“They told me they were all filled,” said Roche, a fourth-year nursing student.  “It was always my fall-back plan, and I couldn’t even fall back on that.”

So the job hunt started.  Roche looked for a job at the Portsmouth Hospital in Portsmouth, N.H. She even looked at a job at the Wentworth Douglas Hospital in Dover, N.H., even though she lives more than 25 miles away in York, Maine.

“I was so desperate for something to do,” Roche said.

She considered job shadowing, but that would have meant a summer without income.

Studying in the nursing field, Roche obtained her Certified Nursing Assistant’s license and was hoping to find employment in the field.  After applying to 15 jobs, only two called her back.

Roche finally found a job in July, losing half a summer of income to unemployment. She was hired at a nursing home and as a waitress.

Since the beginning of the recession, the unemployment rate in Maine has dropped.  State Labor Commissioner Laura Fortman announced that as of July 2009, Maine’s unemployment rate was at 8.4 percent.  A year before, it had been at 5.4 percent. according to the State of Maine web site.

Roche is not the only student at the University of Maine who recently experienced the lack of employment opportunities on and off campus.

Accounting student Brittany Bisson was fortunate enough to have work study last year. She worked in the mailroom of Gannet Hall and made $7.25 an hour.

“It wasn’t a lot, but it was still enough for spending money — like groceries and other odds and ends,” Bisson said.

Now her former job seems better than her current unemployment.  Many students who received work study last year were not fortunate enough to receive it this year, according to Amber Pelletier, an employee at the Office of Student Employment.

“I know this year a lot of kids, like juniors and seniors, were not awarded work study though they were awarded it previously,” Pelletier said.  “They gave them more grants, but last year they over-awarded work study, so they had to cut back this year.”

Neither the Office of Student Employment nor the Office of Financial Aid have an exact number of students that lost work study, but they both acknowledge it has happened.
Bisson’s brother, also a UMaine student, was not lucky enough to have the work study benefits like he did last year.  It became more of a burden for Bisson when she realized how many work study jobs were available compared to regular jobs.

“[Work study] is paid for mostly by the government, and if you go on the student employment Web site, there’s like 100 work study jobs and like 10 non-work study jobs,” Bisson said.

Work study is a federal program based on financial need, a parent’s income and what a student receives for grants. It can be specific and with the failing economy, it can cause those credentials and qualifications to fluctuate just as often as the rate of unemployment. Even taking that into consideration, Pelletier says the chances of a student receiving work study are still better than a student receiving a regular job on campus.

“There are regular hired students and work study students.  The work study students have it come with their financial aid package.  So what happens for the work study students is that the department [at the university] only pays 25 percent of their wage,” Pelletier said.

“The work study [federal program] pays 75 percent of their wage, so we’ve noticed that a lot of employers are hiring more work study students than regular employees because they have to pay the regular employees 100 percent of their wage.   So it’s not necessarily that the jobs were being cut, it is just that they are not hiring as many regular employees.”

Just like Roche, the nursing student, Bisson tried to find employment any way she could.

“I called to talk to someone in financial aid, and they said the only thing I had was a Stafford Loan, and that is the only thing I could get,” Bisson said.  “So basically, it was a big ‘no.’”

Although students have a reputation of easily finding menial jobs, data collected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in February 2009, teenagers had the highest unemployment rate in the unemployed population of the United States. According to its Web site, 23 percent of teenagers are unemployed.

“The position that is hired the most is probably administrative aids. Not for one department, but every department has a student working for them,” Pelletier said.  “People answering the phones, filing, that type of thing.”

The Office of Student Employment offers job listings both in their department and online.