Long Live College Radio and Student-Run Businesses (opinion)

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—amid jokes—the hosts could suggest answers to caller questions and the lawyer guest could confirm or amend them.

LawTalk shows were on topics like landlord-tenant disputes, moving violations, small claims court, criminal defense and bankruptcy; one episode featured 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 the parking law episode was the town’s No. 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 slot, 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 more than 450 college radio stations in North America that run the gamut from National Public Radio affiliates to tiny stations supported by student fees. Last month, The New York Times ran a profile of KXLU at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. It’s a story of “unpredictability, uniqueness and random brilliance” as the station schedule comprises Zoo Croo—a hardcore and punk show hosted by a D.J. identified only as “The Rattler”; Fistful of Vinyl, which features underappreciated and DIY artists; and “a program that airs 16th-century flute bangers.”

The American Association of Colleges and Universities publication Liberal Education recently published 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 marketing and promoting shows, including through social media. A small number of students leverage college radio to launch themselves into the music business. Liberal Education reminds us that “Weird Al” Yankovic came up with his moniker while hosting a show at California Polytechnic State University’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 the Liberal Education article, “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.” Through college radio, 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 the 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.

Helping to run an organization—with similar if not identical business functions as for-profit businesses—is excellent preparation for joining the workforce. College radio may be the most prominent example, but it’s 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, the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska-Kearney. Meanwhile, Saxbys has set up more than 30 student-run coffee shops at places like Drexel, Purdue and Georgia State Universities. Georgetown University has six student-run stores where you can buy coffee and snacks. Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, feature student-run grocery stores. Student-run laundry services like Wash U Wash are quite common. And some universities have student-run retail outlets like bookstores, which sell school memorabilia and apparel. A number of colleges host student-run thrift stores.

Other examples include summer storage and moving businesses. There’s a student-run bike repair shop at Arizona State University. There are also student-run ambulance services; the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation reports more than 250 constituent member colleges and universities providing student-staffed campus emergency medical services.

Colleges that encourage 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 institutions—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 Daily News reports that the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group demands a 250-word essay, two 150-word essays and an 800-word case study. And that’s just for 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 that pre-professional palace, the Wharton School, 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.” One Wharton administrator equated the application process to hazing.

Scarcity appears to be the principal objective. 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 University club leader admitted applicants are “drawn to exclusivity, like a firefly being drawn to a lantern.”

Some clubs won’t consider applicants unless they already have industry experience. But which college freshmen and sophomores are most likely to have had consulting or banking internships? The most privileged and connected. Which helps 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, recruitment activities—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 by-product of the lack of clear pathways from college to a range of good first jobs. As many as 70 percent of seniors at elite colleges apply for consulting and banking jobs, and anywhere from 30 to 50 percent end up there. If the only good first jobs on offer are in management consulting and investment banking, colleges richly deserve a culture dominated by consulting and banking clubs.

The dominance of consulting and banking clubs is such a waste. Because in addition to providing valuable products and services on campuses, student organizations are already serving broader communities. And not just on the radio.

I’ve previously written about the University of Iowa’s student-run newspaper, The Daily Iowan, purchasing two local newspapers so journalism students can work there. The University of Vermont runs a Community News Service where students report for rural papers. Last year, the State University of New York launched a similar initiative, the Institute for Local News. And the University of Missouri’s Missouri News Network staffs five professional news organizations with student journalists.

Quinnipiac University’s The Agency is a public relations, marketing and design firm housed in the School of Communications. Similar outfits exist at Auburn, Boston and Suffolk Universities, and there’s a brand-new one 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 are engaged 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.,

• Staffing health sciences students in entry-level roles at hospitals and health-care systems
• Tax-preparation services from finance and accounting students
• Social services for low-income families offered by psychology and sociology majors
• Political science students supporting legal aid and advocacy organizations
• Childcare and after-school programs delivered by education majors
• Performing arts students bringing theatrical productions to K–12 schools and senior centers
• Culinary and business students offering catering and event production services

Colleges should also help students support local businesses through student organizations that provide low-cost (but onshore) market research, product development, delivery, marketing, sales, human resources, finance, and information technology 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.

In most of the aforementioned student-run businesses, university support has typically 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, 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.