Unemployed students are the minority

Of all the young adults in higher education, the unemployed are the minority. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployed students only made up 6.8 percent of the student population in October 2015. Working undergraduates have become the new standard in an academic world that hasn’t made too much of an effort to change its fundamental ideas about who these students are. For many students, pursuing their education is out of the question without a means to pay for it, making their jobs as critical to their success as their grades.

The higher education community has adopted a “quick, fast and in a hurry” mentality that urges students to graduate in a four-year time span. Completion of this graduation roadmap has become the marker of a successful and efficient college career, but for students who need to work to even attend school, graduating in four years is a task that would require them to spread themselves thin. This graduation initiative assumes the schedules of students are flexible, but the reality of the working class student is often filled with constraints.

As an editorial board, we ask professors to understand that while their students in class fulfill the role of the pupil, the majority of us have commitments that can’t be overlooked and should therefore be considered by professors – for example, when professors decide to go over allotted class time or giving assignments based on event attendance.

It becomes a catch-22 for students: if we leave, we might miss valuable information but if we stay, we risk missing or delaying our next engagement − a lose-lose situation in every case.

For example, in every syllabus, professors have a section in which they list the penalties for being late or absent. But our time is just as valuable as every other member of the FIU community and should be treated as such.

Teachers should consider offering extra credit assignments that are not based on attending events. Not having an available schedule is a disadvantage for many of us. Students with flexible schedules have the opportunity to perform better in class but other students who work or commute are at a disadvantage.

In addition, faculty need to be mindful of how they use their time. For example, some professors will waste a class going off topic. Sometimes, because they’ve wasted so much time going off topic, whatever they didn’t cover, they want students to go home and study on their own. It’s not fair that students have to go home and teach themselves because some professors tend to go off topic.

With the majority of us switching between our student and employee identities, we as an editorial board would like to see more consideration for working students by faculty as jobs have become a vital part of the college experience and are more often than not the reason we students are able to experience it.

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