'It's a lot of hard work': the experiences of student-workers in university term-time employment.

• Author: Munro, Lyle
• Position: Contributed Article

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Robbins (2010) pointed out the importance of understanding the 'hard labour' of university students who have part-time jobs during term time. He did this, however, without invoking the testimony of the student-workers themselves in their dual role as university students and part-time workers. He focused instead on data mainly from quantitative surveys, including his own, of student-workers at a regional university. While Robbins provides an informative and up-to-date account of what he rightly calls 'a challenging time to be a university student', his article does not offer any real insight into the way these challenges are experienced by the young workers whose voices are absent in his paper. This article seeks, in part, to fill this gap by featuring the testimonies of a sample of student-workers at a regional campus in Australia. The stories reveal a range of strategies which students use to resolve the dilemmas posed by the work-study couplet.

Background

My interest in the education-work nexus was prompted in the late 1970s when I asked a Year 11 and Year 12 class at a Canberra secondary college why two-thirds of them had not done some homework which was due on that particular Monday morning. Their response surprised me: of the two dozen students in that class, 16 said they had been working in their part-time jobs for much of the weekend and therefore were unable to complete the assignment. In the next few days I discussed this revelation with colleagues who, like me, had no idea why so many academically able students were failing to complete their assignments on time. Some months later I conducted a college-wide survey to investigate the extent of the 'student-worker' phenomenon and the view of the teaching staff of it. The completed questionnaires revealed a number of facts that led me to conclude that the student-worker was surely a new phenomenon; close to two-thirds of the 470 students who completed the survey had part-time jobs. The comments from their teachers also indicated that it was an issue of interest to them, as most were less enthusiastic about students working part-time on weekends and nights than they were about school-sponsored, timetabled work-experience placements.

In the late 1970s there appeared to be only one empirical study, a short essay by Douse (1975), on what was then a nascent issue of little or no interest to educators. Ashenden (1990) appears to have had a similar experience in writing his monograph The Student-Workers, in which his bibliography of about 100 references contains only a single reference from the 1970s, with the remainder covering the 1980s. Since then, there has been a substantial increase in the number of official reports and academic studies on the school-to-work transition and the dual role of many young people as school students and part-time workers. (1)

As a follow up to the initial surveys in the late 1970s, a study in the late 1980s of the 'student-worker' phenomenon in Australia and abroad concluded that the heavy engagement of school students in the teenage labour market could be explained by the collapse of the school-to-work transition, a problem which potentially had serious consequences for the life chances of young people in Australia and elsewhere (Munro 1989). Interviews with students in the late 1980s revealed a number of anxieties experienced by young people employed in mainly dead-end, low-paid 'adolescent jobs' in the secondary labour market (Greenberger and Steinberg 1986). These anxieties centred on issues of self-esteem and stigma, conflict and--most importantly--the thought of being trapped permanently in low-quality odd jobs after high school graduation.

In 2002 I conducted further surveys and interviews with senior high school students in the ACT, Melbourne and rural Victoria, and noticed how the attitudes of students to their part-time employment had changed over the past three decades. Although the jobs available to student-workers remained much the same, the students themselves no longer feared the prospect of being trapped in underemployment to the same extent as was felt by the 1980s generation. They were not troubled by working in what the 1980s cohort often perceived as stigmatised, demeaning work. A fairly typical comment, albeit not put so bluntly, was Harry's assessment of his job in a Canberra laundromat in 1981: 'It's a shithouse job. I just don't like the conditions or the type of work'. A more arresting moment in an interview occurred when a very pleasant Year 12 student appeared to have been a victim of what Sennett and Cobb (1977) termed 'the hidden injuries of class': 'I'm doing something useful--doesn't bother me if I'm just low life'. Roberta worked at a fruit market in 1981 and no doubt felt that the posh customers looked down on her, a reaction that was in stark contrast to the egalitarian ethos at her college where students were treated as adults and were on first-name terms with their teachers. Here we see an interesting reversal of the view that Year 11 and 12 students are treated as children in traditional high schools and as adults at work.

In the opening decade of the new century, university colleagues were experiencing the kind of disquiet about the student-worker phenomenon felt by secondary teachers in the 1980s; the lecturing staff witnessed the gradual disappearance of the authentic full-time student on university campuses. At my own university in rural Victoria, academics had become aware that many students were not buying textbooks, nor were they attending classes regularly or putting in enough hours to complete their courses satisfactorily. In comparison, until quite recently at least, there has been a paucity of qualitative research relating to university students and their term-time employment, which the present article seeks at least in part to correct. To this end, I conducted a survey (148 participants) in a representative sample of faculties and about 30 interviews with students who volunteered to participate in the project; profiles of the students and their experiences are featured in the last section of this article. These student-workers were employed in the same kind of low-skilled jobs at the unglamorous end of the service sector as their school counterparts, but they were less critical of their McJobs, the term coined by Etzioni (1986) to describe 'fast-food factories' such as McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Subway and other franchises. The current cohort of university students saw their McJobs--which included food outlets, as well as bakeries, catering firms, shopping centres and the like--as a source of much-needed income and in some cases, at least, as a valuable learning experience.

Even so, the experience of American students should serve as a warning to any uncritical endorsement of the student-worker in the so-called 'school-to-work revolution' (Olson 1998). Of the case of the United States, where there is a long tradition of students working to support their university studies, Roksa and Valez (2010, p. 7) note how both Year 12 students in high school (60 per cent) and university undergraduates (80 per cent) combine going to school or university with paid part-time work. They suggest that it is important to include the earlier employment experiences of school students when evaluating the impact of working while studying at university level, since the early exposure of 20 hours or more per week has consequences for a student's future educational attainment. The US statistics are dramatic: almost half of those who completed high school worked 20 hours or more per week, and of these 41 per cent did not go on to higher education compared to 28 per cent who had only a moderate level of participation in the labour market (Roksa and Velez 2010, p. 7).

Literature Review: Risking Learning for Earning

Recent studies have used the testimonies of senior secondary students and university undergraduates to explore the experiences of young people who are now part of a growing cohort of student-workers. Typically, most high school students who hold down a part-time job do so in after-school hours; university students, on the other hand, do so during term-time as well as on weekends and week nights. My own research has shown that many school students continue in the same part-time jobs when they go on to university and therefore the conditions under which they work do not change in any significant way. Recent studies which focus on both the learning and earning dimensions of student life are outlined in the two subsections of the review below. The first subsection outlines some of the key problems identified by researchers in the study-work relationship, while the second features three ethnographic case studies on student employment in both conventional and unconventional jobs in the service sector. These ethnographies serve as an introduction to the experiences of student-workers featured in this article.

Balancing Study and Work: The Risks of Working and Not Working

An article on the recent emergence of 'the new student' in UK universities is relevant to the present study, particularly in the light of the Australian government's plan to increase the numbers of university...