15 Side Hustle Ideas For College Students (Make Up to $16/hr or More)

The college years are demanding. Then, in the middle of all that stress people attempt to ask you to perform unpaid internships for them as a form of free work.

Oh, no. We don’t accept free labor. Establishing a side hustle can help you get experience and more money than unpaid internships, plus it looks better on your CV.

It can be challenging to find additional time for side hustle when your job and final exam preparation are involved.

Starting a side hustle during your undergraduate years, however, this can provide you with a solid foundation of funds, skills, and a head start on determining your post-college career goals.

You can experiment with a digital nomad lifestyle with remote side hustles and potentially even help pay for a gap year while you’re in college.

Brainstorming side hustle ideas and figuring out how to squeeze in flexible online work. My list of top side jobs for college students is provided here.

side hustle ideas for college students

In this blog post, I’m going to show you all the best side hustle ideas for college students.

I will start with ones that can pay you $10 to 20 dollars per hour and ending with a side hustle that can make anyone, any age hundreds of thousands of dollars.

1. Selling Print on Demand T-shirts

First up is selling print on demand t-shirts in school. How it works is that there is a website called Teespring.

This website allows you to put any design on a shirt  for a cheap price.

So you can ask friends in school if they want a slick t-shirt related to their hobby or even want to put their face on a T-shirt.

If they say yes, you take their money, create the product on Teespring then give it to them in school once it arrives.

I have seen teens making real bucks from doing this in a similar manner in their 11th grade. and surely you all can definitely make a few hundred dollars.

So if you want to do this just go to teespring.com add an image to a shirt, buy the shirt for $15 to $20 then sell to student for thirty to forty dollars for an easy $20 profit 

2. AI Homework

The second side hustle is an absolute Banger that I would 100% do if I was still in school.

It’s AI homework, how this works is you do other students’ homework and sometimes even test with AI to ensure they get a good grade and in exchange you get paid very well.

Especially if you take advantage of those wealthy noob kids who don’t want to do anything.

I’ve heard of kids getting paid hundreds of dollars for simply doing rich kids homework with chat GPT.

Let’s say you do three kids’ homework every night for $5 each. That’s $75 dollars per week which equals 300 dollars per month and could make you more than one thousand dollars in one school year. 

Just find lazy or dumb students who need this service, have them send you a screenshot of their homework, ask chat GPT for the answers, then send  it back to them and get paid.

And for you all wondering why the students don’t want to do it themselves, it’s because they are not smart.

These kids are literally on TikTok for 24 hours per day, they probably couldn’t even spell chat GPT not to talk or ask it to do the assignment for them.

3. Social Media

The next up is something literally every single one of you should be doing because it’s crucial to succeed in life.

And that is social media, no matter if you want to admit it or not having a large social media following gets you insane perks, increases people’s respect for you and can make you so much money in the process.

Social media made me hundreds of thousands of dollars as a teenager and it can make you even more like that.

iShowSpeed for example he’s 17 and makes millions of dollars per month from his mom’s house with a $40 green screen and a twenty dollar webcam.

Hence, it is possible for you to also blow up and get rich with social media at any age.

So if that’s something you’re interested in I highly recommend you check out my guide to making $10K per month on social media.

4. Reselling

Number four is a top tier side hustle if you’re still in school. It’s a type of reselling, Here you provide what other students want.

Anything like candy, the custom t-shirts I talked about earlier, painting people’s shoes or even picking up Starbucks in the morning and selling it to other students.

There’s unlimited options to make money by reselling in school, you just need to decide what they demand for in your grade then get paid for supplying it.

The most popular way of reselling in school is selling candy and snacks, my neighbor made over one hundred dollars in a week doing this.

And trust me the demand will never end because school food tastes like a 27 year old Apple under a dumpster.

So students of course are willing to pay $10 for a bag of Skittles or really anything else that hasn’t been in the school lunch freezer.

On average you can profit ten to twenty dollars per hour selling snacks and candy and even more. 

If you provide services like shoe painting, bracelet making and others.

5. Referee or Sport Side Coach

Number five is another great way to make money for ages 10 to 19 especially if you’re athletic.

It’s becoming a referee or Sports side coach. Teen and student referees are very common in young soccer, basketball and football leagues on average making $30 to 50 dollars per game.

Becoming a side sports coach for one of those teams can also be pretty profitable. 

On average you get paid for a season instead of daily, but for going to around 30 practices and all the games you will be paid between $500 and 1500 dollars.

That’s great Considering you can do this at a very young age. And if you choose to be a referee, who ref two to four games per weekend that’s an easy 100 plus dollars per weekend.

To get these positions you need to have valid knowledge about the sport you’ll be working with. So ensure you apply for something you fully understand.

6. Claiming Apps Reward

Next up is a way you can get up to thousands of dollars for free right now, it’s claiming app rewards.

Basically how it works is investing apps will pay you in free stocks for signing up for their platforms.

All you have to do is sign up deposit a few dollars on them and get your free money and by the way you do have to be over 18 and live in the USA to do this. 

7. Pet Sitting

Number seven is one of the best ways to make money ever because you get the view of a cute little doll that goes all day, it’s pet sitting.

It’s no secret that pet owners love their animals so they would never want them to feel sad or lonely like in those SPCA commercials.

Hence they will pay you lots of money to Simply watch, play and feed with their beloved mammal.

On average pet sitters make fifteen to thirty dollars per hour and like I’ve said it’s not even really a work because all you have to do is play with a cute dog, cat, giraffe, lion or whatever animal they own.

8. Work with Rover 

Side hustle number eight sometimes pets sitting and pet walking coincide but regardless if they do or don’t they both pay around fifteen to thirty dollars per hour plus TIPS.

So if you’re good at watching the pet and ensure they don’t eat chocolate, licked children or impregnate other animals you should expect a nice TIPs alongside your hourly rate. 

9. Get a Job 

Now this one is controversial one because most people hate these but it is an insured way to get consistent income as a teenager unlike others in this article.

Getting a job and although I’d recommend starting a business 100 out of 100 times over getting a job.

But, it is a good learning experience provides you with a consistent paycheck and get your parents to trust you more and to get you set up with a bank account, credit card Etc.

So here’s a list of the highest paying jobs for teenager

1.  Walmart pays $20 per hour 
2. Burger King pays $14 per hour 
3. Best Buy cashiers make $20 per hour
4. Starbucks pays $15 per hour 
5. pizza delivery drivers make $17 per hour
6. Trader Joe’s pays $19 per hour

So if you do want to get a job those are some great options.

10. Landscaping

 This is the most popular side hustle ever done by teenagers. Landscaping is literally the perfect for a side hustle because you can get paid immediately once finishing the job.

You can do multiple jobs per day, it’s easy to get repeat clients and in some cases it costs no money to start because you can use your neighbor’s equipment while you mow their lawn.

On average you’d make fifty percent less than a real Landscaping Company because your client consider you to be a kid but that’s still tons of money.

Considering most landscapers charge $80 to 140 dollars per lawn.

Hence you could charge $40 to 70 dollars per lawn and even with one client you can make 2k to 3k  per year for spending one hour a week mowing the client’s lawn.

It’s a great business to start Young And even if they pay you as little as ten dollars per week that is still $520 per year for simply mowing someone’s lawn for 1 hour each week.

11. Survey Apps

The only reason I put them on this list is because I know people love them.

But to me in reality, it makes no sense to spend an hour answering questions to make $2 – $5 and even with the great apps that can pay fifteen dollars per hour. 

It’s still not worth it you can make way more from all the other side hustles in this article especially number 12

12. hanging Flyers 

Hanging Flyers can pay up to fifty dollars per hour and the work is super easy.

All you have to do is walk around a neighborhood with your headphones jamming out to hitz and hang a company’s flyers on people’s doors.

Companies normally pay you by hour or per amount of Flyers.

So it could take two hours to hang all the Flyers and they may pay you twenty dollars per hour for doing so which is 40 bucks or they could tell you to hang 300 flyers and pay you fifty dollars for doing so.

Regardless of how long it takes the only real downside to this job is when Karen’s are home and they threaten to hit you with the pow pow 3000 for being on their property.

15. Dropshipping 

Drop Shipping literally teaches you everything you need to know to become successful in any business and the concept is beyond goaded. 

You find a great product from a Chinese supplier, sell it for five times the price on your own website then keep all the profit.

It doesn’t get better than that and if you want to start Drop Shipping I highly recommend you check out my Drop Shipping guide,

it’s over 14k words of non-stop knowledge that teaches you how to make ten thousand dollars per month from Dropship.

Final Words

For y’all that don’t want to make $10k per month Drop Shipping, you can read this blog post about four secret side hustles that pay hundreds of dollars per day.

Let me know what you think about this post in the comment section and God bless……