College students need to make money and low-skill part-time jobs are an easy way for them to do so — as long as their jobs are not given to machines.
Even though college students are in school, they still need to work, whether it is to pay rent, tuition or to buy food for the week. According to PayScale, the most common method for students to make money is by having a part-time job that they work at while they are not in class.
The majority of these jobs are low-skill tasks, such as cashier, sales associate or receptionists. Jobs such as these may not be an option for college students — or anyone — for much longer.
An article by Forbes magazine brings light to the unfortunate future of low-skill employees, explaining that many big name brand companies, including Amazon, will within the next few years take the cheaper and more efficient opportunity to replace employees with machines.
Even in stores such as Kroger and Target, self-checkout machines have largely taken over the job of cashiers, if not completely. Many people blame this technology for the severe loss of jobs in the retail sector. According to CNBC, “since January 2017, retail has lost more than 140,000 jobs.”
McDonald’s is another example where the role of the cashier is an endangered species. In the past couple of years, they have implemented self-service machines where customers can order food and pay from a kiosk without having to interact with a cashier.
The drastic drop in jobs like these affects not only college students, but other people in the community as well. Those who have a lower level of education are facing more difficulty getting jobs and therefore risk facing unemployment.
There are new jobs that are being created alongside the expansion of technology, but they are not jobs that people are familiar with. Instead of traditional cashier jobs, the new low-skill part-time jobs will be in what Forbes calls, “proximity services,” where people “provide quality care at a large scale.”
These types of positions are more personal services, including jobs in senior living centers, daycares and working in other places in a janitorial capacity.
Many jobs are being taken by machines, and they are jobs that take the least amount of skill and complex thought. For college students, those are the only jobs they can get because of their lack of a degree and minimal amount of free time.
The overwhelming pattern of low-skill jobs being replaced by intelligent machines present a risk of unemployment to college students and the community at large. Students need to pay attention to their jobs and understand the likelihood of their income being stolen by self-checkout kiosks.
