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I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.
This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.
This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.
I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?
A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.
Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.
Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.
((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))
That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.
Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.
Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?
At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.
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"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).
It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually are upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?
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It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.
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