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College vs. Paycheck

Working students can’t always choose between a job and an education. Universities shouldn’t make them.

Credit...Tiffany Jan

Ms. Stauffer is a full-time graduate student who works over 40 hours per week.

When I said I would miss the biggest party of our first year of college, my friend was dumbfounded. I had to go to work, I explained. “Just skip it,” she said, brow furrowed as she struggled to process my misguided priorities.

I’ve been a working student since I was 15 years old. That wasn’t going to change when I signed up for student loans. Whether it was teaching ballet to 4-year-olds, performing manual labor or clocking hours in customer service, jobs were as much a part of my college life as textbooks and study sessions. It turns out I was in good company: One in four full-time college students are simultaneously full-time employees, according to a 2015 report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

It wasn’t just my jobless peers who thought I was doing college the wrong way. Well-meaning professors and administrators showed the same lack of understanding for the plight of the working learner. My sophomore year, an academic adviser sternly warned me about the dangers of taking a full course load and working. “You aren’t going to be able to pull this off,” she said. “I’d strongly advise you to prioritize your education.”

She was wrong. I kept working and graduated with honors. I also graduated with debt that will take a decade to pay off.

Giving this ultimatum to students is a false choice in 2018. Over the past 20 years, tuition at public and private universities has jumped by over 150 percent, while the federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 for almost a decade. It’s fair to claim that a college education is an investment in yourself, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s an outrageously expensive investment, and eventually someone has to pay for it.

I often heard, “Take out loans!” and “Go to a school that gives you a scholarship!” I did both, but those are only partial solutions to the nuanced problem of college accessibility. Some loans and most scholarships apply only to tuition, so even if you get a full ride, you’re still on the hook for necessities like food, housing and textbooks.

So I found myself in a Catch-22 when advisers urged me to take fewer hours of course work to balance my schedule: Take less than the number of hours required to be a full-time student, lose my scholarship. Collegiate life became an impossible riddle. Which should I quit, the thing that would advance my personhood and career prospects or the thing that enabled me to pay for it?

Too many students are in the position of having to make that call on their own. Almost a third of students who take out loans drop out before completing their degree, in large part because of the financial burden. When I asked that academic adviser how I should pay for school if I quit my job, her solution was more loans.

This is, at best, an irresponsible suggestion to young people attempting to better their futures. In early May, student debt in the United States hit $1.5 trillion. As someone who has been working most of her life despite being in her early 20s, I am exhausted by the continuing idea that it isn’t a university’s responsibility to make education affordable and accessible to all kinds of students.

Much of the debate around higher-education inequity focuses on lessening the cost of tuition. Great, but the burden on working students is often left out of that conversation. We need affordable tuition, but also need to acknowledge other life expenses that are just as essential to learning.

Instead of penalizing working students like me for not being able to participate in every activity, why don’t universities seek additional ways to make higher education reachable for an increasingly diverse population of students? Not only are more students working than ever before, but nearly 40 percent of college students are over the age of 25. Nearly 60 percent of working learners are women. A quarter of working learners between ages 30 and 54 are African-American. And we’re not just working to cover costs in the short term: Working learners are upwardly mobile and more likely to move into managerial positions after graduating. Aren’t those the kind of career outcomes universities want to cultivate in their students?

When I got to graduate school, I assumed there would be more sympathy for an adult life that balanced academia and work. Yet in my first week of journalism school last fall, a professor told me I should quit my job. That breezy solution is incongruent with the realities facing the 76 percent of graduate students who log at least 30 hours of work per week.

The double life of a working grad student is filled with guilt. Guilt that I am constantly ducking out of extracurricular benefits like seminars, workshops and office hours to get to my next shift. Guilt that I need to complete a paid assignment on time before I can focus on my thesis. Guilt that I’m not making the most of the chance to continue my education by being unable to devote myself to it entirely.

By working, am I missing opportunities to enhance my education? Undoubtedly. But the truth that gets stuck in my throat every time someone encourages me to leave my job is that my work actually enables my learning. If I hope to complete my education, I can’t ignore paying for it.

There are benefits of bouncing like an academic Ping-Pong ball from class to work. The jobs I’ve worked can be passed off as résumé-building and provide me with real workplace experience that school itself can’t. Yet it’s unacceptable and frankly infuriating that a country with universities bragging about water parks and movie theaters also has students struggling with food insecurity, or that universities that want to tout employment as a byproduct of a degree would not support working students.

It isn’t working students who need to reprioritize education over employment. Universities must prioritize affordability on campus and create opportunities for students to work while staying invested in their education.

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