I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I examine how colleges can offer students a route to money, certifications, and skills and experience — and to a successful college-to-career trajectory.
Hiring Students
Before he started working in higher education, William O’Hayer worked in finance, real estate, manufacturing, and even start-ups, where organizations constantly evaluated processes and looked for efficiencies. Looking for those efficiencies can be difficult for colleges, he says, as they are often short on the money needed to hire consultants that specialize in finding ways to streamline.
After he arrived at Muskingum University as the vice president of finance and operations — where he oversees an array of campus activities — O’Hayer landed on an idea: Why not hire students to act as “in-house consultants” to analyze functions like the use of the university fleet or purchasing arrangements? They could, he thought, look for money-saving efficiencies while earning money and credit along the way.
Under the arrangement O’Hayer is planning to launch this summer, students at the eastern Ohio institution would live in the otherwise mostly unoccupied campus residence halls for free, earn $12 an hour and six credits, and work with professional staff and new AI tools to gain experience in cutting-edge technology, project management, and leadership.
“Those skills are universal,” says O’Hayer. “It allows us to teach some really valuable things — things they’re going to need to succeed to get the projects done — and earn good credit on it. And these skills will be part of their toolkit as they go out into the world.”
Money, certifications, and skills and experience — an essential formula of the successful college-to-career trajectory. A college should be a prime location for getting this mix, as it has the ability to grant all three. The average campus also has a wealth of “hidden jobs” (as Ned Laff and I use the term in our book) in a wide variety of crucial roles — in horticulture, logistics, human resources, among others — that quietly sustain colleges’ operations and might be related to many students’ interests.
But connecting students to relevant work experiences on campus has had its challenges — even with venerable and well-established programs like Federal Work-Study offering money to set up such experiences. A major challenge: Programs that align campus work with student interests can be difficult to start and expand. For example, O’Hayer’s in-house consulting shop seems like a compelling idea, but it will only employ 10 to 15 students out of more than 1,500 on campus.
‘Breadth of Opportunities’
College campuses can be as complex as any corporate entity, and running one requires roles that subdivide into a number of specialized jobs — roles that can turn into careers or closely resemble positions in the corporate sector. In the 1990s, Lalit Agarwal was a graduate student in management-information systems at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln when his grant funding evaporated, so he went looking for work with people who ran building-control systems at the university. He worked his way up to executive director of operations, and last year was named president and CEO of APPA, a higher-education association representing campus facilities departments.
“Facilities is the most diverse opportunity that any student can get” — but it depends on looking at the operation in a broader way, says Agarwal. Most people think of the groundskeepers or the janitorial staff, but not those who work in heating and cooling systems, renewable energy, electrical systems, and more, which often involves skills relevant to engineering and other STEM fields. Facilities departments are often intimately tied to a range of third-party vendors, which can also open up new experiential-learning opportunities and job routes. “The breadth of opportunities is immense,” he says. “I’m not even counting the clerical work, the HR-related work, the administrative work in project management — just literally anything that’s possible as a career, you can have that opportunity within facilities.”
Yes, hiring students can mean cheap labor for a facilities department, says Agarwal, but some administrators recognize that capturing a student’s enthusiasm can mean developing them into a future employee, in a field where skilled labor can be difficult to find. In the cases he knows, when students work in a facilities department, they are not just making coffee or answering phones, but actually tackling the backlog of crucial work that facilities departments are constantly catching up on.
Students “actually get practical experience in whatever field that they are trying to pursue, either in their education or in a potential career that they didn’t even know existed,” says Agarwal. But facilities departments can sometimes overlook these opportunities to work with students. Or, burned by past interactions with students, some departments might actively resist it. Students might fail to show up for a shift, leading the professional staff to have to make up the work. Staff members might worry that a student worker will abuse sensitive private information in a clerical or recordkeeping job — because they have had to deal with students doing just that in the past. Local regulations or union agreements might stand in the way, too.
Reinventing Work-Study
Campuses have long had a way to connect students to jobs, in the original form of student aid: Federal Work-Study, which has a history at work colleges and at more mainstream ones, where the program has supported scores of students who answered phones in a dean’s office or staffed the checkout counter at the library — leading to improved graduation rates along the way, education scholars have noted.
But advocates for needy students have long called for reform of the Federal Work-Study program. The program’s $1 billion distributed annually — an amount that has been stagnant for decades — provides only a few thousand dollars toward an individual student’s needs. In the mid-1970s, a work-study job could cover up to 90 percent of a student’s tuition costs at a public university, but today it would cover less than 20 percent, according to research by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College of Columbia University.
Critics complain that Federal Work-Study wages can be exploitatively low and that the work is often menial, disconnected from a student’s aspirations. But Scott-Clayton says it’s not altogether clear that a work-study job has to be connected to a career goal. Some students just need a low-stakes job that offers time to do their homework. Research on the program suggests that one of its key values is “as a kind of starter job,” she says, “this professional setting where it’s explicitly acknowledged that your studies still come first.”
Work-study money is also distributed according to historic trends — colleges that have been in the program longer get a bigger base allocation of money — which means that the program’s funds disproportionately go to long-established private institutions, while significantly less goes to public two-year colleges, most of which have been created relatively recently, though it’s also where the program might reach more needy students. Think tanks and policy shops have offered various ways to change that way of distributing money. “We would like to see that base allocation probably just eliminated and it given out more on the basis of the demographics of students, particularly the percentage of students who are receiving Pell,” says Catherine Brown, the senior director of policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network.
Over the years, say people in workforce policy, many legislators have fondly noted that they received work-study money from their private-college alma maters, which may explain why the program has survived cuts to entitlements — and also why the program has remained unchanged. “People in positions of authority and power have direct experience with the program, and that’s always a helpful political shield,” says Scott-Clayton.
However, we seem to be in an era where everything is in question. The first Trump administration proposed cuts to Federal Work-Study, but when his second term began, work-study was apparently not part of the plan to pause federal grants. However, “It surprises me that this would be a target, given that it’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of thing,” which seems to appeal to conservatives, says Iris Palmer, who directs programs related to workforce and community colleges at New America, a liberal think tank. But then again, the administration has been eyeing cuts and changes related to apprenticeships, she says, which are also work-related and broadly popular. “A lot of things that used to always survive have not survived.”
Various policymakers have offered proposals to make work-study more relevant, but positive changes could go well beyond simply giving the program more funding and distributing it to a wider variety of institutions: For one thing, notes Palmer, many people do not know that, under the current rules, colleges can offer students work-study money combined with college credit. Expanding opportunities to earn cash and credit might be a way to offer more incentives for and depth to on-campus work.
Policymakers and regulators could also ease some of the rules around using Federal Work-Study money for off-campus jobs, where students might more readily find positions relevant to their career goals. While students can technically receive work-study money for off-campus employment under the current rules, “the administration of it is really, really difficult to do — up to the point where I have never seen it work off campus,” says Palmer. Some people worry that this arrangement would simply funnel public money to corporations. “There’s lots of good arguments about not subsidizing private employers,” she says, “but allowing people to use this subsidy in a way that supports learning and that connects more with their course of study would be really good.”
But Scott-Clayton points out that it has been very difficult for institutions and other organizations to line up individual students with positions that are relevant to their specific goals and appropriate to their abilities, while also fitting the demands of their class schedules.
“There are some startups that are out there trying to use work-study money to connect students with more meaningful jobs,” she says. “In the abstract, that sounds great and promising, but it’s just so frickin’ hard to do that at scale.”
For now, colleges might find more promise in tiny entrepreneurial efforts like O’Hayer’s at Muskingum, which will support its program not through Federal Work-Study but on the promise of savings realized from identifying efficiencies. In the students’ work on consolidating purchasing, for example, O’Hayer says, “we feel like we can avoid $25,000 to $35,000 a year in unnecessary expenditures on just the ancillary costs of purchases we’re going to make anyway.” That amount could pay for up to six of the 10 to 15 students in the program. Other projects will focus on potentially using more efficient electric vehicles, deploying control systems on heating-and-cooling equipment, and streamlining job-application processes in human resources, projects picked for their clear potential return on investment. “I’ll be really surprised,” he says, “if we have any of these positions that can’t, in the end, show some sort of ROI.”
To get that return on investment, O’Hayer says, it was important to create experiences for students that went beyond mere job shadowing — to where they are truly working collaboratively with the professional team. Although O’Hayer and other staff members will show the students how to use business software and teach them about the university’s business processes and functions, he hopes the students will start to experiment with the tools and teach themselves when they run into problems, thereby developing a sense of agency.
“Everybody will get stuck, and everybody will get themselves unstuck — or we’ll show them how to get themselves unstuck,” he says. “To be able to do that, and then lean into driving change, that’s a kind of meta skill. It’s not project management, it’s not just AI. It’s a way of thinking about how you can go and make things happen.”
