I’m a working student in my 30’s. I work a full-time job (40 hours a week) and generally take 6-7 credits a semester (two courses, four evening classes a week). I’ve been reading up on the frustration and stress other working students are feeling and the studies being done on them. A study commissioned by Upromise has the following to say:
I feel the pain here. My class schedules and the courses I can take are much more limited, as I’m forced to only take evening classes. My choice of professors is also limited, as I sometimes am forced to take poorly rated professors since they’re the only ones teaching in the evening. Things are made even more difficult by the fact that I’m a science major. The advanced science courses and labs are generally only offered during the day.
There is a question in my slight rant here: Why have colleges been so slow to accommodate working students? My college prides itself on having a history of being a commuter school before they built dorms, but now they very obviously cater to on-campus students far more than commuting students. Community colleges seem to be the only ones willing to be flexible with students like me. If you want a bachelors or higher, however, tough luck… do what we ask of on-campus students in addition to your job or find another school.
I’ve been an on-and-off student for years, and the schools really haven’t changed in this respect. What gives? You’d think school would jump at the chance to help working students, as we generally work harder, are more committed to graduating, and have more income to spend on the school. And our numbers are growing fast.
Yes, there are schools out there that cater to working students, such as UMUC or Phoenix University, but there you’re pretty much limited to majoring in something associated with business, such as Finance, Marketing, or MBA.
Sorry if this was a half-rant, half-question, but what gives?
Just to note that “commuter student” =/= “student who has a full time job and attends classes in the evening or on weekends”. My wife attended Florida Atlantic University when it was a well-known “commuter school” in the 1980s, but all that meant was that most students were from the area, and did not live on (or necessarily even near) campus.
I wonder if you didn’t just answer part of your question right there. How many people who enroll in the undergrad program at a 4-year college as part-time students complete the program?
I have no idea of the answers to these, but…
What percentage of your school’s undergrad enrollment are part-time students?
What’s the graduation rate for part-time students, versus full-time students?
How can your school tell the difference between a part-time student who is dedicated to completing his degree (even if it’s going to take several times as long as it would a full-time student), and a part-time student who is just puttering along, taking classes which interest him, and isn’t truly actively working towards finishing his studies?
Are those opinions, or do you have cites for those?
Offering evening and weekend classes means that your school has to find professors and TAs willing to staff them – and they, too, probably have other things to do on their evenings and weekends.
The fact that your school (and schools in general) is geared towards full-time students undoubtedly makes it much harder on you. But, if it turns out that part-time students make up a small percentage of the student body, and are less likely to finish, does it make sense to bend over backwards for them?
I feel your pain. Try being a grad student with a family.
I think the numbers issue is the bottom line here. But I also think it’s a circular argument. There aren’t very many nontraditional students because academic institutions make it very difficult to survive as a nontraditional student, but institutions don’t have any motivation to make it easier, because there aren’t very many of us.
There’s only so much the colleges can do to accommodate part-time evening students with full-time jobs. And those attributes don’t always go together- I worked full time and was a full-time day student as an undergraduate ( it is possible to work full-time starting at 4pm and on weekends) It took me 5 years to get done, not because I had a poor selection of classes or poor instructors, but because I could only handle 12 credits or so instead of the 16 needed to graduate in four years ( at least, if I wanted to pass them all and get some sleep)
When I started grad school, I worked 9-5 and attended classes part-time in the evening. There was no issue with a greater selection of courses during the day- I worked during the day because the graduate classes didn’t begin until 4 pm ( Commuter school MBA-not only did everyone in the graduate program have full-time jobs, we were pretty much expected to) IIRC, there were no classes Friday evenings.(because no one , not students ,not professors wanted to be there Friday night.) That meant there was no option for a 3 credit class to meet 3X a week for 50 minutes. They all met twice a week for an hour and fifteen minutes. Take a class that starts at 5:05 to 6:20 and another from 6:30 to 9:15 twice a week and that’s 6 credits. Take 2 MW classes and 2 Tu Th and you have 12 credits, four evenings. Starting work at 8 or 8:30 and ending a class at 9:15 is a long day. I’m not sure anyone wants a longer day, nor do I think it would increase the graduation rate- I suspect it would increase the drop-out rate.
As far as work limiting class schedules or library access- as long as classes are not offered and libraries open 24/7, any firm outside commitments or schedules will limit you in terms of class schedules and library access. It doesn’t matter whether you work 9-5 and cannot take classes before 6, or you work 4-12 and must be done by 3, or you can only use the car on Mondays and Wednesdays ,or only have a babysitter on Tues, Thursdays and Fridays or teach CCD on Wed afternoons. All of these issues will limit your class schedule - just as the “traditional” student who wants but doesn’t need a part-time job is limited in his/her choice of jobs by the class schedule.
The question should be, why did universities who were once able to accommodate part-time students less willing today. I spent my first 3 years of college as a part-timer, working “full-time” (not really) at a lab in the university. The basic courses (pre-calculus and calculus, general chemistry, first course in physics, language courses) were all taught in night sections and the college of general studies allowed me to take in the day any advanced course I needed. The lab was very accommodating with allowing me to take those courses and make up the time. All-in-all, I was taking 9 credits every semester and 6 during two summer sessions and was on track to finish in five years. After three years, I got financial aid ($500 scholarship and $500 loan–imagine the tuition at an Ivy of only $1000 in 1957) and finished in 4 1/2 years. That last term I actually took 3 graduate courses and one undergrad course.
But I was born in the depression (1937) and the universities had expanded greatly after the war (GI bill students) and now they had large staffs and relatively small student cohorts, so not only was it easy to get in, but they really went of their way to be helpful. All that changed with the boomers.
So the basic answer, they have not been more accommodating because they have little or no incentive to be.
How many students don’t complete the program because of the difficulties of being a part time student. If the class choices and hours were better, I’ll bet you’d find a lot more part time students who would complete the program.
Our local public schools offer BA/BS degrees where all the classes can be taken at night as well as MBA and law degrees. And there are also 100% online degrees at the BS and MS level. Maybe we are lucky.
Your question would be easier to answer if you told us what you expect or want colleges to do, specifically, to accommodate working students. Then we could at least speculate why they’re not doing it.
For example, you complain that “the advanced science courses and labs are generally only offered during the day”; so it sounds like you want then to offer advanced science courses at night. My best guess as to why they don’t do so is that there isn’t enough demand for it. It’s not cost effective to offer a class that only a couple of students will take.
If you think that’s incorrect, and there really is a demand for a section of Advanced Scientific Basketweaving at night, you could try petitioning the school’s administration (or whoever creates the class schedule) with a list of students who would take such a class on a particular night.
My school had a great online program and a pretty decent selection of night classes for non-traditional students.
My biggest issue was that the non-class things were difficult to work with: bookstore hours, student services, library hours, etc. The worst was that at the testing center (where you can take proctored exams as make-ups or the primary exams if you’re in an online class), the hours were not expanded during finals. Like it would really bankrupt the whole school to have someone show up once a semester on a Saturday from like 9-1 or something.
I went to a college for “non-traditional” students. i.e. working adults. Most of my classmates were over 25. I was 40 and seldom the oldest in the room. Almost all of us worked full time. The school offers the vast majority of its course in the evenings.
And they still weren’t “good” at the working adult thing. I had points docked for attendance when I had to be out of town on a business trip. Others weren’t allowed to make up “pop quizzes” when they had to stay out for sick kids. Online classes were usually “easier” in terms of “have internet connection, can take class” - but even those occasionally missed the mark with “questions will be posted Tuesday morning, please log three responses, by Thursday afternoon. To make sure we have a discussion to respond to, one of those responses needs to be posted by Tuesday at 5pm for credit.” Almost all my classes docked for attendance - I was told it had to do with financial aid.
I know at NC State they open the student bookstore at night. But these days many people buy books online so I’m not sure that matters. Their MBA program at night is way off campus so there is plenty of free parking without having to fight student traffic.
One unexpected consequence, for me and my Spanish classmates, of going to graduate school in Scotland is that it made us view Spanish class hours in… a positive light! :eek: Us? We’re actually good at organizing something? It can’t be!
As one of them put it “I still can’t believe we’re good at organizing anything, but these people somehow manage to be worse.”
Now, the US system, with all those optionals and requirements such as “2 Science credits”, is more complicated to arrange, but both our Spanish undergrads and this Scottish program had fixed coursework; in Scotland, 80% of our courses involved everybody in the program, another 15% was two optional “tracks” and the other 5% had more options (an additional language). In Spain, make that 80:20, with the options chosen as a “track” so it was a whole block of courses.
The way it was handled in Spain:
lectures for the non-optional part took place in a single classroom (it was the teachers who moved around) and were all together. Lectures for optionals involved the smaller group of students moving to a smaller classroom. Labs were also “piled up”. For example, all my classes and labwork (30h/wk) took place M-F 8:00 to 10:00, 10:30-14:30. My school didn’t offer afternoon classes, but other majors did; you chose in which of the available hour ranges you wanted to be, with working students being given precedence over non-workers. People working shifts could flip from morning to afternoon hours and back as needed.
This is how every single one of our schools and our relatives’ schools in Spain worked; there may be some fancy-pamby ones which don’t, but it’s the usual. There is one important exception:
UNED, the largest university in Spain. Long-distance education. Most of it is self-work; there are radioed lectures (netcast as well, nowadays). Some majors require labwork: labwork is always a single day/wk. Generally it’s Friday afternoon, which is an easy day to arrange off for most people. There are no lectures which need to be attended in person.
The way our Scottish school handled it:
students always had to run around campus. We could have an all-class course in one building at 9:15-10:10, then one in the other end of campus at 10:15-11:10. And the second teacher would ask “why do you always pour in late?” “Geography, we’re coming from the other end of campus!” <— yes, I have a big mouth.
some days we had five classes, some days one. There was one day in the second half of the coursework we only had class at 11:15 There were days we had classes at 8:15, 9:15 and 17:15. Oh yes, very practical.
We had only 13h/wk, yet the time between the beginning of the first class to the end of the last class, added day to day, was closer to 35h.
We didn’t understand. Those hours meant that those who had jobs needed to do things like switch to the night shift (those who could) or leave their job in the middle of the morning for two hours, to come to one hour of class. If Spaniards, who may not be the most disorganized people in the world but try, can manage to organize class times in a way that makes sense, how come these people could not? Why weren’t those 13h organized into two days of 6-7h? Why were we running all over campus?
If y’all ever figure it out, please tell me, because I still want to facedesk when I think about it.
In the case of labs in particular, the cost of maintaining a lab is rather expensive, and any good laboratory experiment usually takes 2-3 hours to complete, if not more (I had two classes that had 6 hour lab sessions!). Offering these at night becomes problematic, because people are generally less alert and more inclined to make mistakes, which could be a significant safety issue. Hungry, tired and grumpy people are also more likely to be unsafe in a lab.
Enrolment numbers also play into things - I took one upper year organic chemistry class where I was one of 8 students. Should the professor really have to teach a second section of that class? Should the traditional students - who are on campus during the day already, often early - have to take evening classes because of a couple of non-traditional students?
Teachers, TAs, support staff, administration…these people are already working a full work load. Adding more evening/flexible class time means adding staff or funding and I don’t know how many schools are in a position to really do that (around here, schools aren’t raking in tons of profit!). Why should full-time workers work more hours because you want to go to school and work full time?
One issue is the cost of staffing. I ran a night and weekend program for MBAs at one time. For a class of 35:
Tech support had to be on campus
Cleaning crews had to be paid for
Administration staff had to be there (people who worked for me)
Faculty were paid an overage to teach in the program
TAs had to be available (and they were unionized)
Additional air conditioning and heating charges were put against my budget (the rest of campus would shut down the HVAC starting Friday at 5:00 PM)
Trash pickup (separate union gig from the classroom cleaning crew)
So the cost of teaching on a weekend was high. Luckily, the cost of the weekend MBA covered it all. However, the much lower cost of an undergraduate class might not cover those costs - especially with the union rates for nights and weekends.
There is also a faculty issue. I have taught at night - it can be fun. However, once class ends at 10:00 PM (by the time I was done talking to my students), I was still wired on adrenalin from teaching. This kept me awake past midnight, but I was still back in the office by 8:00 AM the next day - made for a tough term.
Most of the complaints I hear from working students are that the university doesn’t prioritize the student’s job over the university courses, like the example above of having points docked for missing class. What? The class is just as important as your work travel. You are forced to choose. Yes, it sucks, but why should class be considered optional? Frankly, I think this question should be considered in both directions: why won’t your job allow you to miss work if something important comes up for school?
The answer seems to come down to money. Work pays you, while you pay the university, and so implicitly you (generic you, no one specific) buy into this hierarchy and assume that work is more important. After all, you’re only going to school for a better job, right?
NO. Your education is a goal in and of itself, or should be, one that incidentally leads to more opportunities because you come out a better person (more knowledge, more skills). I’m all for flexibility in the university system, but every demand I’ve ever seen seems to be that the university bend for the needs of work. Students are not customers and they are not clients. Have a little respect for what you are paying all those thousands for.
Part-time university education is great, but you still have to be able to commit the time. There’s simply no way around that. Many universities offer night, weekend, and online courses, but for those 6 / 10 / 15 weeks, you still have to fully commit to at least one course. That means taking several hours a week away from your job, family, chores, leisure time, and / or sleep. It’s hard, and frankly your grades are going to suffer if you can’t commit that time. But you know what? Grades aren’t nearly as important as you think they are. Most returning students know they could get As (quite correctly), and freak out if they are handed a C.
My advice to the working people of the world: chill. Do the best you can knowing you’ve taken on more than a full-time undergrad could manage, and don’t worry about squeezing every last drop of knowledge from the experience.
People who spend a lot of time working and don’t have as much time to spend on their studies, may not do as well in school. People who have commitments that make them only able to take classes at certain times, may find that there are limitations on what classes they can take. No shit, Sherlock!
This isn’t directed at the OP, but I think Dr. Drake has a point. Some adult, full-time-working college students are excellent, exemplary students. But I’ve heard of some who have the attitude that, because they’re busy people who have so much else going on in their life, they shouldn’t be required to do as much academic work. “I work two jobs! I don’t have time to do all that reading / homework / research / class attendance / whatever!” That, and/or “I’m paying good money for this, so lay off all these requirements and just give me the degree already!”
There were days we had classes at 8:15, 9:15 and 17:15. Oh yes, very practical.