiam, to do everything they could in high school to get great grades and scholarships.

"I didn't want it to be as hard for them," Yang said.

She said Pachia, 22, is now in her third year at St. Catherine University in Minnesota. Seenhiam, 20, is at the University of Central Arkansas. Both, she said, have scholarships that have saved them from her work schedule.

Working has costs in terms of time, psychology, social life and, for many, grades.

But not for Quentin Savwoir, who has a 4.0 average as a senior at Rockhurst University.

Savwoir, 26, of Kansas City works full time and attends school full time too, while also co-launching a business, Nuts and Bolts, featuring environmentally friendly custom underwear for men.

His 40 hours-a-week job as a youth advocate at Synergy House, serving homeless teens, is necessary.

Rockhurst's tuition alone is $30,000. He has already mounted more than $10,000 in loan debt. He has a Pell grant for low-income students. The maximum amount is $5,500.

Savwoir brings home about $1,500 a month before taxes. He has rent, food, utilities, and on and on.

"It's a real struggle," he said. "I feel like I have a purpose in life, and to achieve that I have to be educated. In order to be educated, I have to work. It's not ideal, but I have to work."

Savwoir spent his spring break last week with a stack of books, seated in front of a laptop at a desk in his River Market apartment getting a jump on several projects due at the end of the year.

"I don't even have time to enjoy my 4.0," he said. "I don't have a social life. It's all about work and school."

Colleen Monaghan, 22, an Overland Park, Kan., senior majoring in journalism at KU, said she also had no choice.

Her parents, she said, told her, "'You have got to get a job.' Not working is not an option."

Monaghan tends bar 30 hours a week at The Wheel. Her hope is to someday work in London, and she has a job interview there next week during KU's spring break.

Until she moved back home this year to save money for London, most of her paycheck went for rent, along with her car and other bills. Some nights she works until closing and grabs a little sleep before heading back to serve the bar's opening crowd and work into the dinner shift.