It is sometimes amazing how, in the most unlikely places, we find a tendency in our government to find ways to shovel money to those least in need. Latest case in point, at least latest case to come to my attention:
Greg Noll, a senior at Columbia University, balances his engineering major with a federally subsidized “work-study” job at the university’s fitness center, where he fills spray bottles, wipes sweat off the machines, and picks up towels for twenty hours a week. The $9-an-hour wage he’s paid is underwritten by the federal work-study program, which was launched in 1964 to support low-income students who would not otherwise be able to afford college.
While Noll and his counterparts at Columbia and other pricey, top-tier private colleges and universities no doubt benefit from the program—Noll says he uses the money to buy books and food and to go out with his friends on the weekends—they are not necessarily the intended recipients of aid from the $1.2 billion federal program. Noll’s family, for instance, makes $140,000 a year, which he says, rightly, puts them squarely in the upper-middle class. 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.
Perhaps one reason civilizations decline is that they become ever more encumbered by irrational impediments to progress. This is a small example, but the near certainty that nothing will be done about it illustrates the broader problem. How often are civilizations able to sweep away outdated traditions and policies that no longer serve a broader purpose but do serve entrenched interests? It can happen. Consider that England did, among other 19th century reforms, get rid of rotten boroughs. But we face impediments England did not, prime among them our written constitution , which is showing its considerable age, but which has become, in its main elements, unalterable holy writ. It was not always thus, we changed the way Senators were elected at a time when plutocrats were quite literally buying Senate seats. The plutocrats are in charge again, but we seem powerless to turn on them.
Addendum: After writing this, I put it aside. I probably would have left it aside, until I came upon an article in Harpers (can't find a link) by a Frenchman (and surely we needn't iisten to one of those), Jean-Philippe Immarigeon, who suggests that what we need is an injection of the parliamentary system's ability to call new elections at the drop of a hat, so to speak. The theory is that if Congress obstructs, the president can call for elections to try to break the logjam. Optimistic, I think, as we'd quite likely get an even worse Congress. Really, while it might help somewhat, the real problem lies in the fact that the states where the people are (which are or will be primarily blue) are woefully under represented in the Senate in addition to be gerrymandered into powerlessness in the House. But Immarigeon does perform a useful service by calling for the unimaginable: an overhaul to our antiquated form of government. It won't happen if no one talks about it. It probably won't happen if we do, but it's at least possible.
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