Not so very long ago, it was possible to work a full-time job in the summer and some part-time hours during school and graduate with little to no debt. Today that is simply not the case, according to a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
“Working your way through college is no longer an option to offset growing debt,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and the report’s lead author. “College costs too much to pay for with a summer job and work study after class.”
That’s because college costs have risen so precipitously over the past few decades. Today, a student working full-time earning minimum wage would make just over $15,000 a year, which wouldn’t cover tuition, fees, room and board for the typical university.
It also used to be true that working more than 15 to 20 hours a week while enrolled in school was perilous to your educational success—too little time to focus on schoolwork, which led many to drop out before completing their degrees.
Today it’s a mixed bag. “If you’re from a relatively affluent family and you go to a relatively selective college, where you get a lot more support and where you’re more likely to have work related to your field of study, work is not a bad thing,” Carnevale says. “It looks like it improves grades and career prospects, especially when the work and the learning are aligned.”
But there’s the other side of the coin: “For disadvantaged students with the least support, too much work can be one of the many factors that undermines degree completion,” Carnevale says.
That’s because less advantaged students may attend less selective colleges that offer less support for students, and they’re much less likely to be working in their field of study. That minimum-wage job flipping burgers doesn’t further your career prospects and keeps you from spending more time on your schoolwork, often leading students to drop out.
The other knock against full-time work for disadvantaged students is that it keeps them from taking on other valuable work experience, such as paid internships, that could position them for a better job. The starting salary for college grads with a paid internship under their belts was $52,000, compared to $36,000 for those who had an unpaid internship and $37,000 for those who didn’t complete an internship.
What’s more, 63% of college grads with a paid internship on their resumes got job offers, compared to 37% of those with unpaid internships and 35% with no internships.
To help students moving forward, experts believe there should be more information available about what a particular degree will get you upon graduation. “We need much stronger connections between learning and work,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown Center and another co-author of the report. “When students pick a major or field of study, they need to be told up front what kind of career it likely leads to and how much money they are likely to make.”
That kind of transparency would allow students to make informed decisions about the amount of debt they take on and whether a field of study even makes sense in the end. "It's about connecting programs and careers," Carnevale says. "At a minimum, that's a cheap solution."
