Patronage for Plutocrats

If the Republicans retain or increase strength in Congress in the fall elections, I don't expect this situation to improve.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_01/days_end_and_weekend_watch_84048470.php

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2014/ten_miles_square/patronage_for_plutocrats048351.php?page=all

Washington Monthly January/ February 2014
By Jon Marcus

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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 poor job of serving low-income students.

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By contrast, less-prestigious state colleges and universities, which tend to serve students of more modest means, get relatively few work-study dollars. Florida State University, for instance, receives less than one-fifth as much work-study money as Columbia, even though Florida State is five times bigger and has a much higher proportion of low-income students, according to the Teachers College study. The same is true of community colleges, which were typically built in the late 1960s and ’70s, after the old-line schools first grabbed their self-perpetuating shares of work-study funds. Community colleges enroll 30 percent of all students, including many who have comparatively low incomes, but get only 16 percent of work-study money, according to the College Board. By comparison, private, nonprofit institutions enroll only 17 percent of all students but get 40 percent of the funding.

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Today, nearly one in four work-study recipients comes from a family that earns more than $80,000 a year, according to new figures from the U.S. Department of Education. By contrast, fewer than one in five students who get work-study money comes from a family that makes less than $20,000 a year.

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Those on-campus work-study jobs aren’t the same as off-campus jobs at local fast-food joints, Cooper says. They’re in convenient locations, and students can often study while they’re at work—two factors that correlate with greater academic success. Studies have shown that when students are forced to take off-campus jobs, it can slow down and derail their path to graduation, Cooper says. “The more they work to pay for school, the less well they do,” she said. ‘If we enhance work study, we can do a lot to improve their academic outcomes.” Seventy-two percent of U.S. undergraduates currently work at least part-time while in school, most of them off-campus, and one in five works thirty-five hours a week or more, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Last year, the Senate Education Committee began a series of hearings that will continue this year on updating the whole financial aid system.

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