How The University Works

Loyal readers will have seen some of this before, but I’ve just cross-posted this to the Chronicle of Higher Ed Brainstorm and The Valve.  NYU has made a pdf of the entire chapter available for free download: it’s written for general readership and is suitable for undergraduate reading. Ask your students about their working lives–you’ll be shocked at what they endure.

Not that most of you will care very much, but one of the best contenders for the thoroughbred Triple Crown will race this Saturday. The horse’s moniker, “Big Brown,” expresses the owner’s gratitude to shipping giant UPS for renewing a contract with his trucking company. For folks like him, for full-time Teamster drivers, and for the customers who want their online-ordered crap at their doors tomorrow, UPS represents a good deal. The company’s also received plenty of good ink for its “Earn and Learn” financial-aid packages for part-time student employees.

Coincidentally, the chapter of HTUW that usually gets the most attention from non-academic readers is the one questioning whether involvement with the company really has been a good deal for the tens of thousands of students it claims to have “aided” over the past decade.

Most startling for many readers are the details of the meretricious financial aid scheme at its Louisville Worldport hub. Recruited from Appalachia, urban Louisville and Cincinnati, and the profoundly depressed rural Kentucky counties where blood and animal excrement from giant hog butcheries and chicken plants befoul the waterways, students flock to the UPS program on the promise of “education benefits” that few persist to receive.

The worst job–performed by thousands of struggling students–is a physically demanding, high-stress job sorting heavy packages on a fast conveyor at the airport hub. Every student must work after midnight five nights a week–every Monday through Friday) but on a split shift, working just a few hours (until 3 or 4 am) at unprecendentedly low pay, taking home about $25 a shift. The Teamsters play a role in this scheme–they’ve bargained this low pay for the students and part-timers while preserving the generous pay and benefits of the full-time labor aristocrats represented by the drivers: driving for Big Brown is still one of the good blue-collar jobs. (This is similar to the strategy of many faculty unions, who bargain great deals for the minority tenurable caste while neglecting the contingent majority.)

Few of the students in this program were succesfully taking even one class a term when I spoke to its director. While UPS refuses to make meaningful persistence data available, the most generous interpretation of the numbers suggests a persistence to degree while involved in the program of around 12%.

…..
In its ruthless quest for super-cheap labor, the university has fastened on new ways of exploiting an old favorite: the student worker. We are all familiar with the figure of a student working a minimum-wage job as “financial aid.” On many campuses, student workers outnumber faculty, staff, and other workers combined.

Undergraduates work for their degree-granting institution as painters, maids, janitors, cooks, groundskeepers, truck loaders, daycare staff, teaching assistants, computer technicians, coaches, security guards, and administrative assistants, typically for wages at or near the national or local minimums. For a significant fraction of these students, on-campus jobs are just one element of their efforts to fund their degrees, which increasingly involve unsustainable debt loads and additional off-campus employment.

Nearly twenty million students are enrolled in postsecondary institutions. Eighty percent work to finance their educations, averaging 30 hours a week.

I first started thinking about this issue at the University of Louisville, where I first received tenure. I arrived in 1998, shortly after the university began a much-ballyhooed “partnership” with United Parcel Service (UPS), the city of Louisville, and other local colleges. The partnership’s sole function is to entice students to sign contracts committing them to provide cheap labor in exchange for education benefits. This arrangement alone has provided UPS with more than ten thousand ultra-low-cost student workers since 1997, the same year that the Teamsters launched a crippling strike against the carrier. Currently there are six thousand undergraduates working at the UPS Louisville hub, with plans to hire thousands more. About three thousand work a midnight shift that ends at UPS’s convenience—typically 3 or 4 a.m., later during peak shipping seasons.

Between 1997 and 2003, UPS hired undergraduates to staff more than half of its one hundred and thirty thousand part-time positions. Students are currently the majority of all part-timers, though only some receive education benefits. By restricting the education benefits of its “Earn and Learn” programs to students willing to work undesirable hours, UPS has over the past decade recruited approximately fifty thousand part-time workers to its least desirable shifts without raising pay. The largest benefits are reserved for students who think they can handle working after midnight every night of the school week.

The consequences of night work are well documented, and the available evidence suggests markedly negative effects for the Louisville students. Every instructor to whom I spoke reported excessive fatigue and absenteeism (due to both fatigue and an extraordinarily high injury rate). Students participating in the UPS program showed substantial failure to persist academically. In a desperate attempt to stem this tide, faculty scheduled UPS-only sections between 5 and 11 p.m. both on campus and at the hub. They even began a ritual of 3 a.m. advising, sending as many as a dozen faculty out to the airport before dawn in order to catch the exhausted students coming off the sort. Since nearly all of the faculty involved taught and served on committees five days a week, these efforts resulted in a bizarre twenty-four-hour cycle of work for themselves.

The UPS partnership appears to have increased rather than decreased the economic distress of participants. According to the company’s own fact sheet, student workers giving up five nights’ sleep will typically be paid for just fifteen to twenty hours a week. Since the wage ranges from just $8.50 to $9.50, this can mean net pay below $100 a week, and averaging a little over $120. The rate of pay bears emphasizing: because the students must report five nights a week and are commonly let go after just three hours, their take-home pay for sleep deprivation and physically hazardous toil will generally be less than $25 per shift. In fact, most UPS part-timers earn little more than $6,000 in a year, and most have at least one other job.

UPS presents a triple threat to students’ prospects for academic persistence: sleep deprivation and family-unfriendly scheduling, low compensation resulting in secondary and tertiary part-time employment, and a high injury rate. UPS refuses to provide meaningful persistence figures for the more than fifty thousand students it has “aided” over the past decade. But of the ten thousand at the Louisville hub, it could account for little more than three hundred bachelor’s or associate’s degrees earned. The most generous interpretation of the few statistics made available suggests persistence to degree of about 12 percent.

According to one analyst, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing and housing could be had by working a minimum wage job an average of 22 hours a week throughout the year. (This might mean working 15 hours a week while studying and 40 hours a week summers.) Today, the same expenses in a low wage job require 55 hours a week 52 weeks a year.

At a private university, those figures in 1964 were 36 minimum wage hours/week, relatively manageable for a married couple or a family of modest means, and still quite manageable for a single person working the lowest possible wage 20 hours a week during the school year and some overtime on the vacations. Today, it would cost 136 hours per week 52 weeks a year to “work your way through” a private university.

Now each year of private education amounts to the annual after-tax earnings of nearly four lowest-wage workers working overtime.

Employing misleading accounting that separates budgets for building, fixed capital expenses, sports programs and the like from “instructional unit” budgets, higher education administration often suggests that faculty wages are the cause of rising tuition, rather than irresponsible investment in technology, failed commercial ventures, lavish new buildings, corporate welfare, and so on. The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and student labor: over the past thirty years, the price of student and faculty labor has been driven downward massively at exactly the same time costs have soared.

For the eighty percent of students trying to work their way through, higher education and its promise of a future is increasingly a form of indenture, involving some combination of debt, overwork, and underinsurance. It means the pervasive shortchanging of health, family obligations, and ironically, the curtailment even of learning and self-culture. More and more students are reaching the limits of endurance with the work that they do while enrolled. One major consequence of this shift of the costs of education away from society to students, including especially the costs of education as direct training for the workforce, is a regime of indebtedness, producing what Randy Martin describes as docile financialized subjectivities by way of what Jeff Williams has dubbed “the pedagogy of debt.” The horizon of the work regime fully contains the possibilities of student ambition and activity, including the conception of the future.

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