There are a lot of jobs at Amherst available to kids without work study awards. Also a lot for kids who do have them.
Hanna, I know you meant well with your post (#257), but as a response to my comment about the impact on campus life of the need to maintain paid employment, unfortunately it comes off as the type of blithe and trivializing comment that my kids and their working-class peers found so frustrating when spoken by wealthy classmates, faculty, or other campus staff.
To start with - and to add to my earlier comment - the time when the impact of work vs. campus life is felt most keenly is during freshman year. First year students are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to finding campus jobs. The better jobs tend to go to the upper-level students, both because those students have more education and experience, and because as students spend time on campus they develop the knowledge and connections to line up better jobs. Added to that is the fact that the first year students are young and new to the college experience, and are potentially encountered significantly higher academic demands as compared to the public high schools that most are coming from – plus the first year of college tends to be a time when other student are spending the most time exploring social options, making friends, and integrating themselves into campus life.
Your post comes off as suggesting that Harvard’s elite, audition-only Sunday choir, which pays its 50 members minimum wage as compensation for their demanding performance schedule, is some sort of viable alternative for the financially needy students whose survival on campus depends on their ability to earn enough to meet whatever expenses aren’t covered by financial aid. I’d note that a quick check of the Harvard web site showed that most of the available work-study jobs pay somewhat above minimum wage (and a few pay well above that)-- so it is rather condescending to suggest that as a solution the cultural challenge that the lower income student face with juggling school and employment. If there are low income students who also happen to be talented and dedicated singers who are able to make the cut to get selected for that choir - then even participating in that choir would be something of a financial sacrifice because of the opportunity cost entailed in having to forego higher paying jobs.
And yes there are paid research lab positions – every campus has them – but again those positions are competitive and not every student is majoring in a field where those would be appropriate.
The problem is that when someone is reliant on their own earnings to get by, their choices are limited. They can hope for a job that is enjoyable and fits their interests, but they have to take what they can get, and they generally have a need to maximize their earnings, because even the highest-paying part-time work available to them probably still leaves them needing to budget carefully. The availability of some more desirable jobs simply doesn’t negate the challenges that students from poor or working-class families face when they arrive on a campus surrounded by students from privileged backgrounds, and often faculty and staff who are equally insensitive to the fact that a significant fraction of students on campus actually need to earn money to get by.
It’s not helpful to marginalize students further by making them invisible. The issue I raised has nothing to do with the student feeling embarrassed because others know they receive financial aid. Nor is it a benefit to those students that many of the more desirable jobs are not reserved for work study students, thus making them more competitive: how is it any consolation for a student wo needs work to know that the paid lab research position in the chemistry department has gone to a student from a privileged background, who may equally cherish the opportunity to work in the lab, but certainly doesn’t need the money.
And yes – it may be true that there are people on campus who “can’t tell” who is on financial aid … but that’s because they aren’t paying attention and is in no way helpful to those who are frustrated and struggling because of the competing demands of academics and work.
“It’s not helpful to marginalize students further by making them invisible.”
I don’t think that’s fair. There’s a lot of space between placing a scarlet letter on people and making them invisible. Shouldn’t students have a choice about whether to be out of the closet, so to speak, about their financial situation?
You are exaggerating what I said in my post. I said that campuses can FURTHER INTEGRATE students – in other words, invest in attempts to equalize opportunities and create cross-class peer interaction. I never said or implied that at any campus, it’s as easy to be rich as it is to be poor. It isn’t. But it’s also true that some schools are investing more than others to ameliorate these problems. Many schools DON’T offer a paid choir or paid tour guide positions or thousands of well-funded research opportunities (which are neither confined to the sciences, nor equal from campus to campus). I think these things can help and are part of the model more schools should be adopting.
BTW, U-Choir’s “demanding” regular schedule is five hours a week, including both rehearsal and performance. The members who perform more often are paid more.
If you have a solution to the fact that upperclassmen are better qualified for the best jobs than are freshmen, I’d love to hear it. My first psychology research position was cleaning rat poop. That’s how it goes.
The issue I raised in my posts has absolutely nothing to do with being “out of the closet”.
So I don’t know where the “scarlet letter” idea comes from, but it certainly never came from me.
I also never said that there was a barrier based on status to “cross class peer interaction”.
The barrier is based on TIME and MONEY.
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BTW, U-Choir’s “demanding” regular schedule is five hours a week,
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All the more reason why it isn’t a viable “job” for a student who needs to work 10 or 15 or 20 hours a week.
Students who don’t have their mommy and daddy sending a generous allowance check every month need to work X number of hours at Y rate of pay to earn Z They live with that reality every day of their lives. If they want to do something valuable to their education or desirable to them for any reason – for example, if my DD wanted to attend a concert in NYC or fund a summer internship abroad that is +X more hours they need to work.
These kids aren’t working for pin money or pocket change. As the WaPo article is pointing out, some of those kids are working to send money back home.
I’m not sure if this was discussed upthread, but should the specific issue of working to send money home even be a concern of a university? Or perhaps who should this issue concern?
It may be a bad form to mention Ivy athletes in this thread but there are 1500+ of them spending 20+ hours/week on their sport and still having meaningful college experience. Talking specifically about Columbia athletes - many of them are riding buses to the athletic complex 100+ Manhattan streets back and forth every day. Some athletes even at the no-loan schools take out loans because they do not have time to work. Yes, they miss concerts and other interesting events on campus and beyond and their social life may be more limited but they are not crying.
Summer jobs, part time work during the school year and federal student loans are all aspects of many college students experience. Why should a student on full financial aide at an elite college’s experience be any different?
Our daughter is at an elite college and we are a full pay family. She has a part time job on campus during the school year and works full time in the summer.
Is this an unreasonable expectation of any student?
32% of millennials live with their parents, according to a new survey. One of the biggest differences we’ve noticed between the elite school grads and the state school grads from middle class families in our town is that all of the elite school grads have launched, whereas a good number of the state school grad are underemployed and living with mom and dad. Again, your experience may be different, but in ours an elite school education provides greater opportunity for social mobility.
^ I am also seeing this in our locale. But, I think some of it might have to do with the lack of direction by both the schools and the parents. The three graduates I know that are coming home this week after college graduation have not found jobs in their fields (neuroscience, psychology, and ?)
and will go back to their low-paying high school/summer jobs. Some of this has to do with their choice of majors (and lack of jobs in the field without an advanced degree), lack of internships, and unwillingness to launch from the family. Someone along the way should have mentioned the importance of these things.
The study found that the living at home was most common among those without college degrees. In my also anecdotal experience, there are kids from State schools fully launched and kids from Yale living at home while figure themselves out. Or from elite schools with mom and dad footing the bill. Most the graduates I can think of moved out almost immediately, if they had parents with enough money to help them out with the costs of obtaining an apartment, while those from lesser means lived at home for a few months to save up enough of their own money to pay first, last, security and brokers fees and then got an apartment. The ones at home are either going to school or in a very low paying field. Thus, it seems that being fully launched is more dependent on the parent’s economic status than on where the student went to college.
Wow @calmom you really have an axe to grind. I think that @hanna was illustrating how a student can combine an EC with work and get paid to do something they would ordinarily be doing for free…it was just one example at one school.
Whether you are rich, poor, or somewhere in between, you need to tell your kids that finding a job senior year (unless they’ve already got a plan to apply to grad school or have already been notified that they are a Rhodes finalist) is Job 1. More important than being the best president their fraternity has ever seen; more important than finishing a triple major (who cares?); more important than planning a spring break trip to Aruba.
It astonishes me how many kids haul their stuff home after graduation, unpack, take a week or so to unwind, and then discover that the job they thought they could get (media company, ad agency, bank, insurance company, museum, NGO/nonprofit, local or state government, think tank) is being occupied by a kid who signed on the dotted line over Spring break (or earlier in the case of banks and large corporations which typically recruit early senior year).
Rich kids can live off mom and dad- but they are still unlaunched and unemployed. Poor kids need to go back to folding sweaters at the Gap just to have the cash coming in. But I find that cluelessness is an equal opportunity disease these days.
Yes- you may get lucky and a local private school needs to hire a language arts teacher (no teaching certificate required) in August when a long-time teacher discovers that he/she needs to take a medical leave. Yes, you may get lucky and one of the 500 resumes you send out to online postings might land and get you a job. Yes, you may get lucky. But your college has a career services center which can help you manage your “luck” with a solid transition plan.
Well, My two state school grads have been fully “launched” since graduating from college. That is typical of their friends who went to state schools as well.
This is how clueless my husband and I were: we did not realize that in D’s field (accounting), the path towards employment actually began (and sometimes ended) the fall of junior year. That was when the Big Four accounting firms interviewed on-campus for summer interns, which were de facto interviews for permanent positions upon graduation. What did we know? We’re scientists.
D really wanted to work for a Big Four firm, so she was familiar with the career services center at her school and was actually taking a non-credit course geared towards launching accountants upon graduation. Thank goodness for career services!
In D’s class, I saw no clear distinction between launchers and loafers, at least as to where they went to school. (sorry, couldn’t resist the alliteration - I don’t mean to suggest that all who have trouble launching are slackers…) Most of her friends - almost all of whom went to state schools or mid-tier colleges - had jobs soon after graduation and hit the ground running.
Accounting is one of those fields where jobs are plentiful. The Big Four recruit from nearly every college that offers an accounting program. Sure, they may go much deeper into the class at a top Accounting school, but they still consider resume’s from a Tier 3 college (however defined).
Not sure that the timing is all that different. Science majors need to hook up with on-campus or local research in their Junior year…
^^ oops - I guess I didn’t make myself clear. Those launchers and loafers to which I referred were my D’s high school friends, not her college friends. None of that high school cohort were accountants except for my D. Yes, she had a job at graduation, but then so did her HS friends who majored in engineering (…duh…), sociology, history, and English (two of them). The few who didn’t have jobs upon graduation majored in English and chemistry and maybe marketing? Sorry, I don’t know all of their majors.
Again, no observable differences between private school/public universities/directional colleges.
But is that because of the treatment effect of going to elite schools or because of the selection effect of elite schools admitting only those most likely to succeed?
Who knows, ucbalumnus? What I do know is that the firm that hired my S right out of college recruits at tippy top tier schools for certain positions, while for other jobs they visit schools farther down the ladder. The first group of new employees are getting paid a good bit more, thereby increasing their options for launching. Is this happening because they came into college already bright and successful and improved while there, making them capable of handling the higher position? Or is the offer of the higher position due to the prestige of their degree and the accompanying assumption they are bright and successful? No doubt some of both.
A lot of employers aren’t very good at evaluating whether or not someone is actually smart or capable of getting the job done. It’s often true that it takes one to know one, but it’s further true that not every talented person is good at finding other talented people. For every highly skilled person, there are 5 people of mediocre to slightly able average capability who can fool an average person into believing they are smart. That being so, even though they are horribly insufficient, many stick to strictly objective criteria to judge people. Objective criteria like your major, GPA, school of graduation, and for those who are already in the workforce: previous salary, previous rank, reputation of previous company, etc.
People who are consistently capable of finding highly talented people to do the job with a high degree of accuracy are worth millions of dollars as recruiters or as businesspeople. It goes without saying that those are rare, and the rest will often fall back on cheap indicators like school. Of course, it’s not quite so simple in general because there’s always more to it that that (field, company, culture, etc.).
Neo, do you work in corporate recruiting? You have a shaky command of the facts.
My company doesn’t recruit at Swarthmore because it’s a cheap indicator. We recruit there because over the last 20 years we have had a consistently high hit rate (the number of kids who proceed to an offer) and a consistently high yield rate (the number of kids who accept an offer) AND a consistently high retention rate of young employees who stay, do well, get promoted, and then get promoted again.
I may be horribly insufficient at my job (perfectly willing to concede that) but I am tolerably competent at evaluating a set of numbers. Colleges which have a high hit rate, high yield rate, and high retention rate are going to stay on the recruiting calendar- all things being equal. Once we observe that those numbers start to deviate from a long held pattern, we evaluate.
You are pretty snarky in assuming that some of the largest organizations in the world are massively stupid when it comes to recruiting.
GPA is hardly an objective criteria. I could show you resumes of kids with a 4.0 who have taken the easiest classes that their university offers, and show you resumes of kids with a 3.0 who are off the charts intellects, hard-workers, soak up knowledge like a sponge, high performers who go through life challenging themselves.
Do YOU want to manage the employee who spent four years taking the easy way out? Most people don’t.