Making Ends Meet-Taiwan's Part-Time Job Dilemma

As the summer holidays get underway, two of Taiwan's largest job placement services, 104 Job Bank and 1111 Job Bank, are reporting that more than 80% of Taiwan's university students intend to work this summer, about twice as many as in previous years. The placement services are therefore anticipating much more intense competition for jobs. With university students working and secondary school students preparing for exams, it seems the only kids vacationing this summer will be elementary school students.

In fact, large numbers of university students have begun doing part-time work year round, not just in the summer. According to the Council on Labor Affairs, nearly half of all university students worked part-time while school was in session in 2006. A survey done by 1111 Job Bank just before the start of the 2007 academic year in September further revealed that 90% of university students were interested in doing part-time work. Figures like this suggests that today's university students are anything but the easily bruised "strawberries" they have been made out to be. They want jobs, and more and more of them have already rolled up their sleeves, put their noses to the grindstone, and entered the workforce.

In recent years, well-paid at-home tutoring positions have come to represent the pinnacle of part-time work. Unfortunately, these positions are limited almost exclusively to students in the most prestigious departments of the top national universities.

Backgrounds and prospects

Two forces underlie the rising numbers of university students who are working.

The first involves financial difficulties at home.

The sluggish economy of recent years has limited growth in real household incomes. With prices rising, lower and middle-income families have been struggling. Acting on government policy, universities too have been steadily increasing their tuition fees. Not surprisingly, the number of students applying for educational assistance loans has also been rising steadily. By 2007, more than 360,000 students had applied. Students from non-wealthy families, who make up the majority of university students, are also finding it necessary to take on part-time work to earn a little cash.

Shih Chien-chu, head of the Career Development Department of the National Youth Commission, says that 43% of students at expensive private universities work part-time, versus only about 35% at public universities. In general, about 40% of students take jobs out of economic necessity, i.e. to cover their own living expenses or supplement their families' incomes. Only about 17% do so to acquire the kind of pre-graduation work experience that business executives advocate.

(facing page) The percentage of students working part-time and the variety of jobs they're getting are both on the rise. The photo shows Wu Chih-hang, a surfing instructor at Ilan's Honeymoon Bay.

Dealing with dim prospects

Imbalances in the job market for young people are another force impelling students to work before graduation.

Data published by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed an overall national unemployment rate of 3.84% in May versus 4.28% for university graduates. Clearly, a university degree no longer guarantees employment. The data also showed that young people aged 15-24 suffered the highest rate of unemployment-10.36%.

The notion that graduation equals unemployment hangs like a dark cloud over the current generation of university students, and is compelling them to enter the workforce and learn how to deal with money at a younger age.

With the grim full-time job market before them and family financial difficulties behind, some students spend nearly as much time working as they do in class. A June survey of working university students conducted by 104 Job Bank revealed that these students spent an average of 18.3 hours per week on the job, almost exactly matching the average 18.5 hours per week they spent in class.

Many disciplines with a practical orientation actually encourage their students to gain work experience before graduation through internships and part-time work.

Huang Ching-han, a graduate of the Communication Studies program at Tzu Chi University who currently works in public television, spent part of her senior year interning with the Public Television Service, commuting all the way from Hualien to Taipei's Neihu every week to do so. Huang was able to integrate her part-time work and job search with her field of study, and has been working for PTS ever since.

Hung Yi-cheng, an 18-year-old student in the hotel and restaurant management program of a vocational high school, is another case in point. Hung has worked in restaurants and at 7-Eleven, both to earn needed cash and in the hope that the experience will help him in his future career.

Faced with high tuition and cost-of-living expenses and stagnant wages, more than half of Taiwan's university students are taking part-time jobs while school is in session, and 80% are working during the summer. In the photo, a student-worker carries a cooler full of drinks for a beverage promotion.

"Useless" jobs worthwhile?

Unfortunately, part-time jobs rarely draw on the skills students are acquiring in school. A 2006 CLA report on part-time work among university students showed that 70% of those with a part-time job worked in a position unrelated to their field of study. Nonetheless 80% believed that the experience would help them in their future careers.

You can't help but wonder: if students aren't applying what they're learning in school, how is their experience going to help them find a job in or develop skills related to their chosen profession?

Commenting on this contradiction, Shih Chien-chu, an active proponent of students working part-time for the experience, says that the explosion in the number of university graduates has provided companies with an abundance of skilled mid-level personnel to choose from. Management is therefore much more interested in a potential new hire's attitude towards work than his or her professional skills.

Consequently, it doesn't matter if students take part-time work unrelated to their fields of study. "What's crucial is that the employment relationship foster obedience, identification, teamwork, and proactivity vis-a-vis work," says Shih.

Another part-time job market trend worth noting is that the jobs tend to be low-skill service-industry positions.

As Taiwan's economy has transformed, service-industry jobs have been replacing those in manufacturing. Few students work in manufacturing. Instead, they take positions in restaurants, supermarkets, and tutoring centers, or work as administrative assistants.

These are generally low-skill positions with low pay, no prospects for advancement, and high turnover. Data from the CLA show that the average hourly wage for a convenience store employee is NT$81. For a restaurant worker, it's NT$89. Gas station attendants earn NT$85 per hour, while tutoring- and day-care-center workers earn NT$133 per hour.

Students are now spending as much time working as they are in class, typically in jobs that have nothing to do with their fields of study. Are the pressures of a sluggish economy and tight labor market endangering a generation's acquisition of knowledge and skills?

Home tutoring

At-home tutoring is the one exception to the low-wage pattern. Back when there were fewer university students, and fewer of them working part-time, tutoring was the de facto part-time student job. Now, with wages averaging NT$351 per hour, at-home tutoring represents the pinnacle of part-time employment.

Lin Chia-ho, an assistant professor in the Law Department of National Chengchi University, observes that tutoring is more like providing personal assistance in return for an honorarium; the relationship is very different from the typical part-time employment relationship. At-home tutors also used to serve as monitors or even baby sitters in addition to helping with coursework. But the diversification of the educational market has resulted in a massive decline in the number of traditional tutoring opportunities as tutoring centers have taken over the home tutors' primary role, and day-care centers have taken over the secondary one.

"What's more problematic is that modern-day parents have very high expectations of home tutors," says Lin. "If you aren't a student in one of the most prestigious departments of the best national universities, they don't want you. As a result, most students have no chance at this kind of work."

Wanting it all, unwilling to pay

Though many see students' desire to work and get a feel for the job market as "proactive," the phenomenon worries Lin.

"Many companies aren't willing to hire full-time workers," he explains. "Instead, they're using temps, part-timers, and students. They've realized that the large pool of students available for part-time work allows them make large cuts in their labor costs. The influx of students into the workforce is displacing the middle-aged and older jobseekers who would otherwise have filled these low-skill positions. It has also prevented students from focusing on their studies or on acquiring deeper knowledge of their fields, which is terribly detrimental to a Taiwan determined to develop a knowledge economy."

Worse, workers develop their attitudes towards work unconsciously. If students internalize the part-timer's "I'll stay if it works for me and leave if doesn't" attitude and the idea that a given job doesn't matter because there's part-time work to be had everywhere, they may well become uncomfortable with the "permanence" of a full-time job. And, in fact, many are ending up as freelancers.

On the other side of the coin, shops and restaurants have chosen to accept the lack of dependability and lower skill levels of student part-timers because they don't want to invest the time and money to train a "real" employee. Given this, the government's ongoing efforts to encourage the service industry to upgrade and innovate will in the end amount to little more than words.

Lin stresses that you have to think about the issue of university students working part time in the context of both labor-market and educational policy. Otherwise you find yourself on the one hand implementing a policy that hikes tuition fees, and on the other complaining about students not focusing on their studies. Or, promoting a policy aimed at encouraging "flexibility" in the labor market and permitting companies to utilize large numbers of contract workers, thereby creating wage stagnation; and then watching as large numbers of students are compelled to take part-time jobs to cover rising tuition and expenses, making it more difficult for adult breadwinners to find work.

"If we start seeing a lot of sons taking part-time jobs because their fathers are out of work, we're going to get a vicious cycle," says Lin. "In that situation, we'd really want to bring this part-time work trend to a halt."

Compositional fallacies

Formal logic includes the concept of the fallacy of composition, which is the false assumption that because something is true for the part, it must also be true for the whole.

In the case of part-time jobs, we have university students looking to earn a little money and gain some work experience; corporations looking to cut personnel costs and increase their flexibility; universities raising tuition fees to meet operating expenses; and a government loosening constraints on the labor market to meet businesses needs and invigorate the economy. Individually, each of these objectives is reasonable, but together they interact in ways that negatively affect the development of our society and the growth of our economy. In short, they offer a real-world example of the fallacy of composition.

Next time you see a young part-time worker handing out fliers on the street or working in a coffeeshop, appreciate the service they provide, but also think a bit about the impact their jobs are having on your own job opportunities, the future of business, and Taiwan's international competitiveness.

Average part-time wages for university students