Before I was able to land a job with The Chronicle toward the end of my sophomore year, I worked at a pizza place with only one regular four-hour shift a week. I was fighting for extra hours against single mothers, laid-off businessmen and employees whose future careers lay in the world of pizza, while the paychecks of 30-odd dollars per week weren’t cutting it. Thanks to Columbia’s student employment, I found a job at The Chronicle and started making enough to live off of doing a job I cared about.

Other Columbia students haven’t been so lucky.

As previously reported by The Chronicle on April 11, budget cuts put 11 student employees from the Theater Department out of work with very short notice. Now, as reported on Page 1 of this issue of The Chronicle, a similar plight has struck the Photography Department. With 30 percent of the photography budget cut, student jobs were one of the first things to go.

A lack of student jobs on campus causes college students to seek work in the “real world,” where it’s not looking so great for our age group. According to 2010 Census data, one in five 16- to 29-year-olds is unemployed—the lowest it’s been since the end of World War II. Students who don’t have the opportunity to compete with other students for student jobs are instead competing with unemployed 16- to 29-year-olds and the 8 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds who are unemployed, according to data from the Current Population Survey. Not to mention fewer jobs are actually available this decade because of senior citizens holding onto their positions longer and retiring later.

To put it simply, students don’t have a lot of employment options. The opportunities that Columbia does offer often give students experience in their future field; a photography student would surely choose working daily in a dark room over busing tables once a week at a local restaurant.

Cutting jobs for students affects teachers and the department. Without the student workers in the Photography Department, classes lack teaching assistants who used to be available to set up chemicals for darkroom classes and help students with little experience as they dealt with corrosive chemicals. Often students who care about the work they do continue volunteering their time to help faculty and other students and end up doing the job that was once their livelihood for free.

As the modern day work landscape changes and positions at the McDonald’s drive-thru are no longer reserved for high school and college students, Columbia and other colleges should evolve to create more opportunities within the school instead of less.

For my sake, I hope Columbia holds onto The Chronicle jobs at least until I graduate. I can’t go back to a life of taking food orders and serving pizza now.