Giving Compass' Take:

• Andre M. Perry argues that students could get more about work-study programs - including career preparation and polish. 

• How can funders help to make work-study more impactful? How can work-study be made to work for those who need it most? 

• Learn how colleges can build better work-study programs.

Marissa Marshall, a junior at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is quiet and soft-spoken on campus, but she works tirelessly just a few miles from campus at The Brookings Institution. As a paid research intern, she conducts literature reviews and analyzes census data for me. Her work shouts of the kind of enthusiasm she should have when learning about a potential career. I value her contributions to the research team daily.

But in previous semesters, Marshall earned money doing something completely different—working as a student guard at the university, as part of a commonplace federally backed work-study job. Although she is not a trained security officer at Georgetown, Marshall is more than capable of checking whether her peers swipe their student access cards and making sure only authorized people enter campus facilities. In fact, she was so good at watching people swipe their identification cards that she earned a promotion, managing other student guards who monitor card swiping. And if that sounds glib, it’s because I’m deliberately throwing shade.

Marshall appreciates the money she earned, she says, and the opportunity to serve the university as a security guard, but her work at Brookings has made her realize what a difference relevant professional and educational work experience can make, for all students. She doesn’t want to become a security specialist.

Colleges and nearby employers should work closely to provide students more opportunities to gain the work-relevant skills that they want and society needs them to have. When I was in college, the ideal work-study job was one that gave you enough flexibility to complete course work while on the job, such as a gig at a front desk, signing people into a chapel that few people entered. Any job that paid you while you studied was the most desirable, even in the eyes of university faculty and staff. Working at a job that required you to pay attention to earn your paycheck was seen simply as a distraction from schoolwork, which took priority.

Research generally supports this belief. Students who work on campus for less than 15 hours a week, which is the limit for federally backed work-study, have higher graduation rates than those who work off-campus for more hours.

But students can and should get more from college jobs than a paycheck; they also deserve a professional experience that will allow them to apply their classroom learning, give them some polish, and make them more desirable to recruiters post-graduation.

Read the full article about getting more from work-study jobs by Andre M. Perry at Brookings.