It depends. Looking at this from a purely mathematical point of view, if the job delayed graduation by say 6 months, then it might not matter. However, each additional year makes it longer and longer before you start making the salary of someone with a degree. Also, assuming that in the additional time you have loans building up, then you are also doubly screwed by wasting even one month in school longer than you have to.
In my case, my parents supported me while I went to college. I was able to take additional courses during the summer, so then I did 3 semesters per year instead of 2 like everybody else. I did 3 years of college in 2 years, and 2 years of grad school in 1.5 years. Therefore, not working decreased the time I was not getting the higher salary and allowed me to start earning the higher salary earlier than my peers.
So, if we go with a base of 4 as the “average student,” my ratio would be 4:3. someone who worked might have a ratio of 4:5 for a difference of 2 years. That is two additional years of debt (if you are getting loans) and two less years of working at the higher salary of a graduate, for an actual factor of me being 4 years ahead of my counterpart who had to work. While that person is behind, I would be 4 years ahead in savings and earnings. Therefore, if we both started college at the age of 18, by the time we were 30, it would be like I started college 4 years earlier than he did.
To make the difference even more sick, my actual friend took a bunch of AP classes in high school and started college as a sophomore. He’s now 10 years into his career with a PhD, while I started my career about 2 years ago with an MA (my guess is that he makes about 2.5X more than me, or 1.3X more than the combined income of my wife and I. His wife doesn’t work.) Essentially, he’s around 25 years ahead of me financially, living in his second home, and he only needs to work for 5 more years before he retires. (Although part of that is all the scholarships and grants he got. Stupid scientists.)
I was shocked to land in an American university for grad school and find out I was expected to spend 9h/wk in class. My undergrad load in Spain was 6h/day (the lectures/lab ratio changed depending on the year and specialty, for most years it was 4h lectures and 2h lab), with between one and five lab reports due every week plus other reports due for lectures and the expectation that you would spend 4h on self-study per hour in lectures, or 80h/week. This self-study does not include time spent preparing reports.
Back when I had hiring responsibilities I had one opening to fill and more than 100 resumes from eager young students. According to their resumes they had all graduated at least magna cum laude, had all received numerous scholarships and had all been president of their student senates.
Obviously I had to start looking beyond basic qualifications to determine who at least to call for an interview. And it was pretty easy to eliminate the group that didn’t have any “real world” experience. YMMV.
The problem with that scenario was not that you had a menial job, it was that you made really shitty, irresponsible choices while working that job. The job didn’t make you stay up all night drinking and sleep till noon, or skip class, or waste your money–that was 100% on you. If you hadn’t had that job, you wouldn’t have spent those evenings and late nights sitting blamelessly at your desk with a hot pile of calculus notes. You would have spent them watching tv, or playing video games, or going to parties, or playing beer pong, or otherwise dicking around till the wee hours and then sleeping till noon and blowing off class.
'Cause, c’mon, if you were the sort of person who would otherwise be sitting in your room studying, you would have come home from work, gone to bed, gotten up on time and gone to class–just like the dozens of people I had classes with who worked in restaurants.
I worked in college, and it in no way cut into my study time. It cut into my farting around time a fair bit, but I finished a BS in biology in 4 years with a 3.75 and no significant strain, and still managed rather a lot of farting around. It was about the same for pretty much everyone I knew–we pretty much all had part-time jobs of various types and got through in the normal amount of time with good grades and a decent social life. Of course, we all were the sort of people who would spend a weeknight at our desks studying if we weren’t at work and there was studying that needed to be done, party/tv/beer pong be damned.
I worked after school during high school, but in college, I only worked over summer vacations. Pops made it clear to me that college was my job and it was expected that I’d succeed at it.
Frankly, I worked damn hard in college, and it paid off. Got through in 3 and a half years instead of 4, and saved Pops more money that way than I’d have made by working during school.
The summer before starting med school, I worked construction, which kept me quite busy and paid pretty well.
I did not work any job at all while in med school, though I did get a $500 research stipend one summer. All the summers were spent in Mr. Hospital.
In short, I got plenty of experience on what it meant to work for a living, but focused on my academic efforts to maximize the bang I got for my dad’s tuition bucks.
How tough of a program do you want? I graduated with a degree in Chemical Engineering, while working between 12 and 20 hrs a week. I think the lowest credits I took was 14/semester and the highest was 17. That was usually in the range of 20-25 contact hours a week. Homework and studying on top of that.
Yes, I believe that college students should work to pay for at least part of their education. The biggest partiers I saw were the kids who’s parents were paying for everything. For them, it was all a game. They just weren’t invested in their own education. The kids who worked lots of hours to pay for school weren’t the ones skipping out on classes because of a hangover or failing tests.
Perhaps. I’m not sure what groups I would have fallen in with. However, I’d like to think that the year and a half I wasted at a menial job would have been spent like my last year and a half involved in student organizations. At least having fellow serious students around helped me stay focused at the last part of my college time.
I don’t understand why so many parents think their obviously bright kids aren’t capable of working and doing well both. I suppose it’s remotely possible that I’d gotten on the dean’s list a little more often if I didn’t work mornings, but I doubt it. The 12-16 hour as week I worked didn’t take that much time away from writing papers, which along with reading was the bulk of my coursework. The only class for my major that required a lot of time and effort was grammar, and most of the other classes we had to take (besides math, the history I shouldn’t have taken my first semester of college, and one of my four science classes) for a Liberal Arts degree were pretty easy too. I already knew from struggling with math all through high school that it wouldn’t help to put more time into it, so…I doubt I would have gained much more than extra sleep if I had those hours to devote to something besides work. Friends whose parents paid for everything certainly didn’t get grades much higher than mine, anyway.
Well, that 12-16 hours/week you were working for pay, I was going down to the Biophysics department at the medical school, and doing research projects. By my junior year, my research partner (a fellow undergrad) and I had gotten an original research article published, independent of the grad students, post-docs, and the professor who mentored us.
Other free time got spent trailing behind a cardiac surgeon, a pathologist, and a pediatric surgeon for more immersion in the field.
I was at University to sample opportunities I couldn’t get elsewhere. Not to stock merchandise at the local bookstore.
Well, I worked full-time during uni because I had to pay my rent. There weren’t any extra debts I could have taken on even if I’d wanted to. The same applied to all my uni acquaintances who worked - there just wasn’t enough money to go around otherwise.
Where would this extra debt come from? Who would lend extra money to an undergrad? I mean, sure, an undergrad medical student can get lots of loans (and they can’t realistically work beyond the first year, either), but an undergrad maths or history student?
I would prefer that my daughter doesn’t have to work (as in paid, non-study work) too much while at university. Sure, I graduated with a good degree, but I never really experienced campus life because I was always working every evening, and they’d be all blase about spending hours in the library copying reference books down, while I was, again, working. TBF, I enjoyed my job, but I *loved *the two months at the end when all I had to do was study.
When it comes to politicians who pontificate on the minimum wage, it would be nice if they’d ever had to live on the minimum wage. It might give them more experience of what it’s like to be poor. But then, even if they did choose take on a McJob for a semester for the experience, with back-ups in the form of parents or bank loans and a starting point of relative wealth, it’d still be vastly different to someone who had no choice about doing it.
Still, when it comes to people who are now in higher positions, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if at one time they’d been on the opposite side of the bar.
Very true. My intent was to point out the things motivated students can do when not obliged to work due to financial constraints.
My father could have tightened the purse strings, and made me work during the school year. He didn’t, & I took advantage of that fact to do things I otherwise could not.
That says a lot for your dedication to the craft you wanted to take up, and frankly I think parents need to make some intelligent decision there based on an honest assessment of their kid’s attitude.
I knew a few students like you, who had the opportunity to put a lot of extra effort in and did so. But, to be honest, most of the kids on the gravy train spent their extra time drinking or dicking around. It’s purely anecdotal guessing on my part but I think your attitude was and is still the exception.
Of course, parents don’t always have a great idea of how their kids will react to being away at school, and can’t exert a lot of control over them.
Indeed, I was lucky enough to have much of my schooling paid for via scholarships and grants, and that is one reason why I didn’t work during the school year. (I did work during summers, and that money also went toward school.)
My university education was crucial to making me the succesful person I am today, so I haven’t forgotten their generosity. Every year I make a sizeable donation to my alma mater, earmarked for undergraduate scholarships.
My parents had zero dollars to contribute to my schooling, so I worked all the way through both trips to college. The experience gave me a great deal of perspective on working life, (for example, unlike many of my co-workers I will never complain about a white-collar middle-class job, because I know how fortunate we are) not to mention the approximately ten years of minimum-wage jobs I also had in between the two trips to school. I imagine that these demanding schedules also resulted in my having a great work ethic and the capacity for many daily hours of high productivity, even now as a middle-ager. I did get a 4.0 GPA and I guess I could’ve achieved more, like being in student government or something like that, but really didn’t care to. It would have been nice to have not been obligated to work though, in that I probably would have gotten a lot more sleep.
By the way, when I say that I didn’t work during the school year (and I didn’t), I hope people aren’t coming to the conclusion that my parents paid for my education. They didn’t. My freshman year happened to be the year my father’s small business was just about bankrupt, so he couldn’t afford to spend anything on my education. My expenses were covered by grants, scholarships, loans, and my own summer earnings.