Being a student colleague and the impact on student learning and belonging

The chapter explores the impact on students of one of the UK’s first university-wide student “jobs on campus” programs. It considers research that was undertaken to identify motivations for students to work on campus, the nature of the skills they developed, and the impact it had on attitudes and approaches to learning and their university. Such investigations have taken place at colleges and universities in the USA where tuition fees and jobs on campus programs have been in existence for many years. However, within the UK the phenomenon of substantial tuition fees was new and students and universities were struggling to identify methods to tackle the issue and build the language to address the implications. It has been established that students in the UK seek employment alongside their studies in order to finance their student life (NUS, The Pound in your pocket summary report. NUS, 2012; NASES 2012). The majority of students will be forced to locate this employment through off-campus employers and research has shown that such off-campus employment can have a detrimental impact on student academic performance (Astin, What matters in college? Four critical years revisited. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1993), but that this can be flipped to a positive effect if that employment takes place on campus where a more supportive and flexible working environment can become conducive to student learning (Pascarella and Terenzini, How college affects students: A third decade of research. vol 2. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2005). The chapter interweaves theoretical underpinnings with research findings to seek to explain and highlight the changing landscape in which students study at their universities. The outcomes and literature set universities a series of challenges including the nature of the identity of student colleagues (Zlotkowski et al., Students as colleagues: Expanding the circle of service learning leadership. Campus Compact, Providence, 2006), supporting students’ motivation to engage and how this employment can be best targeted at those students who might most benefit.