Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 34

hard to independently verify the information. A report from the
Government Accountability Office found that aid officers were
often airbrushing their numbers to support inflated requests.
Ultimately, aid officers from expensive, private schools
proved most adept at the game, and their institutions ended up
with much of the pot at the expense of public universities and
community colleges, which serve far more low-income students.
In the 1980s, Congress sought to correct the imbalance by creating a "fair share" formula. But the formula would only apply to
new funding for the program. Congress promised the existing
winners that their allocations wouldn't change greatly.
Unfortunately, Congress hasn't invested much new
money in the program since then. In fact, the total inflationadjusted budget for work study in 2016 was lower than it was in
1980. More than half of it still goes to schools that were grand-

A high-income student at a
private four-year college is
more likely to get work study
than a low-income student
at a public four-year school.
The way money is doled out
is "divorced from any sort
of useful metric you could
think of," said one expert.
fathered in. As a result, a high-income student at a private fouryear college is more likely to get work study than a low-income
student at a public four-year school. The way money is doled
out is "divorced from any sort of useful metric you could think
of," said Reid Setzer, who analyzed the program while working
at Young Invincibles, an organization that advances young people's policy interests.
Policy researchers have been calling on lawmakers to fix the
distribution breakdown for decades. But attempts have always
failed, thanks in part to successful lobbying efforts from university associations and prestigious schools. According to Greg
Winter's reporting for the New York Times,
Such disparities have been a sore point among universities
for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable basis. Now,
for the first time in more than two decades, the nation's financial aid officers are calling for the imbalances to be wiped away,
replaced by a system that steers financial aid toward the universities that poor students actually attend, rather than those
with the biggest reputations.
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September/October 2019

That was written in 2003. In the sixteen intervening years, little
has changed.
Today, community colleges get just over a third of the work
study money that private, four-year institutions receive, despite
educating far more low- and middle-income students. ScottClayton found that, in 2017, New York University received more
work study money from the government than all twenty-four of
the City University of New York's public schools combined. Harvard, which has a nearly $40 billion endowment, got more than
$3.5 million in work study funding in 2016.
Mechanically, it's a simple problem to fix. Congress would
just need to rewrite the rules about how schools get money. The
stumbling block has always been politics. But were Congress to
attempt to rejigger the formula again, they'd be doing so in a
different political climate. In the wake of public outrage over
rich families bribing their way into prestigious schools by paying to inflate test scores or cutting deals with athletic coaches,
elected officials may be more willing to take on the likes of Stanford and Yale.

E

ven better than simply expanding the work study budget
would be to retrofit it to address one of the biggest challenges in higher education today: placing students in wellpaying jobs after they graduate.
Employers aren't investing as much time and money into
training new workers as they used to. That's in part because expectations have changed, and fewer people start a job out of college planning to stay for twenty years and work their way up-
a timeline that drove employers to invest in entry-level workers.
Instead, employers now expect new hires to have gained professional skills while still in college. A survey by the Chronicle of
Higher Education recently found that the first thing employers
look for in recent graduates is internship experience.
That's one reason why students of means, who can afford
to take unpaid internships during college, have a leg up when it
comes to getting hired after graduation. Meanwhile, as it exists
right now, work study isn't focused on helping students get experience in their field of interest. But it doesn't have to be that
way. Some colleges already facilitate internships for students as
a way to bridge the gap between school and career. At Northeastern University, for example, students can participate in a "cooperative education program," or co-op: six-month periods spent
away from classes working full-time in jobs related to their career goals. In most cases, the employer pays the student's wages. According to the school, half of Northeastern students who
participate receive a job offer from one of their co-op employers,
and more than 90 percent of students have a job or are enrolled
in graduate school less than a year after graduating.
Northeastern has for years been pushing Congress and the
Department of Education to change some of the rules around
work study so that it can be applied to co-op jobs. (Currently it
can only be used for part-time employment.) And in the past
year, both the Trump administration and members of Congress
have gotten behind the idea. In March, Democratic Senator and
presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand cosponsored a bill with
Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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