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I wasn’t a particularly serious law student. Before I arrived at law school, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to practice law. So after the first semester of compulsory contracts, torts, civil procedure, and constitutional law, most of my courses were “______ and the law,” with an emphasis on the ______. Music and the Law, Television and the Law, Law and the Risk Society, Education and the Law, even Babies and the Law — I learned a lot about a lot of things, with a veneer of law.
Outside of class, my competitive advantage was not caring about activities that tracked to law firm jobs and judicial clerkships. So I ran the end-of-year “law revue” with skits parodying professors and started a legal services talk radio show on the campus radio station. LawTalk invited listeners to call in for free legal advice. I chose my most entertaining classmates to host. But because they hadn’t passed the bar exam and couldn’t offer legal advice, we needed real lawyers on every show. That way – amidst jokes – the hosts could suggest answers to caller questions and the lawyer-guest could confirm or amend.
LawTalk shows were on topics like Landlord-Tenant Disputes, Moving Violations, Small Claims Court, Criminal Defense, Bankruptcy, and a debate on pornography with feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and adult film star Nina Hartley. On Halloween we covered Halloween Law. (What’s fair game during trick or treating? Can houses be legally haunted? Can something be so scary that it’s actionable?.) For our very first show, we chose an urgent topic given the dire shortage of parking spaces near the law school and the tickets many of us had received. Our guest for Parking Law was the town’s #1 ambulance chaser who fought tickets on the side. He was so fun, caustic, and helpful to our cause, that we brought him back for the Personal Injury show. To this day, a large sign outside his office reads “HOSPITAL VISITS ARRANGED.”
I think we helped a few people, or at least entertained them. Despite a challenging time shot, the show gained a small following in the community and we managed to convince legal luminaries visiting the school to record promos (“This is Greta Van Susteren and you’re listening to LawTalk!”)
It was a terrific experience, but far from a unique one. There are over 450 college radio stations in North America that run the gamut from NPR affiliates to tiny stations supported by student fees. Last month the New York Times ran a profile of KXLU at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University (LMU). It’s a story of “unpredictability, uniqueness, and random brilliance” as the station’s schedule comprises “Zoo Croo” – a hardcore and punk showcase hosted by a D.J. identified only as “The Rattler” – “Fistful of Vinyl” – underappreciated and DIY artists – and “a program that airs 16th-century flute bangers.” KXLU is “deeply satisfying for the students and a source of great pleasure for its listeners.”
The American Association of Colleges and Universities publication Liberal Education recently penned a similar love letter to college radio, marveling at the eclecticism: Mexican pop, krautrock, and Gregorian chants; a bluegrass show on Ithaca College’s WICB titled “Hobo’s Lullaby”; traditional Swiss folk tunes; and a two-hour show on University of Virginia’s WXTJ where “the first hour was like radio ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response, where positive feelings and tingling are generated by hearing certain sounds – featuring breathing and eating noodles and whispers… The second hour was punk and hardcore. The show’s title: Soft and Hard.”
But along with the fun comes skills: planning shows, selecting music, script writing, improvisation, mastering analog and digital equipment, meeting deadlines, adhering to rules and regulations, inviting guests, and promoting shows via PR and social media. A small number of students leverage college radio to launch into the music business. Liberal Education reminds us that “Weird Al” Yankovic came up with his monicker while hosting a show at Cal Poly’s KCPR in the 1970s and “recorded his first hit, a My Sharona parody called My Bologna, in the station’s bathroom.”
Creating and running LawTalk required all these skills – save recording parodies in the bathroom – plus pitching and selling the show to the station and managing that relationship through good shows and bad. As for station leaders, they develop skills like selecting talent, scheduling shows, setting and managing budgets, and working together as a senior management team or board of directors. According to Liberal Education, “Running a student station is like running a business. At UVA’s student-run and student-staffed WXTJ, anywhere from 120 to 150 students work in on- and off-air positions. They make the decisions… students… are learning skills and gaining experience—about business, marketing, communications, writing, engineering—that they likely won’t learn in the classroom.”
In an era of podcasts and streaming, asks the Times, “can places like KXLU survive, when the technological pull feels squarely in the opposite direction?” Of course, radio has seen better days. It’s eons from the dominant media it once was. And college radio is unlikely to spawn an entire genre of music as it did in the 80s and early 90s with bands like University of Georgia’s R.E.M. But if the Internet killed the radio star, someone forgot to tell the students. And perhaps that’s the point. Student organizations can fill gaps in markets – and students can gain valuable, relevant work experience – where private enterprises struggle to achieve a return.
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Helping to run an organization – with similar if not identical business functions to for-profit businesses – is excellent preparation for joining the workforce. College radio may be the most prominent example, but far from the only one. And given the massive internship gap, student-run businesses are due to receive a lot more attention in the next few years.
There are independent student-run coffee shops at LMU, University of Chicago, and Nebraska-Kearney. Meanwhile Saxbys has set up over 30 student-run coffee shops at schools like Drexel, Purdue, and Georgia State. Georgetown has six student-run stores to buy coffee and snacks. Cornell and Berkeley feature student-run grocery stores and many campuses have student-run soup kitchens and food banks. Student-run laundry services like Wash U Wash are quite common. And some universities have student-run retail outlets including bookstores, school memorabilia, and apparel. A number of schools host student-run thrift stores.
Other examples include summer storage and moving businesses. There’s a student-run bike repair shop at Arizona State. There are also a large number of student-run ambulance services; the National Collegiate EMS Foundation reports 250 constituent member colleges and universities providing student-staffed campus emergency medical services.
Schools that allow unaffiliated companies to provide any of these campus services are doing a disservice to their students. This is especially true in the context of what passes for pre-professional extracurricular activities at most colleges these days. Because at many colleges – particularly the most selective schools – the most popular student organizations are sycophantic, recruiting-process-gaming vehicles known as consulting and investment banking clubs.
Consulting and banking clubs are now ubiquitous at selective institutions with most campuses sporting multiple rivals or variants. They start with a harrowing application process. The Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group demands a 250-word essay, two 150-word essays, and an 800-word case study – an application longer than what students completed to get into Yale in the first place. And that’s just the first round. If they make it to the second round, applicants are required to present another case and sit for “technical and behavioral assessments.” The Cornell Daily Sun describes a similar scene in Ithaca: “students run around in business professional attire to back-to-back coffee chats and multiple rounds of recruitment interviews in the slightest hope of acceptance into one of these clubs.” It’s a process that just prompted pre-professional palace Wharton to ban student clubs from requiring multiple rounds of interviews with the goal of stopping “activities that create barriers to access or impose undue stress” on students. One Wharton administrator equated the application process to hazing.
Scarcity appears to be the principal object. Acceptance rates can be in the single digits. The Economist reports that Harvard’s clubs confer “a cachet that the clubs like to compare to the selectivity of admission to the university itself: the ‘5% of the 5%’.” One Harvard club leader admitted applicants “are drawn to exclusivity like a firefly being drawn to a lantern.”
Once selected, club members – often naming themselves “partners” or managing directors” – are well-versed in an interview process that may be “harder than landing the job itself.” Part of this may be due to reliance of consulting and banking firms on the extreme vetting process, part may be networking benefits; many younger interviewers were club members themselves.
Some clubs won’t consider applicants unless they’ve already had industry experience. But which college freshmen and sophomores are most likely to have had consulting or banking internships? The most privileged and connected. Which explains why higher income students are much more likely than low-income students to enter consulting or banking. So in addition to being stress-inducing, consulting and banking clubs are engines of inequality.
What actually happens in these clubs – training, case study simulations or mock engagements, résumé workshops, guest speakers, running the recruitment process – is beside the point. Their primary purpose – other than being where fun goes to die – is to position students to land the consulting or banking internships and jobs their hearts desire. And their overall impact is increasingly viewed as toxic.
This mess is yet another byproduct of the lack of clear pathways from college to a range of good first jobs. As many as 70% of seniors at top schools apply for consulting and banking jobs and anywhere from 30-50% end up there. If the only good first jobs on offer are management consulting and investment banking, colleges richly deserve a culture dominated by consulting and banking clubs.
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The dominance of consulting and banking clubs is such a waste. Because in addition to providing valuable products and services on campus, student organizations are already serving broader communities. And not just on the radio.
I’ve previously written about University of Iowa purchasing several local newspapers so journalism students can work there. University of Vermont runs a Community News Service where students report for rural papers. Last year SUNY launched a similar initiative, the Institute for Local News. And University of Missouri’s Missouri News Network includes five student-run outlets.
Quinnipiac’s The Agency is a PR, marketing, and design firm housed at the school of communications. Similar outfits exist at Auburn, Boston University, and Suffolk. And there’s one coming next semester at Metropolitan State University of Denver. (While a handful of student consulting clubs actually do consulting work – I’ve been propositioned by a few – the vast majority engage in consulting theater. Because while students can credibly deliver a low-cost marketing or design project, no one believes they’re situated to deliver quality strategy consulting.)
On every campus, there are dozens of new student organizations waiting to be born so they can provide a wide range of low-cost services for their communities e.g.,
Schools should also help students support local businesses by starting organizations that provide low-cost (but onshore) market research, product development, delivery, marketing, sales, HR, finance, and IT services. The lesson of college radio is that if we give students the opportunity to demonstrate “random brilliance” in a professional setting outside the classroom, they’re more likely to find brilliant careers on the other side.
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In most of the aforementioned student-run businesses, university support has been limited to faculty oversight and office space. But postsecondary institutions can do much more, including supporting organizations with shared back-office services like IT, HR, risk management, and insurance. With greater focus, faculty and administrator attention – how about a cabinet-level position to orchestrate support? – as well as actual investment, colleges can funnel the energy and ambition of their students to more productive uses than consulting and banking.
Colleges have a vital interest in expanding the range of student-run businesses so students can accomplish something tangible as a team. That’s more powerful preparation for career launch than another class or two and a damn sight better than consulting and banking clubs.