Ashley Boyd’s hours got cut in July.

The junior in business started working at Victoria’s Secret two months earlier. She’d come in to the store at least four or five days a week. On payday, most of her check went toward bills and living expenses — $500 a month for rent and about $600 a month for food and gas.

It was only by luck that she took up a second job right before Victoria’s Secret management started, little by little, to cut her hours.

“I went to change my availability, but I didn’t have any hours,” she said. “I never had to change my schedule to accommodate my second job.”

By the second week in July, she was working three days a week.

“Then it was two days. Then it was one weekend. I wasn’t on the schedule one week,” Boyd said. “The next week, I was working one day.”

Even scheduled shifts would end early.

“I’d be on break and when I came off my break, they’d tell me to go home,” Boyd said.

When she and her coworkers asked why their hours were cut, Boyd said the store didn’t have a reason, citing only that everyone’s hours were cut.

And since she renewed her availability — what hours she could work each week — for the fall semester, the store hasn’t scheduled her for any hours, she said.

So now, Boyd works primarily for her apartment complex as a leasing and marketing specialist. She has a regular schedule — 15 hours each week — and her hourly wage is similar to what she made as a Victoria’s Secret employee.

Her paycheck has to cover higher costs of groceries and gas. She tries to save money by carpooling and splitting the cost of home-cooked meals with her roommates.

She said that although she picked up the second job primarily because it would give her experience in the field she wants to go into — “it’s public relations-type stuff” — she didn’t expect her hours to be cut so drastically from her Victoria’s Secret schedule.

Boyd isn’t alone. In fact, she’s part of a trend that has started to affect college students who take up part-time jobs to fund their living expenses, according to Michael Walden, an economist and professor of agricultural and resource economics.

This group of students is more likely to be adversely affected by the comparatively higher prices of foods like milk, eggs, grains and rice, and also the high price of gas. The average gas price in Raleigh is, as of Aug. 26, $3.576. Last year at this time, it was $2.649.

The other group, which consists of students who have not taken part- or full-time jobs to help pay for their educations or cost of living expenses, are likely not as affected.

Limited job availability, combined with the poor state of the housing market and the high cost of living, classify the economy’s state as an economic slowdown, Walden said.

Although cost of living for people of both groups might be comparable, Walden said there is one distinct difference: part-time jobs, especially ones that have enough available hours for employees, are hard to come by. Part-time jobs for which employees retain a regular amount of hours are even harder to come by. So students who are relying on part-time jobs to pay their bills are going to have a harder time making ends meet if their hours get cut.

“Those who are having to be in the work force now, working part-time, those are the ones that see the most adverse effects on their finances,” Walden said. “Those who are relying on savings, college loans or other kinds of scholarships are affected less so.”

But prices are higher for everyone, he said.

“The two key component of anyone’s budget have gone up significantly,” Walden said. “Food and fuel.”

Last Wednesday, as students stepped back on the bricks of N.C. State’s campus, another necessary expense was added to the list: textbooks.

Boyd said she’s seen the tab of her textbook expenses rise, but primarily attributed that to the required texts for higher-level classes. To cut expenses, she said she avoided bookstores and bought all her textbooks online, cutting in half the $600 on textbooks that she calculated she would have spent at the store.

“It sucks because none of my books get here on time,” she said. “I get one a day. I need books now, but they’re not coming in.”

That’s one customer lost to a bookstore because of high prices and low funds. But according to figures from Rodger Berg, textbook manager of Packbackers Student Bookstore, Boyd might be in the minority when it comes to student purchases of textbooks.

More students have actually come in to buy textbooks than last year, Berg, who has been working in the textbook industry for 25 years, said.

“One thing about the business that us bookstores are in is that whenever there are less jobs available, people are going to school,” he said. “We actually do well in hard times.”

The reason is not because of increased prices, he said, but because of the number of new students who, instead of joining the work force, choose to come to school. This also includes students who have been laid off from their jobs and are returning to get a higher degree.

“When there aren’t as many jobs, people tend to go back to school to look for a job,” he said of the pattern he’s witnessed during his tenure in the trade.

Sales are “substantially higher” than those last year, he said.

The Department of Registration and Records will not know how many new students were admitted for the fall semester until it finishes processing data. It will release complete data Sept. 3.

Although Walden said he expects the economic slowdown to last until mid-2009, he did mention a fact that will help students who complete their higher education degrees.

“One thing that [the slowdown] may impress upon students is the heightened importance of education,” Walden said. “Workers who have higher levels of education have been the least adversely affected by the economy.”

He said college students can take this time to “observe the work force” and take advantage of their educational opportunities.

“They’ll do well in that respect.”