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Ohio Nonprofit Offers Students Jobs, Scholarship Money
[March 04, 2015]

Ohio Nonprofit Offers Students Jobs, Scholarship Money


An Ohio non-profit is offering students the opportunity to reduce student debt in a contact center program that offers job skill development and up to $6,000 of tuition assistance per year.

An Inside Higher Ed article below offers the story behind Education at Work, a rapidly developing contact center in Cincinnati that plans to expand and help more than 100,000 students nationwide.

Inside Higher Ed

As a student ambassador for Education at Work, Jazmine Reed's job was to spread the word about the nonprofit organization that offered jobs to college students.

As an informal recruiter on her campus at the University of Cincinnati, her sales pitch was pretty straightforward. After all, a job that is close to campus, pays well above minimum wage and provides the chance to earn thousands of dollars in scholarship money doesn't require a complex marketing plan.

"They thought it was too good to be true," Reed said when describing how some students thought the setup was a scam upon first hearing about it.

Education at Work was founded in 2012 with the aim of teaching the "soft skills" that employers often report are lacking in recent college graduates. But the main driver for founder Dave Dougherty was a desire to help solve the issue of college affordability.



The organization launched with roughly 25 student employees from a handful of colleges and universities in the Cincinnati area. Within a few months, the number had doubled.

Now, there are about 615 students employed by Education at Work, and Dougherty expects to see that number rise to 1,000 before the end of the year. In 2013 and 2014, the organization paid a total of $4.2 million in wages and tuition assistance.


And in October, Education at Work took the first step in its goal to expand across the country by opening a second call center. Now, students at Mount St. Joseph University can forgo the 30-minute commute to the company's main offices and instead walk to work at their on-campus call center. Students from other colleges work at the company's headquarters in Norwood, which is right outside Cincinnati.

This article was originally published by Kaitlin Mulhere of Inside Higher Ed. All rights and content go to the original publication and author. Click here to view the original full article.


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