When Extracurriculars Become Full-Time Jobs

Grade deflation isn’t the main threat to student life — it’s the full-time jobs masquerading as extracurriculars.

Since Harvard’s report on grade inflation, I’ve heard plenty of students complaining about the prospect of tougher academics (myself included). A common defence of grade inflation is that it protects student welfare. That might be true, but at Harvard, concerns over wellbeing should be directed elsewhere: pre-professional clubs that demand grueling hours from students.

Careerism has come under even more scrutiny since it has been found to distract from academics. What’s often ignored, however, is student welfare; in some cases, the combined workload of full-time study and an intense extracurricular is borderline cruel, robbing students of a legitimate personal life and sacrificing their wellbeing.

Undergraduates who work Harvard-sponsored jobs can work no more than 20 hours a week — the University should do the same for pre-professional clubs. If these clubs want to be perceived as professional, they should act professionally — and that means protecting students as companies should employees.

Students typically spend about 36 hours a week on academics — two 75 minute lectures and 6.5 hours of work on coursework for each class. That’s already a full-time workload, but some clubs demand that students take the night shift, requiring them to work the hours of a second full-time job.

In finance clubs, students have reported working dozens of hours weekly. In a 2014 article, one student reported working 40-50 hours per week at the Institute of Politics, while another claimed she devoted half her week to the Phillips Brooks House Association. Though reported over ten years ago, I doubt much has changed in the interim, as pre-professional culture has only intensified.

If a student spends 40 hours per week on an extracurricular and the average 36 hours on classes, they’re working close to 11 hours a day. In that position, students have to make a sacrifice: either their academics or their personal life.

Then there’s the more extreme example of The Crimson. According to a Crimson article, the newspaper’s president is expected to work between 60-100 hours per week. Similarly absurd are the expectations for the managing editor, who must “drop anything and everything — school commitments, personal commitments, family commitments — to take care of the paper.”

A 100-hour workweek would leave 32 hours left in the week — just over 4.5 hours a day for sleep, for eating meals without keeping an eye on your laptop, for downtime, for socializing outside of work.

Assuming they only attend class but do no other coursework, they would still be working close to 16-hour days.

There’ve been many criticisms of careerism and pre-professionalism, with most framed as a threat to academic integrity. But more importantly, pre-professionalism should be seen as a welfare issue, since students are sacrificing their personal life just as much as their academics — if not more.

Some might argue that students opt into this work; no one forced them to take a demanding job that robs them of a personal life, so they should be the ones to determine what’s good for their wellbeing. But that relies on a very simplistic understanding of choice.

Students aren’t blank slates when they walk into Harvard. For years they’ve likely been encouraged to be as ambitious as possible, to achieve as much as possible. Harvard isn’t the success to end all successes; when students get here, their eyes are still fixated on it.

But when their eyes never drift from success, they begin to accept conditions that grow ever more demanding. Hard work is defined by those you’re competing with; if you want the top job and others are working harder than you, you’re no longer working hard — at least, not hard enough.

So what initially seems reasonable gets progressively more unreasonable, beginning a slow process of conditioning and normalization that transforms something absurd, like a 100-hour work week, into something normal and defensible.

We should celebrate ambition and hard work, but not necessarily when they overwhelm your personal life — especially for a college student. The choice to work what’s effectively another full time job shouldn’t be viewed only through the positive lens of ambition; the anxiety of failing to meet Harvard’s demands is likely just as strong a motive.

A 20-hour limit on extracurricular work might help alleviate that anxiety. And if you think 20 hours is too low, maybe Harvard’s gotten to you: Accounting for schoolwork, that’s still a 56 hour work week.

Of course, this doesn’t account for students working in multiple different clubs, and students might downplay or misreport how many hours they’re expected to work. But if a club boasts its pre-professional qualities, it should follow through; students are treated like employees in how much they’re expected to work and what they’re expected to do, but not when it comes to actual protections for them.

Some students will likely oppose grade deflation on the grounds of student wellbeing. But it’s the extracurricular workload that really threatens welfare; students have proven themselves willing to sacrifice both schoolwork and personal life for its sake.

Students need to be saved from themselves, and the University should draw a line between ambition and self-exhaustion.

Luke D. O’Brien ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Eliot House.