College students nationwide are working fewer hours a week than they did a decade ago, but, at Cornell, students are bucking a national trend.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, college students have struggled to secure part-time jobs to finance the rising cost of tuition, with the average number of hours that students work a week declining from 11 in 2000 to eight in 2009. Despite this national decline, the number of student jobs on Cornell’s campus grew from approximately 7,500 in the 2007-08 academic year to 7,922 in the 2010-11 year, according to Thomas Keane, director of financial aid for scholarships and policy analysis.

This number includes both undergraduates and graduates who worked for at least one hour during that academic year.

Keane said that most Cornell students are able to work as many hours a week as they need to.

“Generally, we don’t like students to work more than 20 hours [a week]. Most students who are on financial aid tend to work eight to 12 hours a week,” he said.

Keane said that University employers have long enjoyed hiring students. In fact, he said, Cornell has been hiring students for “well over 30 years” to give them opportunities to gain work experience.

Student employees also cost less to hire, although Keane said that this is not why the University hires them. More students are turning to on-campus employment to offset increasing tuition costs, Keane said.

The number of students working on campus has increased, Keane said, but there appears to be no shortage of jobs  on campus. Any student who wants a job can find one if he or she is willing to be flexible, he said.

“You may hear a story of someone who had a hard time finding a job, but I think that it is more telling of their academic or personal schedule,” he said. “I think that students who have [a] more science-based or lab-based schedule might have a harder time squeezing a job into their schedule … However, I haven’t heard anyone who wanted to work who couldn’t find a job.”

Despite Keane’s confidence, some students said that finding a job on campus can be frustrating.

Eva Johnson ’15 said that she wanted to find a job as soon as she got to campus so that she could start saving money to pay off her tuition. 

“I feel like I need to work four or five hours a week to keep up with [inflation],” Johnson said.

Although Johnson started her job search in early August before she arrived on campus, she said she still struggled to find an employer who would answer her emails about employment opportunities on Cornell’s website. 

“I went on the student job posting website and … I contacted about 20 to 30 employers. None of them got back to me until November,” she said.

Johnson said that in order to find a job on campus, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  

Like Johnson, others said they had difficulty finding jobs through Cornell’s website. For instance, neither Jake Potashnick ’15 nor Sarah Liscia ’14 said they were unable to gain employment through Cornell’s student employment website; instead, they said, they heard about their jobs through their friends. 

Iana Jacks ’15 said that she would not have known where to start her job search if she had not received a newsletter from the Cornell Tradition, a fellowship program that offers financial aid to students. The program, which requires that students complete a certain number of hours of work and community service every year, advertises job openings for Tradition fellows, according to Jacks.

“The only reason why I know about [the job that I am applying to] is because Cornell Traditions sends out a newsletter for job opportunities,” Jacks said.

Both Johnson and Liscia, who looked at Cornell’s student employment website during their job search, said that jobs posted online often require specialized skills, limiting their options.

“They would say that we need science majors or [people] who are bilingual; that’s where the difficulty came for me,” Liscia said.

Potashnick said that he had an advantage in the job search process by being a student in the School of Hotel Administration. Because the school requires students to amass 800 hours of work experience before graduating, it often advertises job opportunities to students, he said.

“I’m trapped in this hotelie sphere ... We’re very good at publicizing when we have jobs available and what to do,” he said. “I think for a lot my friends who are in other programs, they don’t have those connections … I’m definitely lucky to be in a program that pushes so hard for jobs.“

Although Potashnick, Liscia and Jacks did not find their jobs through Cornell’s student employment website, Keane said that the University provides freshmen information about finding a job in their admission packet and at informational booths in August. Still, Keane acknowledged that these resources are easy to miss in the excitement of move-in day.

Jacks said that Cornell could take steps to make the process easier for students.

“With the amount of work that we have, they could definitely make the job search easier … It’s just a lot of work,” she said.