Captain Capitalism, better known as Aaron Clarey, suggests students consider working as security guards for their schools as a way to pay for school in several of his outstanding books for young people.

Inside Higher Ed’s Charlie Tyson delves into the world of student security guards.

Tragedy was not averted at Seattle Pacific University Thursday afternoon: a man fired gunshots that killed one student and left three injured. The potential massacre was cut short, however, when Jon Meis, a 22-year-old engineering student, pepper-sprayed and tackled the gunman, who had paused to reload. The shooter, Aaron Ybarra, later told detectives that he’d wanted to kill as many people as possible.

Meis was working as a student building monitor when he rushed to subdue the shooter. Seattle Pacific officials declined to share details about the 22-year-old’s building-monitor job, saying the institution was not commenting on its security programs at this time. Officials also declined to confirm whether Meis was carrying pepper spray as part of his campus job. (His roommate told The Seattle Times that the student takes the spray with him wherever he goes.)

At a time when concealed-carry advocates often insist that allowing students to carry guns will improve campus safety, experts say students – typically armed with defensive spray and training in radio dispatching and verbal commands – already make outsized contributions to campus security.

Student security jobs such as Meis’s are a fixture at “a very large number of universities and colleges across the country,” said David Perry, assistant vice president for safety and chief of police at Florida State University.

“It’s almost a common practice, if not a best practice, to employ student escorts, student security officers, on colleges and universities,” he said.

…Institutions routinely employ students as security guards to “serve as a force multiplier” – extra sets of eyes and ears that can report suspicious activity – for campus police units, Perry said.

At the University of Michigan at Flint, officials credit the increased use of student patrols with a reduction in campus crime, MLive reported.

The job description varies from institution to institution. The University of Nevada at Las Vegas employs six student security officers, said Lieut. Jeff Green, an officer in the UNLV department. UNLV’s student guards are outfitted only with radios. They receive “no formal training” apart from learning how to use these devices, which keep them in constant communication with dispatchers, Green said.

At LeTourneau University, a small Christian institution in east Texas, student guards made up the bulk of the campus-security apparatus for about 30 years. Until January 2009, the school had no police department, said Terrance Turner, LeTourneau’s chief of police. Student officers patrolled the campus and reported to two professionals. Four part-time and two full-time police officers now supplement the student workers, Turner said.