Paola de Varona investigates the amount of time student leaders must devote to their positions. She then asks what campuses like Northwestern are doing to minimize the privilege of participating. (Transcript below).
Transcript:
de Varona: Northwestern students are busy. In fact, so busy that many of us are involved in 2 or more student organizations on campus while juggling classes and managing a job. This isn’t unique to Northwestern, it seems to be the norm throughout colleges in the nation.
The average student leader on campus devotes a lot of time to their role – a privilege that students from low-income families may not have. Instead, for many students much of that time has to be spent on working and contributing to their college tuition.
So I have to ask: Do Northwestern student leaders actually have to devote an immense amount of time and effort to their positions? And if so what are campuses like Northwestern doing to minimize the privilege of participating?
I’m Paola de Varona and welcome to Ask NBN.
To answer these questions, I reached out to dozens of student leaders from a variety of popular organizations on campus. 13 in total filled out my survey of questions about the time they dedicate to their roles within these organizations. I got responses from performing arts organizations, club sports team presidents, political organizations, Greek Life presidents and student publication leaders including our very own NBN editor in chief.
I can’t say the answers I got surprised me. About half of the students said they dedicated 10-20 hours to their role. And when asked how often they prioritized this role over school – no one responded with the option ‘very little’ and 12 out of 13 responders answered that they either prioritize this role moderately, moderately often, or often. What’s more is only one responder said their position had never clashed with other priorities they have at Northwestern.
But all the others cited that their position often clashed with work, classes, other clubs, exercise and even their social life.
The potential clash of work responsibilities, school and pursuing an extracurricular is exactly what is proving as a barrier for students from low-income families. And working a job while being a college student is very common. Four out of five U.S. students work while in school and put in an average of 19 hours every week according to a survey by Citigroup and Seventeen Magazine. According to the 2011 American Community survey of the 19.7 million students aged 16 and over enrolled in an undergraduate college, 72 percent had a job.
Now, while working can prove to be a very enriching activity, there is no doubt that balancing so many responsibilities – including financial ones – can be difficult and have a toll on students.
So I wanted to find out if Northwestern was doing anything to help alleviate the financial burden for student leaders with a demonstrated need.
Turns out, they are.
After scouring the financial aid page and coming up empty, I contacted the financial aid office about any potential scholarship opportunities for student leaders. They directed me to ASG.
So I sat down with Christina Cilento, ASG president and SESP senior, to learn more about the Student Engagement award.
Cilento: So this was started two years ago by ASG and probably the reason it’s not well known on campus now is because it wasn’t administered last year. There was some kinks to getting the scholarship out. We have 10,000 dollars allocated to it in our budget. We distributed the first round in the 2014-2015 school year and it was pretty successful and we’re doing the same again this year. The application should actually be going live in the next week. We had to kind of sort out some kinks from the first time it was worked out as well because there were like students who were reviewing the application and we didn’t think that was appropriate because we didn’t want students to have any favoritism or know what students’ financial status was. So we’re working with student enrichment services and student orgs and activities. Anyone can apply for the award. Financial aid is taken into consideration, but it’s not the only factor so our goal is to relieve the burden that students face when they have to decide you know should I get more involved in this organization or should I pick up more work study hours.
de Varona: These scholarships are a one-time 500-dollar stipend, that students are welcome to keep applying to every year. With the upcoming release of the application, I asked Cilento to explain the application process students have to complete.
Cilento: So the application is four questions that are like no more than 250 words. So the first one is just describe the student organization that you’re in – it has to be a registered student organization on wildcat connection. And then tell us about your role in that organization, your responsibilities, your average weekly time commitment. How that organization contributes to a community on campus or strengthens the Northwestern community. And then how your involvement in that organization would be impacted by receiving this student engagement award.
de Varona: This scholarship at Northwestern has even served as a model for other universities to do the same. Cilento received a phone call from the University of Michigan student government earlier this year to get details on how Northwestern created the program. Now, the University of Michigan is creating their own Leadership Engagement scholarship. I spoke with Tania Haddad, the Speaker of Assembly in Central Student Government at University of Michigan. Unlike Northwestern, their program is still in the developmental stages.
Haddad: Our office of student life and central student government established what we call the Leadership Engagement Scholarship. And it’s essentially a way to remove the cost barriers to extracurricular involvement that many students face.
Currently I believe the scholarship has a little over 200,000 dollars in the endowment which is a wonderful start considering that we've only been fundraising for it about 6 months at this point. And what it means for it to be endowed is it will be guaranteed to be maintained and grown by the university over time, but it also means only a small percentage of that 200,000 is going to actually go to students as a scholarship. So we haven't started giving out the scholarship yet because I think that the vision is just that it will be a lot larger and we're just going to continue fundraising efforts in the meantime.
de Varona: The two scholarships actually have slight differences. The University of Michigan Scholarship allows students to aspire to hold a leadership position and evaluates the money that will be distributed on a need based scale, while the Northwestern version requires students to already be involved and is at a fixed rate of 500 dollars. Haddad also talked to me about the greater vision they had for the recipients of this scholarship.
Haddad: I think that it’s going to last throughout their college career, but the idea is that we give out more scholarships each semester so that it becomes a you are part of a leadership cohort and then there would be a mentorship program. And so it would be always a growing network and there would be incoming classes and outgoing classes. But yeah I think the idea is to help them – we don't want to just help them for one semester and then leave them hanging.
de Varona: Cilento cited some of these differences as areas they’d like to work on in the future for the Student Engagement Award.
Cilento: Our hope is that the university would match that 10,000 dollars so we’d be able to do like 40 or we’d be able to I don’t know have a sliding scale. So it’s like this particular person really needs a 1000 dollars and this person only needs 100 dollars – so give us a bit more flexibility. But I think after this year of hopefully doing it successfully then we can go to the university and say hey this is a really successful program that students would like to apply to more and they would give us more money for it.
de Varona: While these scholarships definitely have room for improvement, they’re a step in the right direction to bridging the socioeconomic divide many schools like Northwestern are facing. We’re urged to get involved, but often times who exactly is able to get involved and devote time to being a student leader is overlooked. If a university is going to boast about their robust student participation in extracurriculars they need to be making sure that every student is being afforded that opportunity – not just a select few.
The music in this episode is courtesy of bensound.com and purple planet. I’m Paola de Varona and this is Ask NBN.