Employing students as workers on a college campus can result in benefits such as career training and alumni satisfaction for students, as well as cost savings for institutions and reduced requests for additional staff, according to presidents who have instituted student worker programs on their campus.
     During a session on “Students as Workers: Institutional Savings and Student Development,” Larry Shinn, president of Berea College (KY), and William Troutt, president of Rhodes College (TN), discussed several institutional benefits of employing
student workers.
     Berea College is one of a small number of “work colleges,” where all students are required to hold an institutional job. Rhodes, though not intending to become a full-time “work college,” is testing whether the principles of simultaneous student development and institutional dollar savings that animate Berea’s work will bring similar results if only some students participate. Rhodes has recently begun a new employment program for sophomores and juniors, known as the Rhodes Student Associate Program (RSAP), which provides 20 high-skilled student jobs with competitive pay and aims to enhance student learning while reducing institutional expense. Only in its first year, the program already shows promising results. “Requests for additional staff have diminished and the school has doubled the number of student associate positions,” Troutt said.
     Berea’s work college model has been quite successful—resulting in solid career training for students, institutional cost savings of about $1.5 million, and alumni satisfaction (80 percent of alumni agree that their job at Berea was their most important college experience). If Rhodes is successful in this effort, the “work college” approach may have wider applicability than has been understood to date.