Some good research done there. I didnt know about the federal aid not the additional funds required. I dont know much more about the school except they do hit up alumni pretty hard. But then, so does every other college.
College of the Ozarks is also unique because 1. its well established and 2. in a very good area for tourism.
Well thinking back to my college days, low paying crappy jobs were the norm. I washed dishes. Sure some kids got good work in say computers but those were rare.
Those are for the public colleges. Not the private ones like COTO.
College graduates are finding that if they can’t list field-related work experiences on their resume, they will have a hard time landing a job in their field.
The days when you could get a job right out of college with zero experience are rapidly coming to end. I know that at my workplace, we don’t give interviews to anyone with “hotel chambermaid” as their last job. Not even for entry-level positions. I hate that it is this way because I’m sure we are screening out perfectly good (and potentially diverse) candidates. But when you’re getting hundreds of applications for a job opening and 80% of the applicants have multiple internships under their belt, then guess which candidates get called in for the interview? It likely won’t be the folks who baked fruitcakes to put themselves through college.
It might be different in non-STEM jobs, however.
I had to look up what STEM was (College and university degree programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
I had a friend who had a degree in Civil Engineering and her friend and she got jobs within a few months of graduation. I heard a couple of engineering students debating which job offer to take after their graduation. I also know Accounting and IT Majors who had pending offers as soon as they graduated. So what I’ve seen at least in Hawaii, at least some STEM graduates are in high demand.
Internships are good, especially if they allow the student to do something meaningful rather than making coffee. Working in a job related to their field is also fine especially if it offsets some of the costs.
I curse the time I wasted working in restaurants and bars, I didn’t need it for school, just allowed me to have a nicer lifestyle in college.
I am not saying STEM grads aren’t getting jobs right out of school. I am saying that the ones who tend to get hired in their fields post-graduation usually already have some field-related work experience to hang their hat on. Such work experience can be obtained through internships, co-ops, or regular jobs held while a student is in school.
Well wait a second.
Remember they are there for FOUR YEARS. Each year they get a little higher level job in that area.
So yes, as a freshman at COTO probably they do work as a chambermaid. But what about the next year? Next year they supervise all the other new freshmen chambermaids. Next year, front desk or accounting. Next year assistant manager.
Sounds good to me. I know if I worked at a hotel chain that resume would look pretty damn good!
Or in making fruitcakes yes, the first year or 2 its all in production but by senior year maybe they are in charge of sales and marketing?
Or in their farm, first year its pushing a shovel full of manure. But by senior year maybe they are overseeing a whole “farm to table” program.
Thing is they can put on a resume how they worked in a field for the past 4 years and worked their way up from the basics to a higher level job or a supervisory position.
COTO just started an engineering program in 2016 and will have its first graduating class in 2019 with around 24 students. But they seem to have a solid program where they will work side by side with real engineers and get real life experience. But only time will tell. Its all about the schools reputation, networking, and making contacts.
Having management experience is great. But if I am looking to hire a full-time data scientist and I have to choose between someone who has spent the last two years doing part-time work for a statistician versus someone who has spent the last two years doing part-time work in a fruitcake kitchen, it is not going to be a hard decision for me. Even if the fruitcake guy has more management experience. Because I am not looking for a manager. I am looking for a data geek.
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Economically, having students work for the college is likely to be inefficient. The students will have to be selected to have some combination of academic aptitude and work skills, or (what likely happens) there’s some lowest common denominator involved and the work they do is essentially unskilled labor
Why not just have college students work jobs and use their income to pay for tuition? It’s not clear that there are major gains in combining the two in one place.
If you want to make it possible to work your way through college, you don’t need to employ your students, you just need to make college tuition, room, and board something that can be paid with the average wages from a local 30-hour a week job that an above average student with a high school education can get.
From an economics point of view, there is no difference. Of course, from an economics point of view, it would probably be more efficient to have the student defer their payment until after they graduate and pay it off with what one would presume to be higher wages. Perhaps charge them a small amount of interest to compensate for the fact that the payment is delayed. We could call such a program ‘student loans’ or some such.
From a pragmatic point of view, there is a big difference. If I have a class project that makes me present at a conference and need three days off, the college can say, “Sure, have fun.” Walmart is likely to say, “You’re scheduled those days, deal.” If I have finals that I need to study for, I can tell my college, “That’s finals week, I really need a light schedule.” and they can say “Makes sense.” Amazon Warehousing says, “It’s the Christmas Season, you’re working 60 hours that week or you’re fired.” If my dorms close the week of Thanksgiving, the college will likely give you the week off. Target will likely schedule you to deal with the Black Friday rush, forcing you to find some sort of place to live for a week or risk your job. There’s also the simple reality that you actually have to have those jobs in the community in which the school is located. For some schools it wouldn’t be a problem, but for most it is. Working for your school is much better because they understand that you’re a student first and a worker second. McDonald’s simply sees you as a replaceable drone who either adds value to their bottom line or subtracts from it and if you subtract from it, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
That’s not possible for everyone (if you have 20 freshman chambermaids this year, you don’t need 20 supervisors next year) and it actually doesn’t seem to be possible for anyone. If you spent a few minutes looking on their website, you would see that the student positions are for assistants and looking at the HR page shows that they are recruiting full-time paid staff with multiple years of experience for Hotel Manager, Assistant Banquet manager, Kitchen Supervisor, Retail Merchandiser , etc. The students will spend four years doing the same low level work that students at other colleges do in return for Federal Work study funds
No, there’s a huge difference. A university is necessarily going to be a much more limited employer than every other employer out there combined. Which means that talents will go underutilized.
Your other points about the ways that the university can be an employer that better fits students schedules and needs are true, but I’m not convinced they make up for the downsides.
It seems to me that a university office tasked with liaising between local businesses and helping their students find local employment that wouldn’t disrupt their studies might be a much better way to do this.
Milking cows, making fruitcake, and waiting on tables are not “valuable job skills”. At least not for the jobs people go to college for.
I don’t see this as being a viable economic model. The main purpose of a school is supposed to be educating its students. There’s not enough need for unspecialized labor to offer employment for all the students.
So if a school wants to offer all its students jobs, it has to expand out of education and do things like make fruitcakes. And a business which is half bakery and half college isn’t doing wither half very well. People who want a job in a bakery would be better off finding a regular bakery where they can work a fulltime job and people who want an education would be better off finding a regular college where they can be fulltime students.
I doubt College of the Ozarks would be able to function this way if it wasn’t heavily marketing itself to conservative Christians and telling them they should feel obligated to support the school/bakery. It couldn’t compete on a level playing field against a regular college or a regular bakery.
Look, I did some number crunching using the skills I picked up in college not milking cows or baking confections. I would need to sell over 1,500 fruitcakes to cover current one year tuition. There are over 5000 students, which translates to over 7.5 million fruitcakes per year. And that’s just one elite-ish private university.
I just don’t see how having students do odd jobs or hold glorified bake sales can cover the main costs of running a major university.
Yeah, sounds like a great school. No opposite sex in the dorm rooms. No same sex in the dorm rooms. The only fruitcakes are the ones baked by students in preparation for their future career.
To a point, pretty well any job helps people get valuable job skills, especially if they’ve never had one before. You can skim through school showing up late, missing classes and only doing part of the work, but you can still get a good grade, if you’re doing well enough at the rest of it. You can’t do well at a job like that though.
Take milking cows; cows don’t listen to excuses, or care if you milked them really well last time and you’ll try extra hard next time, so on aggregate you’re doing it OK. You figure you don’t feel like it today and have a lie in, that’s a big problem . Better those kids that need help with that sort of thing figure it out while at college where there’s consequences but not dire consequences, rather than getting through the course, getting the entry level position in their ideal career, then not showing up to their first serious meeting because they had a late one last night, and getting let go.
The problem is, the sort of work they’re doing here is probably only going to teach the same skills you can get at any first job, and four years of it isn’t going to teach students any more than they learnt in the first year. If they did a bit of that as an initial stage in a wider programme of work-based learning, it’d be fine. It’s not doing scut work that’s a problem, it’s doing only that.
Don’t count on it. I really doubt the College of the Ozarks closes down the hotel or restaurants during finals week and they can’t close down the dining halls while the students are still on campus taking finals. So maybe some students get accommodations in their work schedules for academic reasons- but it certainly isn’t all.
I think the broader question is: can students work their way through college? Largely, the answer is no. In some places, it’s possible for people with a high school education to cover basic living expenses with wages from part-time work that they could do while attending school, but it’s pretty unlikely they can also cover tuition. In many places where universities actually exist, the cost of living is high enough that even covering basic living expenses is a major challenge on 20-30 hours a week of wages.