I often see data on how many college students work and I have often cited the research showing that first-generation college students are more likely to work off campus and for longer hours than other students. I vaguely understood that campus jobs were better for "connections" and integration with academics, but I also had so many counter examples. When I was a sophomore in high school, I went with a friend to visit her older sister at college one Saturday, and we met the sister as she was finishing up her shift scraping dirty dishes in the kitchen of a huge cafeteria. I vividly remember my very limited perceptions of "college student" being shaken when seeing her up to her elbows in cold french fries in her hairnet and white smock. When I got to college, I worked whatever jobs I found posted on bulletin boards or the work study office. One year, I stuffed tens of thousands of envelopes in a back room in the admissions office and recorded textbooks for visually impaired students (alone, for hours in a small windowless room in the library). It wasn't dirty dishes, but it was strictly about earning money.
I had no way of knowing then that other students were doing work that would actually benefit them in later job searches and graduate school applications. I had no idea in part because those jobs were likely to be filled informally, and performed in spaces to which I had little access.
In their new article on campus work in Sociology of Education, Anthony Abraham Jack and Becca Spindell Bassett explore who holds these different kinds of campus jobs – the "work for pay" jobs that I did and then the "life of the mind jobs" that other students do.
In interviews with 110 students, Jack and Bassett found that low-income, first- generation students were more likely to hold "work for pay" jobs. They needed money to cover their bills and to support families, they found campus jobs through data bases and bulletin boards, and they took jobs that required few skills and afforded them few long-term advantages: cleaning dorms, shelving library books, working in food service, setting up for special events.
More privileged students leveraged their networking skills to get jobs that were not officially listed, that afforded them extended contact with faculty and staff, and through which they gained knowledge and skills that benefitted them in careers and graduate school. They worked as research assistants, teaching assistants, or on special projects for administration. They explained in interviews that their paychecks let them spend more frivolously or let them feel more independent of parents, but the connections were more valuable to them than the pay. They had often simply asked faculty if they knew of opportunities. Often, faculty had approached them in class to ask about their interest in unlisted jobs.
When campus closed in the pandemic, the poor and working-class students were laid off from their "work for pay" jobs and scrambled to find other work back home, while the privileged students continued their research and teaching projects and sustained their ties to faculty and administrators in those years of isolation.
Jack and Bassett studied students at Harvard, and few of us went to or work at such places, but they offer basic recommendations to campuses committed to social class equity. Faculty can be held accountable for pro-actively approaching lower-income, first-generation students to let them know about available jobs on grants or in courses. Campuses can be much more explicit with all students about how to approach faculty about opportunities, whether through orientation immersion programs or ongoing mentoring. And peers can be better understood as arbiters of information about the "life of the mind" jobs.
In a just world, the "good" jobs that help students to build social and cultural capital should be accessible to all, rather than only to those who already have the capital to find out about and to pursue them.
