Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 32

PUTTING WORK
STUDY TO WORK
The aid program is underfunded and underappreciated.
Here's how to unleash its potential.

L

ila Scher has been working since she was fourteen. Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, she worked as a line cook at
the state fair making tacos and nachos. In high school, she
was a busser and runner at a brunch spot near her house. And
when she got into college at George Washington University, in
D.C., she knew she'd have to keep working. During her first semester she was constantly on the hunt for jobs.
By the spring, she had landed one, handling IT requests
from professors. Was it her dream job? No. Did she get yelled at
by professors who were angry that their projector wasn't working? Yes. Was she interested in IT? Not really.
But there were upsides. She could fit shifts in between her
classes, and she didn't have a commute. She liked her supervisor, who let her work more hours when she was tight on money,
and who served as a reference when she applied to other jobs.
Having the job helped her learn to manage her time, and she
could sometimes get homework done during shifts between
calls. Plus, she was getting her first professional office experience. The job required learning to speak with authority, even to
professors. "I grew in that way quite a bit," she said.

32

September/October 2019

That's financial aid money at work. Scher's on-campus job
was a federal work study position. Her experience is fairly typical: more than half a million students across the country reshelve
books in campus libraries, swipe IDs at the front desks of gyms,
and answer phones in administrative offices as part of their financial aid package. The federal government kicks in a large portion of their wages. In one controversial instance, work study
students at Harvard were employed to clean dorms.
It's one of the oldest federal aid programs, created in the
mid-1960s with the goal of helping low-income students work
their way through college. But it hasn't kept pace with the changing economics of higher education. Today, most college students
need to work during school whether they get work study or not.
Meanwhile, unlike in the 1960s and '70s, work study wages in
2019 do not even come close to covering tuition. But, like a baggy old sweater that's now ironically hip, work study still suits the
current higher ed landscape-just for different reasons.
First, while work study will probably never go back to covering the cost of tuition on its own, students will always need
reliable ways to earn money for living expenses, even if some

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