Therapy for the Sane

Dear fellow bloggers re: work and school,

I appreciate all the comments you all made about the problems with dealing with work and school. Like I said in class, hearing the myriads of experiences helped me better understand the difficult choices that students have to make. I realize how lucky I was to not have work while I was in school, outside of the workstudy jobs that I had on campus. As Nina pointed out, it is a fallacy to generalize from your own experiences. I do think that some students overestimate the need to work, and perhaps don't prioritize school. I also think that some students work for other reasons than simply money, and don't neccessarily have the foresight to be able to balance their work with their school. Another thing that still worries me about the trend of students who work over twenty hours a week, and go to school, is that there is a lower-standard in terms of what is expected out of school. For instance, the rule of thumb is that each class should require one hour of homework for each credit hour--meaning that ideally you should be spending almost forty hours a week, just on homework, for each class. However, obviously if people are working over twenty hours a week plus going to school, they are not spending that much time doing homework. I, on the otherhand, did have that much homework while I was in college. I wonder if students are perhaps having to do less homework, or simply ending up spending less time on their homework. Either way, it makes me worry about the quality of education that students receive while they go to school, compared to the quality of education that I received.

What do you think?

Melissa