If you're lucky enough to have wealthy parents, chances are that financing your way through college will be a doddle. If your folks are less well-off or are positively poor, you're in for a tough few years.

The full maintenance grant for a student living away from home currently stands at £1,653 or £45.89 a week based on an eight-and-a-half month academic year. Students living less than 15 miles from college are entitled to an adjacent rate of £660 a year or £18.33 per week.

Grants are increased annually in line with the cost of living - but don't hold your breath. In 1997, the full maintenance grant was increased by 77p per week, while the adjacent grant went up by just 36p weekly.

Each year, Barry Kehoe, director of student services at DCU, publishes figures on the cost of going to college. He estimates that the true annual cost of attending third level is somewhere in the region of £4,471 for a student living away from home. The grant, he says, covers only 37 per cent of the cost of a student living away from home and 27 per cent for a student living at home.

Increasingly, the grant pays only the rent. "Dublin students are paying around £45 a week in rent," comments Glenn Mehta, president of Tallaght IT's student union. He argues in favour of extra funding for students attending college in high-rent areas - and it's not only students in Dublin who are affected. In Limerick, for example, rents are escalating. Here, you can expect to pay between £30 and £40 a week, according Tara McCabe, UL's student union welfare officer.

Apart from the low level of grants, a major difficulty is the fact that, to qualify, parental income must be extremely small. A family with fewer than four dependent children must have no more than £18,308 to qualify for a full maintenance grant for a child.

Most families have to dig deep into their pockets to keep children at college, but low income families are unable to do this. It's impossible for them to make up the shortfall between the actual cost of college and the grant.

More and more students are being forced to take part time jobs. USI's Poverty Survey 1997/98 shows that more than half of all third-level students (57 per cent) now have to do part-time work. Almost 60 per cent of these admit that their work interferes with their studies.

"If you're a 2:1 student and have to work 20 to 30 hours a week, you're likely only to get a 2:2," explains the president of TCD's student union, Adrian Langan. "If you study well during the year, you pass your exams - but if you fail, you have to repeat in September, which means you can't work all summer long and earn enough to pay your way through college next year."

Even worse is the fact that, if you fail your exams and want to repeat a year, you forfeit your grant for that year and you lose your right to free fees in the repeat year.

The poorer the student, the longer he or she will have to work to pay for college. One student admits to doing a full-time course which involved 27 hours of lectures each week and working in a part-time job for 30 hours a week: "I worked Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights, all day Saturday and most of Sunday, so the only time I had to do projects was on Monday and Tuesday nights." "Some people are forced to miss lectures to go to work," notes Mehta. "It's disgraceful that this has to happen but, for many people, it's a necessity."

It's must be noted, too, that students working long hours in part-time jobs have a diminished college social life, lose out on exercise and run the risk of suffering from stress or ill health.

For some students, though, part-time work is simply not an option. Science students, for example, are usually faced with a nine-to-five schedule which makes holding down a job well nigh impossible.

For them and for people who wish to limit working hours, a bank loan may be the solution. Bank of Ireland, AIB and Ulster Bank all have specialised student offices, some on campus. So, it's worth talking to them as early as possible to find out what's available.

IF all this sounds gloomy, don't be downhearted. The fact remains that most people do manage to get by at college and one way or another manage to have the time of their lives. Besides, there are snippets of good news.

Maintenance grants for PLC students are finally in the process of being paid out and most recipients should get their money by the end of this month. This year for the first time, mature students living away from home qualify for the full, rather than the adjacent, maintenance grant.