Giving Compass' Take:

• Students from the University of Utah share their employment experiences, acquired through a nonprofit called Education at Work that arranges partnerships between universities and large employers. 

• What are the mutual benefits for both students and employers in this partnership? How can funders help expand these types of connections and programs across the U.S.?

• Read about the employment challenges for low-income working students. 

On the third floor of a downtown office building, Solomon Kalapala was chatting with a Microsoft customer on one computer screen while troubleshooting the customer’s misbehaving software on another.

These aren’t typical call center employees, however. They’re among about 300 University of Utah students who have side jobs here arranged by a nonprofit called Education at Work.

Founded by a call center executive, EAW sets up partnerships between universities and large employers to provide jobs like Kalapala’s. The employers get reliable employees and prospective hires while the universities can offer students a novel way to work for tuition and keep their loan debt low.

The students also get work experience, said Taylor Randall, dean of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.

“They learn a set of remarkable customer service skills,” said Randall. “In my mind, they learn it better here than they would just listening to it in the classroom.”

As students struggle with college costs and the strain of balancing work and school, Education at Work provides a little-noticed new way of leveraging corporate America’s thirst for skilled talent and colleges’ desire to tout how well they prepare young people for careers. The nonprofit employed 488 students on four campuses last year and has plans to expand to 1,521 by 2021.

Offering part-time corporate work can allow the school to say, “Yeah we’ve raised tuition, but guess what, we’ve got this program, you can pay for over half your education, in the University of Utah’s case,” said Randall. EAW’s University of Utah graduates end up with half the student loan debt of their peers, the organization reports.

As employees retire and companies seek to establish brand awareness with a new generation of consumers, businesses such as Microsoft and Discover “want to maintain a strong relationship with that potential flow of workers,” Smith said.

Read the full article about helping students pay for college through corporate jobs by Mikhail Zinshteyn at The Hechinger Report.