Is working a menial job during college an economically rational thing to do?

Great Debates
1

I grew up in a family where it would have been unthinkable for me to work a job for the money during my schooling. Luckily, I mostly got by on scholarships & grants but if I had needed the money, it was understood that my parents would have just taken care of it. To them, school was a time for learning, I did do some work that was of direct educational value to my education but the goal was always to build a solid base of education so that earning could happen later.

However, a lot of my peers were in school and also waitressing or working in retail or some other job that was not directly related to their major. Obviously, the economic calculus for this is different for every single person but do you think these people were making the economically rational choice or would it have been better to go into more debt now in order to have more time to focus on schooling?

2

I think working for a year either before I went to university or during my first year would have been a wiser choice than going straight through. This is partly because of how much of a pain in the ass Centrelink was because they didn’t consider me independant from my parents, but also because I think it would have better prepared me to deal with the workload during my final year.

3

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4

What makes you think they had the option of working or not?

I worked while going to school because it was the only way I could go to school, pay for my tuition and books, and still support myself. Even student loans won’t pay every expense.

My family was just the opposite of yours anyway. We were all told at an early age that if we wanted to go to school, we were going to have to learn to work hard, because school wasn’t free and we were responsible for it. And that wasn’t just because we were poor - it was our philosophy.

The idea being that working your own way through school means that you understand the value of your education and you don’t take it lightly, and that you learn through hard experience how much jobs suck when you don’t have a college degree. It also forces you to think hard about your faculty of choice and whether you will be able to find a career when you’re through. Working several years in a retail store or swinging an axe is a great motivator for college.

When I got out of high school, I didn’t have any money saved. So I had to go to work full-time for three years to save up money to go to college, and line up part time work while in school. That taught me a lesson about planning for the future.

We’re doing the same thing with our daughter. She’s 13, and she’s already had a paper route, and she’s excited to get a ‘real job’ next year, probably working weekends at a fast food place or something. She’s saving money for college, and we pretty much match everything she saves. We could easily afford to just send her, and if absolutely necessary we’ll pay what we have to, and if she takes student loans, we’ll pay them out the day she graduates so she can get a good start in life. If we see she’s working hard in school and a job is really a strain, we’ll just support her then and let her concentrate on her studies.

But she doesn’t need to know any of that. As far as she knows, college is the first thing you really have to prepare to be able to do on your own. So the idea of scholarships and bursaries starts to loom in importance, and she really works hard in school because she already knows what it would mean to her if she got significant educational aid.

So yes, I think working while in college (or at least to save enough for college beforehand) is perfectly rational.

5

I know that the people at work who recruit our new graduates are pretty disdainful of applicants that have no work history. Everyone with any tertiary education knows that the workload leaves plenty of time to work so your working peers would be more likely to score an interview.

6

I had a job from the time I was 15, and I worked and supported myself through the last half of my junior year and my senior year in HS [emancipated minor] and worked my way through college, and had no loan debt to burden me thanks to a combination of savings, trust fund, scholarships and wages.

Please not it was hard as hell, and not many people can really manage to do it without a lot of stress, I do wish I could have had a free ride, and a lot less stress in my life but it didn’t happen. I made my share of minor mistakes but survived =)

7

I come from a culture where students are expected to work, and are often looked down on if they don’t. In fact, I’d say that in certain sectors - like waiting tables - something like half of the workforce consists of college students.

Working shouldn’t take away from your studying time, it should take away from your drinking and playing videogames time.

8

In other words: you’re a grown up. If you *can *work, you *should *work.

9

If you’re in a tough enough program there isn’t plenty of time. I had more free time getting a Ph.D. in chemistry than I did during undergrad. In grad school we were expected to work six 12-hour days minimum, and for the slow ones here (i.e. me) that wasn’t ever enough time to get enough work done.

Working a menial job is detrimental to your education. Obviously if there’s no outside support, you have to get the money somewhere. But any parents who think they are actually helping their offspring by withholding support and encouraging such work are deluding themselves.

10

I understand that there are people who have to work during school.

However, if it isn’t absolutely necessary, then I don’t think a college student should be doing a menial job. It was the worst mistake of my college years. It is very easy to fall into the restaurant worker lifestyle of working late, drinking after work, waking up at noon or later the next day, and blowing off class the next day. The extra money didn’t really go towards education, I spent it on booze, CDs, and other crap.

Far better to get some more relevant work experience or do an internship of some sort.

I finally woke up around my junior year and quit the restaurant job. My grades jumped and I did an internship my last semester.

I don’t really think I learned anything from the restaurant job except some various drinking games and that restaurant managers can be complete jerks. I don’t think I learned anything about the real world at that job. Learning how to swipe shots of liquor from the bar, how to give away your shift if I didn’t want to work, or how to dine on fried food every night didn’t really help me in my career after college!

11

I think the best use of your time while in college is to get an internship or job related to your intended area of work after you graduate. Seems most of the people I know who got good jobs after graduation got them through contacts made this way, and if you want to go to grad-school in the sciences, getting a job doing research in under-grad is pretty helpful both in terms of getting accepted and just for getting practical experience.

I did several of these and didn’t have too much trouble finding (low) paying ones, but I’d say even if you have to work for free its worth the time and extra-poverty of forgoing a job waiting tables.

12

See, this is what I really disagree with, the idea that college is only about hitting the books.

There is no other stage in one’s life when one can really say, “this is the time for only doing this one thing.” Throughout your post-college life, you’re going to have to balance an increasing number of complex and important life tasks: work, finding a spouse, raising kids, planning vacations, fixing the house, plotting the takeover of the world, etc.

The skill of learning how to balance priorities (how much time for study, how much for work, how much for drinking, how much for building the fusion reactor in the basement) should begin as early as possible. Regardless of what the job is, I think the balancing of all these priorities better prepares someone for real life after school.

Personally, almost all the money I made in college went to getting my pilots license, which allows me to fly to Skull Island on my vacations and work on my secret, uh… tan.

13

This nails it, in my opinion. Woking teaches a person a lot, including character and the value of an education.

14

I think it depends a lot on the schoolwork requirements.

Some of my college friends had classes in the afternoon and worked part-time jobs in the mornings (flipping burgers and receptionist were common), or classes in the morning and tutored children in the afternoon. For many of them, this was doable because of the way their work was structured (all their studying took place right before exams, all their reports would be due in the last weeks; they would usually drop the jobs during those periods), although it would still add time to their coursework. For those of us in so-called “hard majors” (engineering, architecture, chemistry, physics) it didn’t work at all; not only were you likely to add years to your coursework, but if you were in engineering or architecture and had taken an unrelated job before finishing your undergrad research (required for those degrees), your probabilities of graduating went from ~100% to ~0%.

I only know one person who worked while in college and did not take extra years for coursework, but it still affected her studies negatively. It’s my sister in law; she’s a doctor, and in Spain doctors need to pass an exam before being able to do their internships (which are required for any position other than “factory doctor”). She finally passed that exam on the year that a broken ankle made it impossible to go on teaching aerobic, something which had moved from taking 10h of her week while she was doing coursework to over 50h (between teaching and preparation) once her coursework was over.

The Spanish college system is simply not thought up for anything other than full-time students, and by “full-time” it means 24/7, not 40h/week.

15

I wish I had worked a few years BEFORE I went to college. Instead I squandered my first few years in college before taking a (forced) break and working for a living. I worked for a few years and realized how much it sucked not to have a college degree. When I went back to college, I was fucking motivated. I got straight A’s and A-'s and looking back it would only have taken a little more effort to get those sort of grades to begin with. I just didn’t take it seriously.

I fully intend to make my kids pay for at least part of their own college education in the hopes that they will take it more seriously. Of course if my kid is a motivated self starter, it might not be necessary but if he’s anything like me…

But I don’t know if I would want my kid to work WHILE he was going to classes.

16

My education was 100% funded by the Federal government and there was no outside work, so this situation never really came up for me.

However of all the friends I know that went to college, the ones that worked did so because they had to, not because they were deciding between working vs. not working.

For them, the decision was between “working and going to college” and “working without going to college.”

17

In college I had on-campus jobs at least tangentially related to my major or career hopes (worked in a library doing collection development, worked as a lab tech in a archaeological conservation lab, worked as a PA in the theater department (ran follow-spot, mainly). None of them were particularly arduous and I set my own hours, within reason. My husband also worked on campus in a job that was highly relevant to his career goals.

If you let yourself get through college without ANY work experience at ANYTHING (a summer position, a volunteer position, I mean anything that can be loosely classed as “work.”), you are demonstrating an exceptional lack of forethought.

18

I had jobs in the summer, but not during the school year. My parents were very clear that during the school year my job was to learn, to earn high grades, and to graduate on time. They didn’t want me working during the school year.

I was a physics major with tons of homework every evening. It’s hard to imagine how I could have fit a job into that.

ETA: My parents didn’t pay a cent for my education. I got by with grants, scholarships and a small amount of loans, plus what I made working during the summers.

19

Being on a college sports team is somewhat like having a job (in the sense that it takes a good chunk of time, energy, and attention that might otherwise be devoted to academics), yet some (though not all) college athletes are also very good students. I’ve even heard some say that it helps them academically, because it forces them to be disciplined and practice good time management. And I think the same could be true of having a job while in college: it can have a neutral or even a positive effect on one’s scholarship.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the OP’s question. I think it depends on three things:

  1. Does the job leave you enough time and energy to do justice to your schoolwork? (That includes not just attending classes and turning in required assignments, but also doing the assigned reading and homework slowly and carefully enough that you really understand it.) If you flunk out, or even if you squeak by but nothing really sinks in, because your job detracts too much from academics, then no, of course it’s not economically rational.

  2. If you didn’t have the job, what would you be doing instead? Some people make very productive use of unstructured time; others just waste it or get into trouble. If you use every waking hour pursuing your interests, exploring new things, making yourself a well-rounded person, getting an education in the broad sense, and doing the kinds of things that, when you look back on them twenty years later, you say “I’m so glad I took the time to experience that,” that’s a better use of your time than working a menial job.

  3. What are the economic realities of your situation?

20

I don’t see how someone could go to college for an undergrad and not work. How many credits are you taking? My freshman year I made it about three weeks without a job when I realized that I was only in school like 3 hours a day. I got a job working 2 to 3 nights a week and all day Sundays. I averaged 25-35 hours a week, always had cash in my pocket, and so what If I couldn’t show up to the party on Friday night until midnight, nothing cool happened until midnight anyway. Plus working a job is a good way to meet people and expand you social group. I was constantly amazed at how I would meet someone at work and before we knew it, my whole group of friends would be hanging out with their group of friends.