The Working Student

October 15, 2015

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With a comatose swiftness, I shut off my chiming alarm to prevent my roommate from waking up. It was 6 a.m., an hour unknown to most Harvard students, except perhaps athletes and the most ardent of partiers. I crept to my part-time job where I would perform mindless tasks until my 9 a.m. class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As for the other two weekday mornings, those were consumed by early training sessions on the water or in the weight room.

I had an average freshman course load, nothing markedly easy or difficult. However, I noticed that very few of my peers in my classes or on the crew team were working part-time. I practiced the NCAA maximum of 20 hours a week, worked between eight and 10 hours a week, spent 13 hours each week in class, and juggled a workload for those classes that, according to Harvard’s course evaluation guide, added up to an estimated 18 hours a week.
Although there are surely students whose class schedules, athletic commitments, and extracurricular pursuits exceeded mine, I can assure you that working part-time in order to offset the cost of college is not a simple task. It requires something beyond exceptional time management: sacrifice. Sometimes this sacrifice might entail losing a couple of much-needed hours of sleep, or it could mean putting off an assignment or withdrawing from a club or social community.
Students’ term-time employment may allow them to attend Harvard financially, but the greater question is whether their jobs permit them to remain wholly a part of Harvard and fully able to take advantage of the resources it has to offer. Harvard’s financial aid system has enabled a significantly higher number of students of low socioeconomic status to attend in past decades— but at a steep cost. The continuation of the Federal Work-Study Program, along with a term-time work expectation included in many students’ financial aid packages at Harvard and other private colleges, highlights and perpetuates economic inequality among students by limiting the pursuits of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Working for Aid

Harvard College’s financial aid is need-based for all matriculating students. For the class of 2018, the total cost of attending Harvard for one year was $64,000. Of this, Harvard covered an average of 76 percent, or $48,850. As part of this financial aid package, students had a term-time work expectation of $1,750, in addition to the student asset and summer work expectation of $1,250. Although this combined student expectation of $3,000 comprises a little less than five percent of the total cost of attending the university, it is based on students working a “reasonable number of hours during the semester—often around eight to 12 hours per week,” according to the Harvard College Griffin Financial Aid Office.

The effects of non-negotiable, government-enforced student employment compound this issue. According to its own description, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) Program consists of “funds for part-time employment to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education.” According to the Federal Student Aid Office of the United States Department of Education, the FWS Program “emphasizes employment in civic education and work related to [students’] course of study, whenever possible.” However, there are often few opportunities in students’ fields of choice, and work schedules frequently conflict with course times, resulting in very little flexibility for students to fulfill their work expectation.

FWS also prevents students from working more for personal spending money, as the amount student earn cannot exceed their total FWS awards. A majority of FWS programs at schools use students’ earned funds immediately for tuition and other educational expenses, preventing students from paying their own contribution or having access to earned money. The FWS Program thus generally allows low-income students to graduate debt-free through campus employment. In reality, however, students at Harvard University and campuses throughout the United States essentially become modern-day indentured servants through the FWS program, merely as a result of their backgrounds.

These problems afflict other campuses as well. Stanford University expects no parent contribution from families with incomes less than $65,000 and covers tuition costs for parents making less than $125,000. However, students are still expected to contribute through savings, summer income, or part-time work during the school year. Likewise, 75 percent of Princeton University students graduate debt-free, but many do so through term-time employment, which consumes nine hours a week for almost the entire academic year. Yale and Cornell both have financial aid packages that often include FWS on-campus employment. Most private universities expect some sort of student employment as part of a financial aid package, especially in the Ivy League and at other top colleges in the United States.

Punching the Time Clock

I wiped the drop of blood off my fingertip and drowsily tagged the remaining six dozen sweatshirts before my 9 a.m. French class. It didn’t hurt; all I felt was the tranquility and aggravation that arose from listening to the same Pandora channel for the past two hours. After clocking out, I rushed to my class with a protein bar for breakfast, just like every other Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In my experience, working part-time was monotonous and only served to take away precious time that I could have spent studying, training, talking with my professors, pursuing new interests, or catching up on sleep. It prevented me from writing for the Harvard Political Review during my freshman year, as well as from joining many other extracurricular and pre-professional groups, which required commitments of time that I simply could not dedicate.

While it may have been a step up to attend Harvard, my job was a step down once I was here. It was not rewarding. It just expanded the division between my peers and myself. I couldn’t afford to attend Harvard, and Harvard couldn’t afford me all it had to offer.
Although some campus employment opportunities or FWS Program jobs may be rewarding, many are not engaging for students and simply serve to fulfill term-time work expectations. Cormac Conners ’18 reported, “My job was not very demanding. I was allowed to do homework while I worked” at his part-time job at Crimson Callers, a Harvard organization dedicated to soliciting donations from alumni. Furthermore, many outside awards given to high school seniors and college freshmen are non-renewable, and although they may temporarily alleviate the cost of attending college for freshmen students, they also may solicit larger student contributions in following years. When asked how he will pay his student contribution in the future, Conners responded that he expected to take out loans.
Shelby Martinez ’18 worked three jobs during the 2014-2015 Harvard academic year to pay her student contribution. In reflecting on her experience working, Shelby said, “While I did not view one single job as demanding, the balancing act between three was particularly stressful. If I were scheduled off for one job, most of the time I had to work at another location, making my hours individually flexible but altogether very demanding.” When asked if she believed a term-time work expectation increases socioeconomic inequality and division among students at Harvard, she answered without hesitation: the requirement to work as part of the FWS Program limits poorer students’ exposure to different social circles and ultimately causes a division between working and non-working students over time. Martinez firmly believes that most working students are forced to sacrifice social time in order to work, which hinders their ability to make new friends and feel a greater sense of community—an essential part of the adaptation to college.

Bringing Down Barriers

Since President Obama announced plans to make community college more affordable in early 2015, many private institutions have responded in order to allow more students of lower socio-economic status to apply and attend. The University of Chicago recently introduced a new program to do so called “No Barriers.” It waives application fees for families applying for aid, ends loans as part of financial aid packages, and expands funded opportunities like internships, study abroad, and research positions while eliminating work-study programs. No Barriers effectively enables students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to have the same opportunities as their wealthier counterparts, graduate debt-free, and access unprecedented resources within the university.

A viable solution at Harvard and other universities would be to expand the proportion of operating expenses appropriated to financial aid and eliminate student employment as part of financial aid. Currently, Harvard maintains the largest endowment fund of any university in the world: a cool $36.4 billion, a value larger than half of the world’s economies, and staggering when compared to the average college endowment of approximately $355 million. Although only 30 percent of Harvard’s endowment funds are not restricted to specific departments, programs, or schools, that still leaves $10.92 billion. For the fiscal year 2014, Harvard’s total operating expenses were approximately $4.41 billion, which is about 12 percent of the endowment. Of that amount, merely three percent was dedicated to scholarships and other student awards. This means that less than 0.4 percent of Harvard’s endowment was spent on financial aid that year.

Typically, 60 percent of the approximately 6,700 undergraduates at Harvard College receive financial aid: a total of 4,020 students. If all of these undergraduates had the same work expectation of $3,000, like the class of 2018, then the cost of removing this student expectation would be less than $12.1 million—0.003 percent of the university’s operating expenses and just 0.0003 percent of Harvard’s endowment. Thus, removing students’ term-time work expectation could easily be accomplished from a monetary standpoint.

Harvard University’s misallocation of its resources and inaction concerning the student work expectation is inconsistent with its desire to remove economic barriers for admission. By reallocating more of its considerable resources to financial assistance, the university could easily help to create the inclusive and egalitarian atmosphere for students that it nominally strives towards.
Ultimately, admission to college should extend to all of its opportunities and resources, especially in this critical time of transition and independence in students’ lives. Work-study programs and term-time employment requirements prevent students who worked hard to be admitted from taking advantage of all a university has to offer. This reality must change, and the change will certainly benefit the college experiences of students throughout the nation, including me.

Image credit: Kyle McFadden/HPR