Where institutionally created common experiences (orientation, finals, etc.) create a sense of community in a student body, institutionally enforced distinctions between groups of students create schisms. I do not have to work, but the great majority of my friends do. This feels wrong. Maybe its just a case of Protestant work ethic or an over-attentiveness to those silences in the conversation when a friend starts talking about work, but I find myself longing for the “work-job” system that prevailed in my high school over the last four years. The system was simple: everybody works in some capacity for the school for free, in the way that children might do chores for a household. If Amherst enforced this requirement universally instead of targeting financial-aid students, the average work-requirement (in dollars) required of each individual student goes down. Additionally, a universal requirement would reduce the presence of a socioeconomic class division on campus, creating a social structure more conducive to the lateral, learn-from-one-another, we-spent-a-huge-amount-of-money-to-get-you-diversity-now-take-advantage-of-this-opportunity approach to intellectual development espoused by Amherst College.
Most importantly, a universal work requirement would remove the academic and extracurricular handicap placed on financial-aid students. As it stands now, the self-help “aid” program expects financial-aid students to work roughly six to eight hours a week. How is this unfair? From one perspective, it could be seen as providing less time during the week for financial-aid students to complete homework assignments and study for exams. True, there are many other activities that may take up a student’s time during the week, but none that are involuntary and institutionally enforced on a basis of financial status. One might consider that six to eight hours per week is more time than I usually spent on my Intro Psychology course last semester, homework included. Having this level of time obligation to the College most likely prevents a student on financial aid from taking an additional class, engaging in other extracurricular activities or simply bonding with fellow students. This not only might hurt work-study students socially, but it could also result in harms to their academic records and resumes, as compared to their more affluent peers. Why do we focus so intently on bringing socioeconomically disadvantaged students to Amherst if we do not do our best to provide them with equal opportunities once they get here? Instead of enforcing division, it would be far more equitable for the student body as a whole if Amherst were to require a universal contribution of labor as a way of giving back to the campus community, while making financial aid truly need-based.
Proposals to restructure work-study run into three types of objections. First is the claim that it would be too expensive for the College to require all of its students to work, as this would mean that the College would have to find the money to hire all of its students. This claim, however, would only hold true in the case of an increase in the total amount of self-help aid provided by the College. If, instead of increasing the total amount of work required of the student body, the administration were merely to redistribute this work among its students, there would be no significant increase in total cost to the school, especially as financial aid would be guaranteed and the work itself would not be paid.
Second is the argument that such an arrangement would be unfavorable to full-time workers in Valentine Dining Hall and other student-hiring organizations. This position contends that an influx of student-workers might not only increase the demand on full-time employees to supervise student-workers, but could also threaten the job security of those employees. Yet this argument also falls apart when considered in the light of a proposal not to increase the number of work-hours performed by students, but to merely redistribute those hours among a greater pool of students, leaving the demand for full-time employees unaltered.
Finally, there is the argument that universalizing the work-requirement would have negative consequences on Amherst’s admissions statistics. That is to say, a universal work-requirement might dissuade applicants who do not require financial aid from applying to Amherst. While admissions statistics do play a significant role in “the college process,” a few percentage points printed in a pamphlet would hardly assuage the attractiveness to applicants of a bold, principled commitment to equitable treatment for all accepted students. Besides, are the students who would eschew an Amherst education because of a three-hour-a-week work requirement the students we want applying to Amherst?
As a member of a college which prides itself in championing liberal values, I would like to know why Amherst enforces what appears to be an inequitable financial aid policy, and whether steps can be taken, either as suggested above or otherwise, to remedy this unequal treatment. At the moment, the College’s administration seems receptive to the idea of reform, but not convinced there is a popular imperative for change. Thus, any meaningful alteration in the system requires evidence of significant support from the student body at large, and probably substantial activism. Under President Marx, Amherst College has been in the forefront of the drive toward socioeconomic justice in the academic community. However, given the continued existence of this inequitable system of financial aid, it is incumbent upon us as students to compel the administration to realize the full implications of its commitment to socioeconomic justice.