How much time did you spend outisde of class, reading and studying and doing assignments? The oft-quoted rule of thumb is that college classes require about two hours of work outside of class for every hour in the classroom.
It really depends on the person, the program and the job.
I didn’t work in college, based on the “I’m paying good money for this, why would I compromise it for a minimum wage job” theory, and it was a mistake. I would have had a much easier transition to the working world if I had more job experience, even in menial jobs. If I had done what it took to get a low-level but career related job or internship, I would have benefited even more.
I worked a menial job full-time to put my way through school. Not just on the weekends, or when I needed clothes or beer money, or just over the summer, but full-freaking time, the entire time. Wait, I tell a fib - over Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring, and and Summer breaks I typically worked overtime, 50+ hours a week. I was amazed by the incredibly large number of kids in college who not only graduated never having worked a serious job, even over the summer, but who also were in a mode of:
- Blow money on useless shit.
- Get in trouble with credit cards.
- Call mumsy and dadsy for more money.
- Repeat.
I’m absolutely appalled by my co-workers who tell me about how they have no money now because they’re paying for 1-4 kids to go through college, while the kids not only do not work a single day, but they take vacations to “Cabo, dooooood!”, backpack through Europe, or hang out in Thailand. My secretary is supporting 2 kids currently in college and one who just got out, having basically spent her retirement to do so. Would the kids work? Hell no, not over summer. And the parents, in most cases, doggedly won’t let the precious little 21 year-old angels sully themselves at Wendy’s or Burger King over the summer.
It’s hard but not impossible to work a menial job full-time and go to school. It only requires that you fucking crack down, keep your eyes on the fucking prize, and don’t fucking act like, or worse be, a stupid, drunk teenager while you’re at college. It also means that no, you don’t get to go to “Cabo, doooooood!” for Spring Break, and you don’t go out and blow $25 every night on cheese fries and beer, and it sure as shit means you do not buy $400 shoes with your Pell Grant money like I knew one girl did. Your tax dollars at work, America!
I put myself though one of the hardest degree programs on campus and finished in the top quarter of my class while working full time. If that’s too “harsh” then that’s too goddamn bad, life is harsh. You think college is the place to explore your boundaries and be a free spirit? Maybe sometime last century. Ask the people who “pursued their dream,” treated college like a 4-year paid vacation from mommy and daddy, and got a useless BA in some unemployable field how they feel right now facing 10% unemployment.
I will also add this - over my 2 decades in my career, I’ve been responsible for interviewing and hiring a lot of engineers. And the ones which become the “stellar performers”, the ones you can trust to get the job done right, on time, and on budget, the ones who kick job ass and take down job names, are the ones who worked a substantial amount of time while in school. In my experience, a 2.9 GPA engineer who worked full-time while in school will always, without exception, greatly outperform a 4.0 GPA engineer who spent most of her spare time lounging around with friends or drinking. You know why? They are the people who are driven, can manage time and resources, can manage money, have their eyes on the metaphorical prize, and understand, I mean as in really understand, that when the chips are down there are 24 hours in the day and 7 days in the week, and they were all meant to be used as-needed to make shit happen.
Shalmanese, et al,
Didn’t you feel like a bum for taking money from your parents? Didn’t you feel ashamed that other students were able to earn their own money while you relied on handouts? What did you learn that was so significant that it precluded your being a productive person?
I teach at a small, regional public university. Most of our students work during the school year. Whether this is a good thing depends on the student, the situation, and the job. If the job provides valuable experience and / or pays enough for the student to graduate with significantly less or no debt, and the student is able to balance work and school successfully, they’re probably better off working than not working.
That said, I’m not convinced that working-for-the-sake-of-working is inherently valuable. In my experience, most students who work more than 20 or so hours a week during the school year do end up cutting corners with their schoolwork. I don’t blame them – many of them have no good alternatives other than borrowing more money – but I also see a lot of wasted intellectual opportunity among those students, and many of them will have a harder time getting into graduate and professional programs because they weren’t able to concentrate fully on their studies.
Personally, I worked during the summer breaks, but not during the school year. It was understood in my family that college WAS the equivalent of a full-time job if you were doing it right, and my parents were perfectly happy to pay for tuition, room and board, and enough spare cash for books and (minimal) entertainment during the semester. (I guess there was a sort of unspoken agreement that this was contingent upon our making decent grades, but since neither my brother nor I ever landed in serious academic trouble, we never really put this to the test.) I don’t think this made us either bums or freeloaders; rather, it sent the message that school was our primary responsibility and something we should take seriously. (Believe me, I would have felt DAMN guilty if I had flunked out of college while my parents were paying for it!) I’m grateful that I didn’t have to worry about balancing college with a job – it left me free to load up on tough courses and push my intellectual limits, and to spend the evenings going to quirky art-house movies and plays and lectures, and to work at our student-run coffeehouse for no pay. And frankly, I learned more from those experiences than I did from most of my summer jobs (apart from one tutoring job that was low-paid but not exactly menial). Being on a college campus offers a whole set of opportunities that are harder to come by later in life; I’m glad I had the leisure time to take advantage of them, and I hope to do the same for my hypothetical future kids, if they feel so inclined.
OTOH, a different sort of kid with different ambitions and inclinations might have been better off working. It’s hard to say. There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
TriPolar: Like I said, I got by mostly on scholarships but I wouldn’t feel like a bum even I did take their money because the social contract ran the other way as well. When they are retired, they will be taken care of. The same sentiment applies in reverse.
In case you haven’t guessed already, I come from an Asian family and this is the standard way of doing things. My parents are completely mystified about the Western system.
Of course, there is no single, unanimous “Western system.” Many American parents take a smiliar approach to yours’, or Fretful Porpentine’s; some take the approach of Una Persson’s co-workers; and some pretty much say to their kids: “You’re on your own.” And which of these approaches is ultimately best depends on the kid.
I worked a labor-intensive job, related to my field of interest*, for between eight and twenty hours a week during college. I learned as much about my career field doing that as I did from my studies, honestly, and having the money was a big help as well. For my junior and senior years, I supported my entire living situation (rent, food, transportation, books, beer) from my work and my savings from full-time and overtime summer jobs. I had a lot of scholarships, mostly merit-based (which, really, I earned, both by working hard in high school and in college). My parents covered the rest of tuition, and I managed to graduate without debt.
Had I not worked in college, I would now have significant debt. Because I worked, I was able to be self-sufficient and never had to ask my parents for money, plus I had something regular that forced me to organize. I don’t think I’d have been happy working 40 hours a week on top of the rest of my academic work, but working just a few was good.
*OK, sure, so I have a B.A. in theatre. Four months after graduation, I’m successfully working in theatre, in the capacity that I want to work in, and getting paid (not a lot, but well over the poverty line) to do so. It’s a “useless” B.A., and not necessarily a hard one if you’re content to do the minimum to graduate, rather than actually try to get as much out of it as possible, like I did. But putting in 60 and 70 hour weeks over and above my academic studies was pretty common, so I tend to get defensive about it.
Sorry, I’m no good at guessing that people are Asian. I can understand your situation better now, you see my parents came from a different culture as well. A different planet as far as I can tell. You are still failing to take advantage of a chance to learn. The social contract runs in many directions, and you are denying yourself a chance to learn several of the ways it works. There are plenty of jobs you can do which won’t detract from your formal education. There are many other benefits as well, including an opportunity to expand your social perspective, reap the fruits of your labors, develop some important job skills, and demonstrate an ability to learn outside of a formalized structure.
I can imagine the situation where your parents are horrified that their child has risked their future by doing something unrelated to obtaining a college degree, but then you can also learn one of several great American traditions, lying to your parents, or acting independantly of them.
If none of those things sounds like a good reason, that’s OK too. Your intentions sound honorable, and the quality of one’s character is not dependant on working while in school. Your OP asked about the ‘economic sense’ of working, and as long as a job doesn’t detract from your education, earning money always makes economic sense. I’m sure you understand that.
There is also an alternative I hope is not culturally problematic for you. There must be other students in your school who could use help with their studies, especially if they have to work to pay their way through. You could help them, or there may be many more people in your community who could use help of some kind as well. Your school might be able to help you find a way to contribute to the community in that manner. I’m sure the following sounds judgmental, but if a culture did not approve of helping others in need, I would seperate myself from that culture.
Good luck in your studies, and your life.
My wife is Asian and is one of five siblings. Her parents paid for the entire cost of the college education of all five siblings (minus any grants or scholarships), and he isn’t a rich man by any means – he owned a Chinese restauarant. Maybe it is an Asian thing – or at least a Chinese thing.
No student loans for any of the five, by the way. I think it’s quite remarkable, actually.
I don’t have a problem with that. It is quite remarkable. I am certainly biased by my own experiences. Had the OP mentioned the cultural factor, my initial reaction would have been different. But working while in school would be one way of learning about the attitudes of old farts like me. Shalmanese and your wife are lucky to have parents who provided such an opportunity.
You misunderstand. A “useless” degree of any kind is one where you aren’t able to leverage it into a job. You obviously do not have a useless B.A. if you’re working in theatre. And “useless” in the context I used it does not mean that the subject is not worthy, it’s just not useful for getting a job.* By definition someone who can leverage their degree, whether it’s underwater ass-painting or nuclear engineering, does not have a useless degree. And even a medical degree can be “useless” if one returns to McDonald’s after school.
- And as I said, college might have at one time been the place to go to find yourself, read Wordsworth and hug trees, and get all “oh captain, my captain!”-y while holding a calculus book and sobbing uncontrollably**, but the world changed. College is a trade school.
** OK, there are likely a lot of folks who sob uncontrollably while learning calculus.
Even colleges admit that now. What hath the Flying Spaghetti Monster wrought?
I didn’t, but in retrospect I wish I had. Less for the money, and more for the experience, as others have said. It would have been something useful to stick a CV, too.
That said, I think it would probably have harmed my studying.
On-campus jobs are the best. Even if it’s not related to your major, you can often squeeze in a couple of hours easily between classes. as an undergrad, I worked in the campus library and loved it. As a grad student at the U of Hawaii, I worked on campus in the East West Center’s housing office, a position that provided me with free accommodation, and that’s nothing to sneeze at in Honolulu!
The jobs I had during school were mostly not menial, and they were not for the purposes of paying my tuition, since that was covered, as was my room & board. They were for the purpose of me having money to spend on pizzas, shoes, rock concerts, drugs, music, and a bunch of other things I did not wish my mother to hear about.
But one of the results was, I worked as a waitress with people who were also going to school and people who had not gone to school. The people who had not gone to school were 50 years old and still working as waitresses, which was not something I wished to happen to me.
Retail was a mistake, but only because it meant I had to walk through the store every day on the way to my station. Past perfume, giant chocolate chip cookies (freshly baked!), shoes…in other words, I could spend my whole shift’s paycheck before I even clocked in.
Working on the switchboard gave me a great skill. Unfortunately, a skill that was defunct in the regular world even before I graduated. Like many other skills I acquired, then and since.
Working in the department gave me the realization that I really wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, at any instructional level.
All part of the education.
More often, they sob uncontrollably while not learning calculus.
I worked half time during the school year, and full time during the summers when I was an undergrad. I’d worked similar hours all through high school as well. I guess I understand the idea that “college is a job,” but I don’t agree that it should be your only job. Part of college is learning how to be a productive, adult member of society, and balancing different obligations is part of that role.
I do think you are onto something, there. I grew up in an upper-middle class area that has a high percentage of Asians (Silicon Valley). Most of these Asian parents covered all the costs of university for their kids. It was not considered strange at all. I am surprised at all these Dopers dismissing this philosophy so readily. A lot of these Asian parents, including my mom, just considered higher education to be part of an obligation of raising a kid, even if U.S. law says otherwise. My mom once said something like she believed it to be one of the best investments that she could make for her kids. You may disagree, but there you go.
Why all the incredulity that such kids can take college seriously or develop a good work ethic or launch successful careers? Goofing off and watching TV? You’ve got to be kidding me. The Asian parents I knew from growing up in Silicon Valley seemed to teach resume building to their kids starting from high school, where these kids would juggle a gazillion activities and internships to build the picture-perfect college application to get them into selective universities, which is something that carried over into college when they started resume-building for their intended careers. Maybe I just grew up with a very select crowd, but these kids did well academically, networked, got hooked up with internships relevant to their intended industry during the summer, and received full time offers to places like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Co, etc. Or they went off to professional schools and landed jobs with prestigious firms like Watchtell Lipton Rosen & Katz. You work like 100 hours at those places and deal with the biggest corporate shmucks ever, but they did just fine. That is not to say I don’t see the value of working menial jobs and paying your own way through college. I just think it’s stupid to dismiss other philosophies and say that such kids won’t realize the value of college or will not be prepared for the workforce.
TriPolar: I did take several opportunities to work during school but, in all of the jobs, the primary goal was the educational value and the income was secondary. This is why I specifically specified menial work in the question title.
My apologies. I guess I consider any job working for someone else to be menial.
So you just wanted to know the value of doing some physical labor? Well it wouldn’t hurt to have the experience for the reasons I mentioned before. Plus you need some stories to let your kids know how easy they have it. And there is that part about education being measured in breadth as well as depth. I’m glad necessity forced me into some menial jobs. I have much greater appreciation for the people who haven’t had other options. And I’ve learned many things that way which were are not found in any book.
I would recommend your priorities after graduation as well. If it’s real education, the income will follow naturally, and seem less important. But that’s where avoiding debt comes into play as well. Counting on your future earnings to pay off debt can limit your future options. I guess some people measure education in terms of grades and income. To me it is the process of life. I learn more and study harder now than I ever have. I likely have less time ahead of me than I’ve seen already, so the desire to learn continually increases. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done to experience the richness of the world, whether it resulted in profit or loss. The overall result has always been profitable in terms of both material and cerebral gain.
I realize I’ve addressed you directly, even though you were asking about the actions of others. But that’s my way of expressing the alternative interpretations of rational economics. I get the feeling you’ve considered all these things yourself and follow the path that suits you best. The others you wonder about may have done the same. And the alternative for them may have been not working, without greater focus on school. All the more reason for them to stay out of debt.