Do FA Students Deserve Jobs?

In an article titled “Student Worker Selection Process Explored,” published in last week’s issue of The Exonian, staff writer Alan Liu examined the process and requirements for students to become proctors, paid or unpaid. In regard to the paid jobs, such as Library Proctor or Church Proctor, he reported that there was no priority set for financial aid students (FA students) who—a majority of the time—are in greater need monetarily than those who are not on financial aid.

Excluding faculty children, 46.3 percent of Phillips Exeter Academy’s student body, is currently receiving financial aid. These students receive an average of $40,559, plus $850 that all financial aid students receive to cover for school supplies’ cost, for a total average of $41,409. This is a large sum of money.

Then is it not fair that jobs are divided fairly and equally between FA students and non-FA students? Does this large sum of money not compensate for the lesser income that FA students’ households receive? Should not the FA students and non-FA students given the same opportunities to find student jobs?

At first, this may seem plausible. It may seem right that because most of these FA students are coming to Exeter for a substantially lesser cost than other students, jobs should be distributed without priority. However, at second glance, it becomes clear that despite this monetary “advantage,” FA students should receive priority when applying for student jobs.

Initially, as a non-FA student and student worker, I saw the other side of the spectrum in that there should be no bias against non-FA students when considering student applicants. I convinced myself that this lack of bias prepared us students for the real world, where having less income will not provide more job interviews. I convinced myself that some FA students, in fact, were richer than some non-FA students.

However, as I began to contemplate on the reasoning behind these two claims, I found several argumentative fallacies.

Some, as I did, may say that the unbiased nature of the job selecting process represents the outer world that will also show no bias for students of lower monetary stature. In fact, this bolsters one of the goals of the administration’s implementation of student workers: to create a chance to see what working is like. Not only does the student working process provide for the monetary needs of students, but it also provides an application of a real-world situation at Exeter.

However, I discovered that the idea that there ought to be no priority for FA students to prepare students for the real world had several fallacies. First off, if the poorer students will receive no priority after high school, shouldn’t they at least receive some priority in high school? There is no reason why these students should lose out in both experiences. In addition, shouldn’t poorer students be cared for even more vigilantly so that in the future, they will learn to help out other students who are in the same situation?

Another objection to this priority for FA students might be that some FA students have more money than non-FA students. Admittedly, this is sometimes the case. For example, I, a non-FA student, may have a household that earns less in U.S. dollars than some FA students’ households. There is most likely a small demographic of FA students whose households earn more than a small demographic of non-FA students. But I had to notice the keyword, “small.” The majority of the FA students receive less income than the majority of non-FA students, a fact that leads me to believe that student jobs should give priority to FA students.

Above all, FA students ought to be provided an opportunity to compensate for the dearth of money their households receive more than non-FA students. When one group of students does not have something that another group does, measures should be taken to provide for the group that is lacking. Just like in the mission of Harkness, which, according to Edward Harkness, aimed for students—the “below average” and “average” with respect to knowledge—to be given the same opportunities as the “above average” students, student jobs should provide for this slight inequality that exists in respect to money within Academy students. ♥