The College-Work Balancing Act
Author: Beer, Allison
Date: 2019-09-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Education Work Relationship,Community Colleges,Labor Force Development,Part Time Students,Paying for College,Student Employment,College Students,Student Financial Aid,Academic Persistence,Barriers,Work Experience Programs,Prior Learning,Flexible Scheduling,Child Care,Vocational Education,Individualized Instruction

How can community colleges support students' goals of finding success in the workforce, both today and the future? This issue brief builds upon the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) previously published report &quot;Partnerships for a Future-Ready Workforce&quot; (2018) (ED605153). This brief is the first in a four-part series that will further examine strategies through which community colleges can support students' efforts to achieve their career goals and meet the needs of local economies. Essential to community colleges' workforce development strategies is recognizing that today's students often simultaneously pursue academics and work. Many community college students work, either full- or part-time, while pursuing their degrees. Students have many reasons to work while pursuing their degrees; some of these reasons include earning money to pay for tuition and living expenses, supporting family, avoiding the opportunity cost of leaving the workforce, or wanting to gain new career experience. This issue brief serves as a primer on the characteristics of working students and the supports community colleges can offer to ensure these students are able to attain a degree or credential. As this paper is specifically focused on students who work while enrolled, the authors simply refer to this population as students, except when comparing this population specifically to non-workings students. In the first section, the authors provide nationwide data on the trends of the characteristics of the working student population and how they balance their time between school and work. In the second section, they discuss research on the factors relating to balancing school and work, in particular their time, academic performance, and finances. In the third section, the authors introduce the types of academic and non-academic supports that community colleges can offer to help students balance their responsibilities, with a focus on those that are: intended to better connect students' academics to their work, provide flexible scheduling options, and ease the challenge of balancing family responsibilities. In addition, this paper includes three examples of institutions that offer supports for this population: (1) Lakeshore Technical College's individualized-degree programs; (2) Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical College's flexible scheduling; and (3) Austin Community College District's childcare programs. The authors chose these examples both to demonstrate a variety of academic and non-academic support programs that community colleges can offer for students who work and to illustrate how community colleges can partner with local employers and community-based organizations to meet the specific needs of working students.