Off-Campus Employment: A Bad Thing?

By Student Body President Zack Golden

Being a member of Student Government has been one of the highlights of my time at George Mason University. My only regret is that I was unable to be as involved during my first two years. I worked 30-hour weeks at an off-campus job, preventing me from being an active member of the Mason community. Unfortunately, with the ever-increasing cost of higher education, off-campus employment is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Students working off-campus negatively impact the Mason community in a variety of ways. The first, and most obvious, is graduation rates and academic performance. Students working full-time, or almost full-time, have far less time to devote to their studies than students who are not employed, or not employed on-campus. The additional burden that off-campus employment imposes has a negative impact on graduation rates. A 2002 study from the National Center for Education Statistics found that the number one reason for why students leave college before graduation was because they needed to work.

Equally troubling, off-campus employment affects university life. Students working off-campus are less connected to their fellow students and the Mason community. A Student Activities survey conducted in 2007-2008 found that 54 percent of students who work off-campus said that they do not participate in any type of campus activity, while only 33 percent of students who don’t work and 26 percent of students who work on-campus said that they do not participate in any type of campus activity. Getting participation in student groups and at university programs is difficult when the competition comes from off-campus employment obligations.
Mason’s location gives its students more opportunities for off-campus employment than most universities. Fortunately, there are steps that Mason can take to address this problem.

Mason should dedicate itself to providing as many student-wage jobs as possible. Working on-campus allows students to have supervisors sympathetic to their academic responsibilities.

On-campus employment eliminates commute time, which can add hours of unusable time to a week for academic work or student involvement.

Although students are able to utilize University Career Services, PatriotJobWeb is not well utilized by internal university offices as much as it should be, forcing students to search five or six separate pages at gmu.edu to find job opportunities.
Mason should create a financial aid package specifically tailored to working students. Sometimes financial obligations are such that off-campus employment is unavoidable no matter what the university may do to offer additional on-campus jobs.

In these cases, off-campus employment should be taken into consideration in an effort to reduce the number of hours a student needs to work. While student off-campus employment is a complicated problem, addressing it will have significant positive impacts on the Mason community.