This upcoming week includes the annual spring Board of Trustees meetings, so everyone of us up in Founders Hall are scurrying up and down and back and forth putting together data reports and prepping for two days of meetings. And since it’s week nine of the spring term, I know that most of you are in the same high push mode just to get through to the end of the month.
So even though I don’t have as much time to dedicate to this week’s post as I’d like, I thought I’d show you a couple of numbers that might surprise a few folks. It turns out that we – faculty, staff, and administrators – aren’t the only ones who are working our tails off.
In the last couple of years we’ve talked about the potential developmental benefits of student employment on campus. Yet even I was surprised by the proportion of our seniors who work a job, either on-campus or off-campus, during their senior year.
It turns out that 86% of our 2012-13 seniors worked a job for pay either on-campus of off-campus during their senior year. And with most of this years’ seniors (514) responses recorded, 89% of our 2013-14 seniors worked either on-campus or off-campus. I suspect that these numbers are higher than what most faculty and staff would have guessed.
In both cases, most of those students work 10 hours or less per week. However, there is a substantial proportion of our students who are working 20 hours or more each week.
Of course there are trade-offs within this reality. Our students may be learning many valuable skills through their work experience. However, this obligation takes time away from their ability to be involved on campus or put additional time into their academic pursuits.
Either way, unless Augustana wins a couple of state lotteries and puts it all into a fund for financial aid, this is going to be a reality for most of our students for the foreseeable future. We can either grouse about it or find ways to take advantage of it for the educational benefit of our students.
Hang in there and enjoy the wonderful spring weather.
Make it a good day.
Mark