PUTTING WORK STUDY TO WORK.

• Author: Gedye, Grace

THE AID PROGRAM IS UNDERFUNDED AND UNDERAPPRECIATED. HERE'S HOW TO UNLEASH ITS POTENTIAL.

Lila 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.

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-1900s 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 form of tuition-free college is in our future. Second, there's the ongoing quest to improve graduation rates; research shows that the convenience of work study helps students stay in school and graduate. Third, with some tweaks, the program is positioned to connect more students with high-quality work experiences that could lead to jobs after graduation. Plus, work study is a rare species in contemporary politics: it has the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

But to capitalize on any of those strengths, lawmakers need to correct a glaring injustice baked into the core of the program: rich, expensive, elite private schools get a huge share of the money, but educate few of the low-income students who most need it. The community colleges and public four-year universities that do serve the less wealthy don't get nearly as much funding per student. If Congress wants to help more low-income...