Why more teenagers and college students need

to work while in school

By Jeffrey J. Selingo
November 25, 2015
In researching my forthcoming book on why so many recent college graduates are
struggling to launch into a career, one concern I heard repeatedly from employers is
that too many of today’s college students lack basic work experience. Though plenty
of students completed internships while in college — a critical marker on any résumé
— many of them never had other part-time jobs, working the register at McDonald’s
or folding clothes at the Gap like previous generations did.
Indeed, many students now enter college without ever having held a part-time job in
high school. The number of teenagers who have some sort of job while in school has
dropped from nearly 40 percent in 1990 to just 20 percent today, an all-time low since
the United States started keeping track in 1948.
Some of that can be blamed on a lackluster youth job market, of course, but most
teenagers are unemployed by choice. In upper-middle-class and wealthy
neighborhoods, in particular, they are too busy doing other things, like playing sports,
studying, and following a full schedule of activities booked by their parents.
There is no replacement for managing a part-time job in something totally outside of
your career field. Research has shown that students who are employed while in high
school or college allocate their time more efficiently, learn about workplace norms
and responsibilities, and are motivated to study harder in their classes so they can
achieve a certain career goal.
And recruiters told me that today’s college graduates don’t have enough experience
learning from failures or hardships, so they are not skilled at the prioritizing and
dealing with difficult clients that come with the rush of work. ( body 3)
[Helicopter parents are not the only problem. Colleges coddle students, too.]
One reason high-school students and undergraduates used to work was to earn money
to pay for college. But one byproduct of skyrocketing college prices is that a part-time
paycheck pays a smaller proportion of the tuition bill. As a result, many students find
it easier to just take out loans instead of trying to work to pay for their higher
education.
“You can’t work your way through college anymore,” said Tony Carnevale, director
of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “Even if you
work, you have to take out loans and take on debt.”
Carnevale recently wrote a report on college students who work while going to
school. He found that the share of students working held relatively constant in the
1990s and the 2000s, but the chart below shows that it declined after the recession of
2008 and has never recovered as students turned to loans instead of jobs.
As Carnevale pointed out, even if students work full-time while going to school, they
would earn only $15,000 a year at the federal minimum wage. That’s about half of the
published tuition price at an average private college, and it’s just a few thousand
dollars more than tuition and fees at a public institution.
Passing up a job while in school means that teenagers and undergraduates lose more
than just a paycheck.
A job teaches young people how to see a rhythm to the day, especially the types of
routine work teenagers tend to get. It’s where they learn the importance of showing up
on time, keeping to a schedule, completing a list of tasks, and being accountable to a
manager who might give them their first dose of negative feedback so they finally
realize they’re not as great as their teachers, parents, and college acceptance letters
have led them to believe.
Working part-time while going to school also improves self-awareness. The
employers I interviewed said that today’s college graduates are willing to work hard
to get the job done. But all of them had stories about the behaviors they found
unacceptable: young employees checking Facebook incessantly on their computers,
leaving in the middle of a team project meeting to go for a workout at the gym, or
asking for a do-over when an assignment went awry.
A college student who attended a job-training program in Boston told me he was
surprised when the sessions weren’t canceled after an overnight snowstorm. He said
professors in college regularly canceled classes for all sorts of reasons, including the
weather.
Colleges increasingly treat students as customers, and it leaves those students
unprepared for the travails of full-time work in the real world. This is so at even the
most elite colleges and universities, as New York Times columnist Frank
Bruni discovered when he taught a course at Princeton: “From the moment I arrived
on campus to the moment I left, I got the message that the students were my clients,
and I was told more often about what I owed them, in terms of unambiguous
explanations, in terms of support, than about what they owed me, their professor.”
The more students can work in jobs alongside a variety of generations that help them
better understand specific career paths and the nuances of the workplace, the better off
they are going to be in launching into the world of work after college.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/25/why-more-
teenagers-and-college-students-need-to-work-while-in-school/

Working College Student Academic

Performance vs. a Full Time Working
Student
Laura Fletcher - Updated September 26, 2017
In an era when unemployment remains stubbornly high and employers complain that
job candidates lack skills, more and more Americans are attending college. But cuts in
state funding to higher education have caused tuition rates to soar, and job loss has
forced many families to reduce the amount of financial assistance they provide for
their college-bound children. As a result, more college students than ever --
approximately 72 percent of undergraduates -- work full- or part-time. Students who
work full time and students who work part time face serious challenges balancing
work with school, but in the process they may gain some benefits.
The Nine-to-Fivers
About 20 percent of U.S. undergraduate college students work full time while going
to school. Unfortunately, those students are 10 percent less likely to get their degrees
than their unemployed peers, according to a study commissioned by Upromise.
Because each student has only so much time and energy, the time away from school
toward full-time work is a drag on these students’ GPAs. Further, this lack of time
limits their class choices and library access. Many students who work full time must
take classes part time to do well. This means more years spent working and studying,
which can cause students to become frustrated and drop out.
The Moonlighters
Studies have shown that working 20 hours a week or less has no significant impact on
a student’s grades. In fact, students who work 15 hours a week or less while attending
college have higher grades than students who don’t work. Researchers believe that
working pushes students to manage their time more effectively and to eliminate
unproductive activities, such as watching television.
However, a full 50 percent of undergraduate part-timers clock in 20 hours or more per
week, and these students are more likely to drop out of college than students who
work fewer hours. While 86 percent of students who work less than 20 hours a week
graduate from college, only 79 percent of students who work 20 to 30 hours a week
obtain their diplomas.
The Locals
If you have to work to get through school, working on campus is your best bet.
Students who work on campus have higher GPAs and are more likely to stay in
school than students whose jobs take them off campus. Researchers believe that on-
campus jobs allow students to feel more connected to the college community and to
build stronger networks with professors and fellow students. On-campus jobs are also
more likely to be related to academics or to the student’s chosen career.
Unfortunately, as “Inside High Ed” points out, systematic budget cuts to higher
education have made these opportunities increasingly rare.
The Professionals
While working part time or full time poses stresses for the undergraduate college
student, there are benefits to working. In any kind of job, students develop many of
the business “soft skills” that employers look for, such as punctuality and an ability to
deal with a diverse array of people. Additionally, students who work off campus in
higher-level, more sophisticated jobs as bank officers or as salespeople are able to
enhance their resumes for their careers, and these students also have lower dropout
rates than those who work as cashiers or burger-flippers. If you have to work full
time, a more demanding, career-oriented job is likely to give you the psychological
boost you need to keep it up for the long haul.
https://www.theclassroom.com/working-college-student-academic-performance-
vs-full-time-working-student-16453.html