Patronage for plutocrats: why elite colleges with the fewest low-income students get the most work-study money.

• Author: Marcus, Jon
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

Greg Noll, a senior at Columbia University, balances his engineering major with a federally subsidized "work-study" job at the university's fitness center, where he fills spray bottles, wipes sweat off the machines, and picks up towels for twenty hours a week. The $9-an-hour wage he's paid is underwritten by the federal work-study program, which was launched in 1964 to support low-income students who would not otherwise be able to afford college.

While Noll and his counterparts at Columbia and other pricey, top-tier private colleges and universities no doubt benefit from the program--Noll says he uses the money to buy books and food and to go out with his friends on the weekends--they are not necessarily the intended recipients of aid from the $1.2 billion federal program. Noll's family, for instance, makes $140,000 a year, which he says, rightly, puts them squarely in the upper-middle class. In fact, researchers at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, have found that only 43 percent of students who receive work study meet the federal definition of financial need as determined by whether they also receive Pell Grants. Work study "disproportionately benefits the students who need it the least," says Rory O'Sullivan, research and policy director at the youth advocacy organization Young Invincibles.

A major source of the problem stems from the fact that the work-study program uses a fifty-year-old formula to determine how federal funds are allocated. Unlike other federal financial aid programs that distribute money according to how many students at a university actually need aid, money for the work study program is based instead on how much a university received the previous year, and how much it charges for tuition.

That perpetuates a system under which the universities that get the lion's share of federal dollars are not the ones with the most low-income students but, rather, those that have been participating in work study the longest and charge the highest tuition. Consequently, nearly half of work-study recipients attend private, nonprofit universities and colleges.

As the chart on page 18 shows, eight of the top ten schools receiving the largest amount of federal work-study money are private nonprofit institutions, including Columbia, Northwestern, New York University, and the University of Southern California. With the exception of tiny Berea College in Kentucky, these schools do a relatively...