Summer Jobs

I haven’t seen much discussion of this yet, but it’s becoming very real in my family.

The quarantine is eliminating so many summer jobs that colleges need to stop expecting summer job income to count toward expected family contributions for financial aid.

Admittedly, some of that may depend on location. We live near the Jersey Shore, where summer jobs are heavily concentrated in tourism and hospitality. Both of those sectors have been utterly shut down by quarantine; even if the social distancing rules start to loosen in a few months, the scale of damage to the businesses is likely to be dramatic. That’s a lot of summer jobs for students eliminated.

But even in areas that aren’t as tourism-focused, summer jobs are often in retail, restaurants or other service businesses that require constant contact with the public. In other words, in the industries likely to be the slowest to come back.

For families that receive financial aid, as we do for The Boy, there’s typically an expectation of significant summer income earned by the student. And in most years, that’s defensible. The numbers might be a bit optimistic, but the concept makes sense. But it presumes the existence of enough summer jobs that offer enough hours to make a meaningful contribution. In the wake of the quarantine, that’s simply not true.

I saw this firsthand. When he came home for spring break, TB applied for a summer job at Six Flags, a major amusement park not far from here. He interviewed well and got an offer. The following week, the governor shut down all amusement parks, along with shopping malls, to reduce the spread of the virus. The governor was right; I don’t take any issue with his decision. But it left TB without a job he was counting on, through no fault of his own.

TB is relatively lucky, as college students go. His parents make a decent living (knock wood), and we’re able to support him. As the #RealCollege movement regularly points out, for low-income families, sometimes support flows from the student to the family, rather than the other way around. In those cases, the loss of entry-level jobs is potentially devastating. The EFC may be zero, but the truth of it is negative; losing that income can be the difference between a difficult situation and homelessness.

EFCs have been moving progressively farther from reality for a long time. Rather than starting with what it’s reasonable to ask a family to pay, it’s the remainder after subtracting available aid from list price. For people in expensive areas, it’s ludicrous. On the lower end, it never goes below zero, even if the student is helping support the family.

For years, as the EFC has come untethered from real life, the damage was incremental. But as the saying goes, when the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked. The tide is out.

This is small potatoes in the scheme of things, but it’s something that higher ed has some leeway to enact. We may not be able to create very many jobs -- honestly, I’m hoping to avoid cutting them -- but at least we can bring our expectations of students’ finances into closer alignment with reality. If we don’t, students will have a terrible time showing up in September.