Fixing higher education doesn’t mean upending federal work-study

The “Biden Plan for Education Beyond High School,” unveiled during the campaign and now in the spotlight, promises a bold transformation of higher education.

But its ambitions fall short in an area with enormous potential impact: federal work-study. This program is hampered by funding and allocation issues and suffers from a major perception problem; namely, that the jobs it provides are viewed by nearly everyone as functional and transactional, rather than educational. This is an enormous missed opportunity.

Created in 1964, the federal work-study program provides funds to public and private institutions to offer part of students’ financial aid through subsidized campus-based or community employment. Colleges and universities get a discounted labor pool for semester-time positions, mainly, today, in the areas of student affairs, recreational services, and residential life; students get jobs on or near campus that accommodate their course schedules and other obligations. 

 Federal work-study positions — as it happens — also give students real work experience, at a time when the work preparedness of college graduates has increasingly been called into question.

The problem with the approach to work-study outlined in President Biden’s plan is twofold: First, the plan is silent on committing to the financial investments and design improvements the program urgently needs. The most pressing of these well documented issues are inadequate total funding and an outdated and unfair institutional allocation model.

Second, where Biden’s plan does address federal work-study, it pledges change in the wrong place: to the types of positions, promising to prioritize the “use of work-study funds for job-related and public service roles.” This fix has gained traction in recent years among federal work study reform advocates, who — rightly — want the experience to be substantive and who — wrongly — judge general campus-employment opportunities to be of lesser value. 

Through this lens, writing for the university’s magazine or tutoring in a local after-school program teaches you something, but clearing tables in the dining hall or organizing activities as an assistant for residential life does not.  

So much of the current debate about whether college is worth it centers on work readiness. The ongoing push for more paid internships and better access to them has been an important step forward in connecting college to career for all students. Expanded service-learning opportunities, as well, have allowed students to meaningfully test interests and engage with local communities, including through the Federal Work-Study Experimental Sites initiative. 

However, fulsome work preparedness calls for more than upping field-specific knowledge and community service. Equally important is the development of essential transferable ‘soft skills.’ A recent study by Burning Glass Technologies re-asserts how important such “human skills” are to achieving success in the digital economy, highlighting creativity, communication, collaboration, and relationship building.

These competencies and the cultural understanding and social and emotional intelligence required to be successful in a profession and over a career, do not come to us fully formed: they are built over time and in myriad ways. Federal work-study positions, as currently conceived, are well suited to developing these foundational skills.

As a federal work-study awardee in college, I vacuumed the library before it opened. Another year, I worked as a dispatcher for campus security. Yet another, I fulfilled interlibrary loan orders. Through these jobs, I began to understand hierarchy, to question race, class and gender norms and to decode workplace dynamics; but none was treated as anything but a way to earn needed money and accordingly, I never thought otherwise.

In recent years, several promising on-the-ground initiatives, such as the University of Iowa’s IowaGROW Program, have shown us what frameworks for connecting, articulating, and elevating the learning that happens through different forms of work can accomplish. My own institution, Bennington College, led a Lumina Foundation-sponsored study on equity and access in work-learning. And federally recognized Work Colleges have long led in recognizing the educational and community value of work in all its forms. 

These efforts make visible the rich layers of work preparation students build in college, still too seldom integrated into their understanding of what constitutes their work experience.

The mandate of the federal work-study program has always been to extend students’ learning. Reshaping positions to look more like internships or relocating them to public service is not the reform the program needs. Colleges and universities don’t have the resources to support that level of internal career training. And the expansion of federal work-study positions to local communities should be in addition to critical on-campus jobs, not instead of them.

For the federal work-study program to best serve students and the institutions they attend, it must recognize and assert the value of what it already provides. The solution isn’t to change the work, it is to claim the work.

Isabel Roche is on the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont, where she served as provost and dean from 2011-2019 and was the interim president for the 2019-20 academic year.