Taxpayer-Funded Aid Program Benefits Richer Students
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Greg Noll balances his engineering major at Columbia University with a work-study job in the university’s fitness center, filling spray bottles, wiping sweat off the machines, and picking up towels for 20 hours a week at $9 an hour.
He uses the money for his living expenses—buying books and food and going out with friends on the weekends.
“I try to put some away, but it’s college,” Noll says. “Everyone here needs money, whether they come from better-off families and don’t have the money to live a life they’re used to, or don’t have money in general and are really just trying to live.”
In fact, much of the more than $1 billion a year in federal taxpayer-funded work-study money is going to the children of better-off families at expensive private universities, and not their lower-income counterparts, under a 50-year-old formula those pricey universities are unlikely to willingly relinquish.
Nearly one in four work-study recipients come from families with incomes of more than $80,000 a year. Fewer than half meet the federal definition of financial need.
The formula “disproportionately benefits the students who need it the least,” says Rory O’Sullivan, research and policy director at the youth advocacy organization Young Invincibles. “At a time of tight budgets, it doesn’t make sense. It should go to people who can benefit the most.”
Unlike other federal financial aid, the money for work-study isn’t allocated based on how many students at a university actually need it, but on how much the university got the year before, an