O'DONNELL: Bridge Card cuts put students looking for work experience in tough spot
The first wave of students had their Bridge Card benefits eliminated recently.
Many are voicing their concerns with me as they get their DHS letters in the mail, and the biggest problem people seem to have is that their internship hours do not count as work hours.
The Snyder Administration's budget priorities have put students in a very hard spot pertaining to internships.
On the one hand, an internship worth having is going to consume at least 16 hours per week, with the vast majority unpaid.
With Pell Grants being cut, Bridge Card benefits taken away, an atrocious job market for those without a college degree and parents who cannot make ends meet, I am unsure where Lansing bureaucrats think students' money is going to come from.
On the other hand, students working a low-skill, low-wage job for 20 hours a week will not get the connections, contacts and experience that comes from a good internship.
Although a student will be financially better off for the moment, his or her long-term employment prospects are significantly dampened without the professional development offered by a good internship.
It is worth emphasizing that any part-time job a college student can get will almost certainly only pay minimum wage. Any job available for those with only a high school education completed will not provide enough money to purchase a big-ticket item such as a college degree.
So even though students will be financially better off in the sense that daddy will not have to pay for everything, students will still have to take out big loans and the frustration over money will continue.
A less desirable solution to this problem is to have internships count toward the 20-hour work requirement for food assistance. This would make the decision between eating versus professional development less difficult. In the long run, people will get jobs quicker and make more money in those jobs, so over time their taxes pay off the money they used in college.
This solution is less desirable because students are still working without getting paid, while collecting benefits from the government. Little about this situation is ideal.
A more desirable solution would be to adopt the California model pertaining to internships and require all to be paid at least minimum wage. California makes exceptions for those internships that are completely educational and have no low-skilled work involved, which is by all means a fair exception.
This would allow students to develop professionally while building skills they can take with them into the workforce.
What is certainly not acceptable is the new status quo, in which students will be forever stuck between a rock and a hard place.
