More Work-Study Student Jobs!

Here in the SCUP office, we find that the 8-12 work-study students we employ each semester are a very useful productivity tool which help to maximize what we can get done with your membership dues. For example, the students are solely responsible for populating and keeping up to date our list of college and university plans, which currently has 734 hyperlinks to strategic and campus plans, and provides Carnegie Classification and other data about each institution for which we have found plans. The last time Congress approved more than a billion dollars in work-study money was 2001. A pot of $200M that is funded by the stimulus package law signed this week could push that total back over $1B in 2009. If it does get spent that way, that creates enough dollars for an additional 130,000 to be funded. More here.

The additional $200-million is intended to help colleges provide more Work-Study jobs for students, but the situation is not quite that simple. Colleges match the Federal Work-Study money on a 25-percent-to-75-percent ratio, so they can take the government funds only if they have the institutional aid dollars to supplement them. Colleges have to pay Work-Study students at least the federal minimum wage, and more if required by state law. The federal minimum wage is scheduled to increase from $6.55 to $7.25 in July. Some of the new money will be absorbed by this increased cost at affected campuses.

And even if a college does offer more Work-Study jobs, it might do so by converting regular on-campus student jobs into Work-Study ones. That would help students with financial need, but it wouldn't mean a net gain in the number of jobs. Even so, that is the route some colleges will take, said Mark L. Lindenmeyer, assistant vice president and director of financial aid at Loyola College in Maryland. After all, many financial-aid offices want to give priority to needy students.