Working While Attending College? You’re Not Alone!

Posted on July 10, 2007 by Jennifer Brady

Over the July 4th week, I found a couple of rare moments to actually glance at the newspaper. One snippet on the front page of USA Today caught my eye. In the lower left hand corner of the front page where this newspaper usually runs their "Snapshots" graph was one entitled "Learning and working." Using Department of Education (DOE) stats as the source, this blurb showed the dramatic increase between 1975 and 2005 in the number of full-time college students with jobs.

In 1975, 35% of full time college students had a job of some kind.

In 2005, that percentage had increased to 49%.

I decided to drill down a little deeper on my own by going direct to the source, the DOE. You can, too, at this link where you can get to a spreadsheet of all the numbers under the heading:

Table 45-2 . Percentage of 16- to 24-year-old college students who were employed…

Not surprisingly, the percentage of part-time college students who are working is 85%. I'm sure this has much to do with the growing popularity of online education, although the numbers aren't granular enough to know how many working people attend a traditional versus an online college. Nevertheless it seems clear that the most successful online colleges like UMassOnline will continually find more and more ways to make working and learning as convenient and compatible as possible.