Taking Work-Study Out on the Town

Lured by the convenience of an on-campus job, an overwhelming percentage of students funded by the College Work-Study Program choose jobs in school offices, libraries, and labs, instead of serving in jobs in the larger community outside of the school.

The College Work-Study Program (CWSP) pays 70 percent of the wages of needy students, provided that they work for a non-profit organization. This makes work-study students valuable to low-budget agencies which benefit from the work of college students. However, colleges and universities fall into the non-profit category, and at many--including Harvard--most or all of work-study students are snapped up by the numerous on-campus employers.

There seem to be many reasons why students choose to remain on-campus for work-study, the most common of which are the convenience of a job within the school and flexible hours. Proximity of work is a major factor to a student who is trying to balance a schedule of academics and activities as well as a job.

"It's the convenience of it," says director of student employment John Banfield, at the University of Pennsylvania. "It takes a while to get to work if you are working off-campus. People are worried about time for studies and other activities."

At Harvard, "probably less than a third" of work-study students work in off-campus jobs, according to Martha K. Baldwin, the off-campus work-study coordinator. Those that do work off-campus tend to work in hospitals and laboratories doing research rather than in agencies that directly aid the community, says Baldwin.

Although Baldwin says that there is no specific push for students to work in social service jobs, the Student Employment Office (SEO) here does much to make such jobs available. Students can get names of community service jobs from a bulletin board specifically for off-campus work-study, and SEO administrators say they are always pleased to have students work in the outside community.

"What we do here is keep an eye out so we know what local potential community services need students," says Martha H. Homer, associate director of financial aids for student employment. "We love to see students doing that and encourage them in any way we can." "Agencies in Boston are very receptive to work-study students," adds Baldwin.

Besides a fair number of Harvard students who work in Boston public schools and in Boys' and Girls' Clubs, most students are thinly scattered throughout the many community service agencies which advertise. These include work in programs to aid battered women and children, mentally retarded adults, and elderly people as well as jobs in agencies such as Greenpeace and Red Cross.

For example, there is one Harvard CWSP student now working for Greenpeace, which staffs work-study students from many Boston area colleges. They send information and announcements to Harvard and other schools in the hopes of attracting work-study students.

"The work-study program is excellent for Greenpeace," says Greenpeace staff member Daejanna Wormwood, a former work-study student. "We always enjoy having work-study and internships--this is how work gets done."

The Harvard SEO also finds jobs for students on scholarships from the Stride Rite Corporation, which funds 10 students in each Harvard class who are residents of the Boston area. In order to receive these grants from Stride Rite, these students must do community service in Boston. The students work four to six hours a week in prisons, schools, hospitals, and similar social service agencies.

Work-study candidates may also find service opportunities through Harvard's Phillips Brooks House Association (PBH). The house is primarily a volunteer organization, but 25 work-study students are now employed in and through the house. They work as fundraisers, program directors, and staff assistants in the PBH building, or work off-campus in one of the 23 programs sponsored by PBH.

"Any program could be work-study if a contract was awarded to administer work-study positions," says Greg H. Johnson '82, graduate secretary of the house. "Some organizations require work-study," Johnson says, adding that some agencies prefer students on work-study because they feel that they will be more responsible than volunteers.

Brooks House has sponsored CWSP since 1981, when it was accepted after much debate. Johnson says that the work-study students are very useful to PBH, and is glad to have students working in community service. "I think the work-study program was established to do this kind of work."

Work-study community service obviously benefits the agencies it serves and pleases Harvard administrators, but are the rewards great enough to make a less convenient, more time-consuming job worth it to the students themselves? "I think the ones that go off-campus have no desire to work in an office, and want to do more with their work-study," says Baldwin. "They choose it because that is what they want to do. Working on-campus, one may take an office job just to earn the money."

"I think it's important to have a job away from campus," says Deborah Paine '89, who teaches arts and crafts in the Boys' and Girls' Club in South Boston. "It's so relaxing to be around kids. I enjoy it a lot more than I would working in a library." Another work-study student, Shannah V. Braxton '88, tutors in the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club, and earlier this year worked in a Mission Hill Service project through Phillips Brooks House as well. "It makes you realize that there is more to life in Boston than Harvard," says Braxton of her job. "It's a whole different world."

"This is more of a challenge to me," she says. "It means a lot to teach someone to read and to associate things with numbers. I don't like to work for the sake of working. I wanted to do something that would make a difference."

Both Paine and Braxton say that they thought that community service opportunities and their benefits should be made better known to Harvard students. "People don't know how to look into public service work," Braxton says. "I don't think it's made clear enough that you can do community service and work-study," Paine says. "It's hard if you think you will have to work as well as doing community service. People should be more aware."

At some colleges, no off-campus work-study is offered at all. At MIT, there simply are not enough funds to support off-campus work. "We absorb the work-study funds and it helps us with financial aid," says MIT director of student employment Jane Smith. MIT students do community service through other jobs and volunteer work, but work-study remains strictly on-campus.

Nearby Lesley College normally has off-campus opportunities, but this year has restricted its work-study program to on-campus work. "It is an institutional policy," says Donna Getz, assistant director of student employment. "We thought it was in the best interests of the students and the school."

At Boston College, about 10 percent of their work-study students work in the Boston community. "The preference is to work on campus," says assistant director of student employment Deborah Jackson. She says that students didn't want lose time commuting, and the student employment office actually had to encourage and force work-study students to work off-campus because all on-campus jobs were full.

Boston University was once cited as an institution with a model off-campus program, and still works actively in community service. Still, about 90 percent of their work-study students work on-campus.

"This is a change from the way it was 10 years ago," says Ann McCormick, director of off-campus work-study at BU. She says that the ratio of on-campus/off-campus workers was once 60/40 but has continually lessened through the years. "Students find it convenient to work on-campus. Campuses create more jobs for work-study, and reward students with merit increases for staying at the same job."

The number of work-study off-campus workers are increasing rather than diminishing at the University of Pennsylvania. Employment director Banfield says that there are more students working in community jobs than four years ago, and that this is largely due to more available information provided by the student employment office.

The university's president, Dr. Sheldon Hackney, is particularly interested in social service and expressed a desire that the CWSP be expanded to allow more community service work in an article he recently wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Higher education can and should enhance its role of service to the nation," wrote Hackney. "The tools of this enhancement--service payback and an expanded work-study program--are by no means the only approaches, but they can help remove some of the critical financial and institutional barriers that preclude wide-scale public service by current college students and recent graduates."