The Federal Work-Study (FWS) program provides over $1 billion dollars annually in taxpayer-funded financial assistance to a unique population of at-risk, economically-disadvantaged U.S. college students with limited options for employment-related development. Research on the effects of FWS participation, especially professional development, is…

The Federal Work-Study (FWS) Program was established under the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964 to place low-income students with part-time employment to offset some educational expenses. In 1965, it was moved by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The program was originally established as a job development program to…

The federal work-study program is one of the earliest forms of federal financial aid for higher education in the United States and has come under close scrutiny for its debatable impact on low-income students' college success and persistence. However, federal work-study surprisingly remains one of the least-studied financial aid programs. This has…

In Ohio, the pandemic has forced students to pause their pursuit of a college degree or abandon their aspirations for higher education all together. The health crisis has accelerated a downward trend in enrollment in public higher education, at least for now, and thrown into sharp relief the barriers that prevent Black and brown students, and…

Three Higher Education Act (HEA) student financial aid programs--the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (FSEOG) program, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program, and the Federal Perkins Loan program--collectively are referred to as the campus-based programs. Under the campus-based programs, federal funding is provided to institutions…

In this paper, we explore how tutoring could become a permanent feature of the U.S. public education system. We outline a blueprint for taking tutoring to scale nationally and estimate its costs, while highlighting a range of design and implementation challenges. Our blueprint is centered on ten core principles and a federal architecture to…

Due to rising costs and declining affordability, many students have to work while attending college. The federal government takes a major role in subsidizing the wages of college students and spent over $1 billion on the Work-Study program in 2010-11 (College Board, 2011), yet little is known about how working during the school year impacts…

Low-income students must increasingly rely on work and loans to meet the high costs of college. Too often, though, the jobs they take are not in their field of study, which can impair the potential for career exploration and improved employment outcomes in the future. Despite the need to combine work and school in a meaningful way, only a limited…

Financial aid makes up the bulk of federal higher education spending, but do those dollars make a difference to needy students? A look at Federal Work-Study and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant allocations show that a disproportionate amount of funding goes to private universities with high tuition and low Federal Pell Grant…

A quality education is the primary instrument of social and economic mobility in the United States. As open-access institutions, community colleges are the gateway to postsecondary education for millions of Americans. Many of these students would be unable to afford college without federal resources, such as student financial aid and tax credits.…

From 2000-2001 to 2010-2011, the total amount of federal financial aid awarded to students under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA) jumped from $64.0 billion to an estimated $169.1 billion, a 10-year increase of 164%. For 2010-2011, the Title IV programs accounted for 72% of the $235 billion in total financial aid received by college…

Since 1964, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program has provided funds to subsidize the wages of student employees, but it has never been studied directly. I use an instrumental variables difference-in-difference framework with administrative data from West Virginia to identify causal effects, comparing eligible and ineligible students across…

Student employment subsidies are one of the largest types of federal employment subsidies, and one of the oldest forms of student aid. Yet it is unclear whether they help or harm students' long term outcomes. This document contains the appendices to the report "Should Student Employment Be Subsidized? Conditional Counterfactuals and the…

The three basic kinds of federal student financial aid to college students are described: federal student loans (direct lending, both subsidized and unsubsidized); campus-based aid (Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, work-study programs, and Perkins Loans); and Pell Grants. Some details of program design and recent changes are noted.…

Financed by the College Work Study Program (administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity), college students who were largely from lower-class homes, tutored in the College Discovery and Development (CDDP) High School Centers in New York City. The tutors, recruited from the City University of New York (CUNY) system had, on the whole, a…