Minimum wage work experience and college career aspirations

Personal Perspectives About Work and Education

Menial Work Experience

Honest work is honest work, but the actual experience of work can be very different depending on the kind of work one does. The fact of the matter is that working menial jobs can be depressing and demeaning and even when it is not, it is much less likely to be fulfilling than higher level employment. In general, the higher the level of employment, the more intelligent and skilled your supervisors and managers are likely to be. That is an important factor in the way that working a particular job makes you feel because it usually determines the quality of supervision and assistance.

It can be incredibly frustrating to work for a manager or supervisor who is less intelligent than you, or closed-minded, or unhappy with his life. As a college student working a part-time job, or as someone using a part-time job salary to save money for future tuition or for the achievement of other long-term goals, menial labor is much less depressing than it is to have no other choice for work but to do that for the long-term. That is one of the other reasons that the supervisors and managers you have in unskilled work are often negative people who seem to enjoy making life difficult for people. Many of them hate their work lives and feel powerless in society; they may feel inadequate because they earn a very modest salary and they may be ashamed that they lack any advanced education (Healey, 2009).

The only time that some of them have any opportunity to feel slightly important is by their authority at work. Likewise, they often resent young workers because they envy the opportunities that they seem to have and the fact that they still have most of their lives ahead of them. It is not uncommon for some managers to treat college students worse than their year-round employees because they resent that they are using the work that is their lot in life as a stepping stone to a better life.

Still, as college students working menial part-time jobs, you never really face the same life experience of someone who knows that menial work is also his or her future. Waiting tables or pumping gas are tolerable ways of earning money for textbooks or gym memberships; trying to support one's self (let alone a family) on that type of salary is another matter entirely. In fact, there are many people, the working poor, who work twelve or fourteen hours every day, often at multiple low-wage jobs, who cannot manage to save enough to secure an apartment, put food on the table for their children, and pay for basic medical care and other necessities (Ehrenreich, 2001).

Ironically, when you work a low-wage job, you actually pay more for many things than someone who earns a better wage. Minimum wage workers rarely earn enough money to save up first and last month's rent and a security deposit to rent an apartment; consequently, they often spend more on hotel and short stay rental rates than a modest apartment would cost them (Ehrenreich, 2001). They may not be able to save enough money for a car, insurance, and gas; consequently, they end up paying more over the long-term on car services or other methods of transportation just to get back and froth between home and work on a daily basis. They may not have access to credit cards and may not be able to pay minimum monthly fees for prepaid toll passes, so they end up paying the highest toll booth fees spending more time in traffic to make the same trip as someone with an automatic toll pass. They often cannot afford for basic healthcare services and may go years without medical and dental checkups. When they do get a drug prescription for medical conditions, they often cannot afford to fill them (Ehrenreich, 2001).

A college education is a necessity for almost everyone today, because if you have any hope of pursuing any kind of meaningful interest through the work you do for a living, doing so will be impossible unless you have a particular desire to work in a field of interest that does not require a degree. You may not think that applies to you because you envision working in construction, or as a hair dresser, or whatever the case may be. But until you actually have to earn a fulltime living climbing ladders or cutting a dozen people's hair five or six days a week, week in and week out, you should not necessarily assume that everything that is pleasant enough to do for work in the short-term (or in your imagination) will be a good choice for life.

In any case, there are very few types of occupations that do not require a higher education that one could not try out (or return to) after achieving higher educational goals first. However, the opposite is not true: most career tracks that require a higher education are too important to delay trying out construction or hair dressing as a possible long-term occupation. Both jobs are perfectly respectable forms of work and there are many people who do them happily; but they work harder for fewer benefits than many professionals who stayed in school.

Especially today when the economic situation has made good jobs even harder to find and increased competition for the positions that are available, a college education has become increasingly important even in occupations that may not have previously had minimum educational requirements, like policing or firefighting in many large cities, or even retail sales or personal fitness trainers (Halbert & Ingulli, 2008). Everything else being equal between two candidates for the same job, employers often prefer college graduates for no other reason than the fact that they think it provides evidence that the candidate is more intelligent, more capable of learning, and better able to perform a consistent work effort than candidates of similar age without a higher education.

Previous generations of high school graduates had many more options for work and less competition for them than today's high school graduates. Even more importantly, in previous generations, having a college degree was more the exception than the rule; therefore, there was certainly no social stigma connected to not having a college education. However, today, college degrees are so much more common that in many communities, it is more the norm than going to work fulltime immediately after high school (Healey, 2009).

Recognizing and Overcoming Challenges to Educational Success

Unfortunately, college tuition today is much more expensive for the average middle-class family, primarily because its cost has increased much more steadily than wages have increased (Healey, 2009). One of the consequences for many American students is that they may not have the traditional opportunity for life exploration that many previous generations have considered a rite of passage that went along with going away to college. However, there are viable alternatives available in terms of educational opportunities, if not some of the same social opportunities and freedoms often associated with college life. Similarly, today, many students who may have expected to be able to enjoy financial support from their families while they were in college must work throughout their educational career to help pay for its expense. That is not necessarily a problem provided one understands and is willing to accept the necessary responsibilities in that regard. Living at home while attending a community college is another option for some students but it requires additional commitment and maturity to do so in some respects because it can be tempting to forgo education and take jobs that provide more freedom for high school graduates whose parents do not pressure them to leave the family home.