Working too hard
Secret cash stash: employment during term is regarded by some as inevitable
If wiping down beer sodden tables or serving school kids a sweaty Big Mac isn’t really your style, then Oxford is the right place for you. The vast majority of colleges still put strict bans on their students taking up term-time employment despite the mounting financial pressure being put on undergraduates.
With the cost of university increasingly coming top of the agenda, and with other universities around the country beginning to encourage termtime employment, the issue looks set to become more and more contentious. A survey recently commissioned by the NUS found that 58% of students in Britain now work during term-time to fund their studies.
Nearly threequarters of full-time undergraduates are in debt • even though all but a tiny minority work during the long vacation, and two in five work during term. Over half of English universities now officially acknowledge the inevitability of term-time employment, which is hardly surprising when the NUS sets the average annual cost of university in Britain at £8,810. They estimate that even with a student loan you will need to cough up a further £5,664 a year from your own finances.
Oxford University, however, has recently released its own estimate of expenditure for an undergraduate studying this academic year. The living costs of a student in college accommodation are said to be £5,700 • a snip, you might think, in comparison to the £8,810 estimated by the NUS. But you would be wrong. The University fails to include the £1,175 fees that still need to be paid up-front this year.
If you add that ‘missing’ cost to Oxford’s estimate we find ourselves looking at a figure more like £6,875. Cheaper than the NUS average, yes, but operating in a 27 week year as opposed to a 39 week year we still have to deal with a shortfall of around £3,729.
Student Union VP (Welfare & Equal Opportunities) Aidan Randle-Conde claimed that the shortfall now faced by undergraduates “clearly violates” the Student Union policy which states that ‘grants should form the greatest part of a student’s income’ when compared to the student loan of about £4000.
Though the precise policy towards term-time employment is left up to individual colleges - sometimes at the discretion of a tutor - the University was keen to point out that colleges were “strongly discouraged” from allowing students to work, despite there being no official university regulation in place.
A University spokeswoman went on to emphasise how Oxford’s shorter terms make working out of term-time more feasible than for students at other universities: “Though working in term-time is discouraged, students are on vacation for six months of the year. Whilst a significant proportion of this is expected to be spent doing academic work and reading, some of it can be spent earning money.
“A student working full-time for only the minimum wage for ten of their 25 weeks’ vacation could expect to earn £2,200. That would still leave 15 weeks of full vacation in which to relax and do preparatory reading.” Yet despite the university’s attempts to present these statistics in a positive light, this would still leave a student working full-time for ten weeks at minimum wage with a shortfall of around £1,500.
A medical student now in his third year described how he worked in various bars around Oxford during Trinity term of his second year without his college being aware of it. “I think we are supposed to get permission from a tutor, but I just did it. I was short of cash and was confident that doing a few bar shifts through the week would not have any detrimental effects on my academic work. “Of course I had to plan my time around it, but it was not that difficult to do.
If the government thinks that I’m mature enough to take on more than £12,000 worth of debt by going to university, surely the university can accept that I’m mature enough to decide whether or not working during the term will be bad for my degree”.
Whilst it is true that there are a number of generous financial support packages available from the university and college hardship funds, to help both students from lowerincome backgrounds and those facing unexpected financial problems, it is not always the case that these can be accessed.
The problem of accessing these funds is seen more clearly through figures acquired by The Oxford Student via the Freedom of Information Act showing that 338 Government hardship fund (Access to Learning Fund) applications have been turned down in Oxford since 2002. As well as this, 30% of applications for the university’s own hardship funds were turned down over the same period.
The student finance dilemma look set to worsen still with the new system of student bursaries that will come in with top-up fees being labelled this week as “not equitable” by the president of Universities UK, Drummond Bone, in a statement to MPs. Members of the Commons education committee expressed their concern that the majority of the bursary schemes offered by individual universities would be too complicated for potential students and their families to understand.
Some of the top Russell Group universities, such as Bristol, Birmingham, and Liverpool, all offer their students formal assistance in gaining term-time employment - Manchester University will help its students find work for up to 15 hours a week. Sarah White from Manchester University Careers Service commented on how their provision of assistance to students seeking term-time employment offered an effective means of making sure it is not to the detriment of their academic work.
“We advertise vacancies not only to make it easier for students looking for jobs, but also so that we can limit their exposure to those employers who are not suitable, and push them towards employers who are aware and are understanding of the student situation. This means that they do not make them work more than the recommended 15 hours per week and pay them minimum wage or above.
Is it justifiable to say that the intensity of the short eight-week term does not lend itself to term-time employment, whereas the long vacations are suitable alternative time for earning money? Perhaps it used to be, but with the mounting financial pressure put on undergraduates, it is time that students be given complete freedom to decide how they juggle their academic workload and their financial welfare.
Debt is a fact of life for the vast majority of students, and will be for several years after graduation. Over half of the UK universities now accept this and provide their students assistance in finding term-time employment that is suitable for someone in full-time education.
Oxford cannot continually fall back on the argument that it is so dramatically different from other universities - its archaic attitudes maybe, but the financial situation of its students are not, and no matter how generous the hardship funds seem to be, it should be the student’s choice as to whether they want to ease their debt through paid employment.
3rd Nov 2005