Sixty-nine percent of entering students work for pay, while almost one-third work more than 40 hours a week, found a Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) report, titled “The Intersection of Work and Learning: Findings From Entering Students in Community Colleges,” last October.
The report analyzed the experience of working students, of whom 64% found being a student “equally important” as being an employee.
“You can’t work your way through college anymore,” wrote Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, in the report at the time. “Colleges need to do a better job of providing the right support services to ensure their working students have the means to reach graduation and gainful employment.”
Just how to provide support to those student-workers was the topic of a CCCSE virtual panel discussion on Feb. 3, during which administrators from Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical College (SKYCTC) shared their recent student-worker success efforts.
After the 2008 recession, similar to other postsecondary institutions, SKYCTC experienced an influx of student enrollment due to layoffs.
As companies began to rehire 6-18 months later, the community college aimed to ensure that students received credential attainment before reentering the workforce.
“We as a college, as we were working through all that from 2008 and forward, realized that we needed to make some change or change wasn’t going to happen for these students,” said Dr. Phillip W. Neal, president and CEO of SKYCTC. “And we were going to face some outcomes that we didn’t want to see for our students and for our employers.”
