Next year, work study funding may be cut by over half due to the White House’s proposed 2020 budget. Every year, the White House sends a proposed budget to Congress which may or may not be approved. In the 2019 and 2018 work-study funding remained at just over $1.1 billion, but if this budget is approved, that number may drop to $500 million.

The Federal Work-Study Program was established in 1964 to assist students in earning money while also providing them with work experience. The government helps pay students to work, in turn the institutions and surrounding areas get workers.  The government provides funding to subsidize at least 50 percent of students’ salaries, allowing for jobs to be created where there would otherwise be none.

Students qualify based on their need just like any other federal aid award, but it is not a grant because students must work to earn it, and it is not a loan because students don’t have to repay it. The amount of funds provided by the government dictates how many jobs or hours institutions can offer.

CWU music professor Dr. Bret Smith has served for many years as a faculty legislative liaison with the Washington state government. He was able to pay for college in part through work-study and said that all three jobs he worked changed his life and sent him down the path towards his current career. According to Dr. Smith, cutting the budget would mean that the university can’t offer work-study jobs to as many students. This means both less work opportunities for students and therefore less opportunities to make money to pay for tuition, but CWU and Ellensburg also lose a lot of valuable workers.

“The worst thing probably, from a student’s perspective, would be that if those dollars are not available, that’s more unmet need that needs to be covered by student loans, and I don’t think anyone wants to start talking about making students borrow more money,” Dr. Smith said.

Supporters of the work-study program claim it provides a mutual benefit to both institutions and students, with students gaining time management and work experience, as well as having greater degrees of financial and schedule flexibility. Audrey Vulcano, a senior majoring in biology, works in the art department as an office assistant. She said that her work-study job covers about a fourth of her tuition expenses and gives her the flexibility she needs as a student.

“I set my own hours. If I tell [my boss] that I can only work from this time to this time, I only work in that time. If I say: ‘I have a bunch of homework, I have a test, etc.’ [my boss] says that my degree matters most,” Vulcano said. “That’s not the case for every work-study job, but for the most part they have to work around your school schedule.”

In Dr. Smith’s legislative liaison position he met Dr. Roger Anderson of Western Washington University’s Biology Department who is also a fellow legislative liaison. He has been working with Dr. Smith on gathering information about the work-study program and fighting the cuts in budget. Dr. Anderson believes that the cuts to work-study seem to be part of a push by legislators and the Department of Education away from the kinds of financial flexibility that work-study provides, and towards career-focused programs like internships and apprenticeships.

“The original intent was to put some money in students’ pockets for food, to pay some bills, but for some reason that’s not good enough anymore,” Dr. Anderson said. “What they want is a change to have work-study be career-focused. Well, plenty of students don’t know what their careers are going to be. Potential careers, yes, but it disturbs me that they miss the interstructural benefits of having students work for students.”

According to a 2017 report by Dr. Judith Scott-Clayton from Columbia University, work-study has always been favored by Republicans in Congress, with the program fitting into ideas of personal responsibility and work-based learning. This puts a pressure on the Republican-held Senate to either support work-study or support the budget submitted by a Republican president.

The current administration has made efforts to cut work-study funding before, and those budgets have so far been rejected. However, Dr. Anderson said that if the budget is passed, Washington state won’t be willing or able to cover the shortfall in funding, even though according to him, Washington has generally done a good job supporting work-study in the past. Many other states rely completely on federal funding for the program.

For those hoping to save the work-study program, there is still time. As a line item in the budget, work-study funding can be changed until almost the last minute. According to Dr. Anderson, a lot of our current legislators were a part of work-studies as students and have a lot of appreciation for the program. However, as it is often a part of larger bills, work-study has so far been convenient to ignore. If the problem is unawareness, this provides an opportunity for students and faculty to make their voices heard both at the state and national levels.