You’ve chaired an influential national commission on college affordability and become the news media’s go-to guy for your views on the subject.
Now what?
Well, if you’re Rhodes College President William E. Troutt, you put some of your ideas into practice and then watch as actions speak louder than words.
The students and staff who benefit from Rhodes’ Student Associate Program may not know it, but the idea for this unique student employment program can be traced to the first recommendation that Troutt and his colleagues on the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education made to Congress in 1998:
“The Commission recommends that academic institutions intensify their efforts to control costs and increase institutional productivity.”
When Troutt assumed the presidency of Rhodes in 2000, he considered the best ways that that particular “policy goal” — and the commission’s report as a whole — could be applied at his campus, a small liberal arts college nestled into a comfortable Memphis neighborhood. Despite Rhodes’ reputation as a “labor intensive” school with students who actively pursued internships and volunteer work, Troutt soon recognized that the school wasn’t fully using its students’ talent, skills, enthusiasm and energy.
So, along with Robert L. Johnson Jr., dean of information services at Rhodes, Troutt hatched a plan that encompasses the three major components of the commission’s recommendations: controlling costs, increasing productivity and making college more affordable for many of the school’s 1,600 students.
The resulting initiative, called the Student Associate Program (SAP), is more than mere work-study. Rather, it places students in professional-level on-campus jobs that mesh with their fields of study and their career goals.
“What we’re doing,” Troutt explained, “is providing a first-class internship with a co-curricular transcript that demonstrates what (the student) is capable of doing.”
Students in the program — which began last year with 21 participants and will expand significantly over the next two years — work more hours (between 10 and 15) and receive higher wages ($10-$12 per hour) than other student employees.
Traditional work-study — data entry and mass mailings — marked Anna Ivey’s initial exposure to on-campus employment. “I stuffed a lot of envelopes,” recalled Anna, now a Rhodes senior. Among the first wave of students hired under the SAP initiative, Anna spent last year in the admissions office, where she immersed herself in a program that recruits Rhodes alumni to pitch the school at college fairs and other functions. It’s a job that is interactive, intellectually stimulating and labor intensive.
 | Rhodes College senior Anna Ivey says the experience she’s gained in the program has proven to her that she “can handle the real world.” |
“I can see the evidence of what I’m doing. Before, it seemed all I ever saw was someone’s name in a database,” said Anna, praising SAP’s practical benefits. “If this is a real-world situation, then I think I can handle it. If I can handle a Rhodes education with a part-time job like this, then I can handle the real world.”
The academic and administrative departments that employ SAP students seem equally pleased. When the communications department needed a part-time employee with an English background and strong writing abilities to research and write personal profiles of faculty, staff and students, Media Relations Manager Dionne Chalmers brought in student Sara Beth Rutherford for a professional-level interview. Under SAP guidelines, Rutherford outlined how the position would enhance her education and career objectives, and then explained how her efforts would benefit the department and the college.
She got the job. And Chalmers got a trusted aide that she could turn to, without hesitation, to crank out press releases and handle other writing assignments over the past year.
“If it’s something I don’t have time to do, now I can give the assignment to a student who can use it to build her resumé,” said Chalmers. “The students get to see the evidence of their work, and we get to talk to the students about career goals and what they want to do with their lives.”
Jo Bennett, the financial aid administrator overseeing the program, said Rhodes paid $60,000 in wages to SAP students last year. The benefits to the school — in terms of productivity and student learning — are still being measured, but Bennett said early results are very encouraging. In fact, SAP has been so successful on the Rhodes campus that Troutt envisions expanding the program into partnering arrangements with businesses in the surrounding community.
In a way, however, SAP has already moved off-campus. As word of the program spreads through higher education, other schools have taken notice of the Rhodes College model. In fact, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, will soon become the nation’s second school to implement a Student Associate Program. “They’re adopting it lock, stock and barrel,” Johnson reported proudly.
