Pink Slips (For Some): Campus Employment, Social Class, and COVID-19

While undergraduates from all class backgrounds work while attending college, less is known about how students approach finding work and the benefits they reap from different on-campus roles. Drawing on 125 interviews with undergraduates at Harvard University, we show that in the absence of clear institutional expectations surrounding on-campus work opportunities, students draw on class-based strategies to determine which jobs are “right for them.” Upper-income students pursued “Life of the Mind” jobs which permitted them access to institutional resources and networks. Alternatively, lower-income students pursued more transactional “Work-for-Pay” positions which yielded fewer institutional benefits and connections. The consequences of these differential strategies were amplified during COVID-19 campus closures as most “Work-for-Pay” positions were eliminated while “Life of the Mind” continued remotely. Through documenting heterogeneity in work experiences, we reveal a class segregated labor market on campus and extend previous analyses of how university practices exacerbate class differences and reproduce inequality. 

Anthony Abraham Jack  is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center and Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Society of Professors of Education. He has published two prize-winning books, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price