Vacation Work
By J. F. 'VVOLFENDEN* ESPONSIBLE estimates suggest that seventy per cent.
of all university students take up some paid vacation employment, and that each of them spends, on an average, eight weeks each year in this Way. Is that a good thing ? At the present time this question is by no means rhetorical or (in the pejorative sense) academic.. It has to be answered, as a matter of practical decision, by a great many undergraduates and their parents; and the university authorities themselves thought it sufficiently important to select it as one of the three topics for discussion at the Home Universities Conference just before Christmas.
One distinction must be made at the outset. Many courses of university study require that those who follow them should spend some time, outside university terms, in practical work of a relevant kind. Students of medicine, agriculture or engineering, for example, find that as part of their university courses they must spend part of their vacations in hospitals, farms or workshops, translating into real life the lessons of the lecture-room. Time spent in such " vocational " activities should be excluded from this discussion, since it represents work which is in principle university work although it is done outside the university's walls.
The real problem concerns gainful employment which has no planned connection with an undergraduate's university studies. The Christmas postman, the pea-canner described so vividly by Mr. Oliver Crawford in the Spectator " Under- graduate Page " last week, the summer-holiday bus-conductor, the guide to Americans in London, the temporary barman— each of these is busily engaged on a job remote from his term-time studies. And he is doing it, with very few excep- tions, not " for experience " or on any other high-falutin' pretext, but starkly and frankly to make some money. It is often thought that tradition in Scotland and customary practice in the United States and Canada are relevant evidence, where the question of vacation work and earnings is concerned. Both, for different reasons, are misleading. The " sack of oatmeal " tradition and the arrangement of the Scottish year in such a way as to. allow the crofter's son to divide his life
* Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading.
between philosophy and 6rming belong to a time when public money was not yet as generously available as it is now. There were virtues in these habits, and there are many who deplore their passing. But the whole picture has been changed by the introduction into it of a nation-wide system of grants.
Similarly, the practice of working one's way through college, accepted as normal by the large majority of American under- graduates, began because there was no system of financial aid from public funds.
Nor is this practice confined to vacation-time. Anybody who has lived in an American university and had his shoes cleaned, his newspapers delivered and his milk-shake served by fellow-undergraduates must have wondered, with an uneasy conscience, how much acadeinic work was being neglected by those who were ministering to his personal comfort in this way.
It is at least doubtful whether either the Scots or the Americans would today deliberately institute practices which, granted the virtues they encourage, must inevitably distract the mind and energies of the student from his primary purpose. There seems to be no particular point in making virtues of those necessities which our own more lavish scholarship system has in great part removed.
" In great part," yes. But have they not, it might be asked, been removed altogether ? Is it not the case that nowadays grants and scholarships are adequate, account being taken of parental contributions, to cover all the legitimate needs of a university student ? Why does he need to spend his vacation making money ? The answer must be that it is not quite as simple as that, for at least three reasons.
First, these grants are intended, whether they come from the Ministry of Education or from the local education authorities, to cover students' costs at an adequate but modest standard. Every three years each university is asked by the Ministry of Education to make an estimate, under specified headings, of the total annual cost to a student of pursuing its courses; and on these figures the maximum amount of a State scholarship is based. The universities do not find it easy to assess a student's legitimate spending on clothes or pocket- money. Clearly, nobody wants to prevent any student from taking a reasonably full part in the activities of his college or university. On the other hand, it would not be reasonable to expect public funds to cover all the near-luxuries which " make all the difference." The holiday abroad, the books beyond the utilitarian minimum, the extra evening frock, the occasional glass of sherry—all entirely justifiable expenses, but hardly legitimate claims on public funds. It is precisely these items which vacation employment makes possible.
Secondly, the grants are intended to cover the expenses of the student. But there are a good many who find that, especially in the long university vacations, they are a serious charge on the family budget at home. It is often said that parents are less willing today than they were in former times to sacrifice in the cause of their children's education their own money or standards of living; and in some cases that is undeniably true. But in some cases also there simply is no margin; and a healthy student appetite can make a disastrous hole in a family budget. Further, the student himself has his pride, and he is very firmly not going to be a charge on his parents if he can help it. He feels this especially strongly if he has been off the family pay-roll for two years during his National Service period. So he turns to vacation employment to earn his holiday keep.
Thirdly, different local education authorities adopt different rates in fixing the amounts of their awards. The Minister of Education has recommended that the State scholarship rates should be adopted by all local education authorities; but they have not all found themselves able to do this. So it can happen that two boys, with identical claims and identical financial backgrounds, receive different amounts of grant because they live in different places.- One of them will obviously be attracKI to gainful employment in his vacations more forcibly than the other. Further. whereas the Ministry formerly made an automatic vacation allowance, it now requires that where the parents' income is above a certain point this allowance will only be made when a case for it can be established. So vacation employment finds another ally, Nor is it only the man whose income comes from scholarships and grants who is affected. Many of the surviving twenty-per- cent. for whom the father pays are often worse off than the scholarship-holder; and they need the vacation money no less than he does. From the side of the student the root-motive is self-help. And nobody will quarrel with that. Rather we should welcome it as a sign of independence. The important thing is that this whole business should not get out of hand. The primary purpose in life of a university student is, or should be, academic, for whatever else a university may be it is primarily an institution for higher education. And that purpose persists through vacations as well as term-time. Vacations are not holidays. They include holidays, as they include some time for academic study and some time for making money and some time for all manner of other things. In former days the (only slightly exaggerated) formulation was that terms existed in order that tutors might tell their pupils what to read in the vacation. If a large part of that vacation is now to be spent not in academic study but in canning peas somebody is going to suggest before long that it might be more profitably spent at the university itself and that the Cambridge Long Vacation Term should be universalised. We shall have reached the point of nonsense if students come back after each vacation in order to recni.t their physical energies for the next vacation's toil.
Previous page
