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Meghan Heater, 46, heads to the commissary at the University of Dayton in Ohio most weekday mornings to start assembling sandwiches and tossing salads for hundreds of hungry college kids.
“It’s a lot of time on your feet and hard work,” Heater said.
But that effort yields more than a paycheck. As a college staff member, Heater gets deeply discounted tuition at the private Marianist Catholic college with approximately 8,000 undergraduate students.
Tuition at the university is around $47,000 a year, plus board, although 96% of the students receive some financial aid.
Heater has now been working at the school for four years, enough to qualify for the highest tuition benefit — 95% off — by the time her eldest daughter, now 15, graduates from high school. Her two youngest daughters, 13 and 10, are waiting in the wings.
Employee tuition perks draw parents
The price tag of college can be daunting, but less so at some schools if parents work there — and that is what appeals to Heater and a growing number of parents.
“I had been a stay-at-home mom for several years, so I didn’t have a professional career. I was trying to think of a way to have a job that I could still be with my kids a lot of the time, like during the summer, and work the same hours as they are in school and still make good money,” Heater said.
That’s when Heater, whose husband works at a local steel mill, thought about working at a college. She compared universities in her area and their benefits and decided on University of Dayton, which offers tuition benefits for staff workers and their dependents.
Troy Washington, the University of Dayton’s vice president for human resources, said that about 616 of the school’s nearly 2,900 full-time employees take advantage of its tuition remission for themselves or their dependents.
Washington said that workers and their dependents can also use a tuition exchange program, which allows them to transfer their tuition…
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