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Student Loans Reports

Top Colleges & Universities For Federal Work-Study Financial Aid

Updated Feb 26, 2024   |   4-min read

According to the most recent data compiled by LendEDU, the average cost for attending a four-year not-for-profit college or university in the United States is $25,290 for public institutions and $50,900 for private.

Federal and private student loans, grants, scholarships, and savings are the most commonly utilized resources to help mitigate the ever-increasing cost of higher education.

One of the lesser known methods that can help chip away at that college price-tag is the Federal Work-Study Program, formerly known as the College Work-Study Program.

The Federal Work-Study Program is government-funded and compensates students for part-time work at a university or college. The benefits deriving from this program are multifaceted.

First and foremost, participating students receive much-needed income that can provide some flexibility in handling college expenses, including paying off debt. Second, the program offers the opportunity for students to gain valuable experience in fields they may like to pursue post graduation.

With both experience and a little extra cashflow, work-study participants can start their careers with more earnings potential and more leverage in paying off their student loans.

With the usefulness of the Federal Work-Study Program in mind, LendEDU has put together a list of more than 400 participating colleges and universities to reveal which institutions have the most robust offerings for students in the program.

The data was licensed from Peterson’s Financial Aid dataset and schools have voluntarily submitted their data that is pertinent to the Federal Work-Study Program.

Continue on below to discover which colleges and universities throughout the U.S. provide the highest average compensation to workers within the Federal Work-Study Program, in addition to the institutions that have the most participants in their respective programs.

Top Colleges & Universities For Average Federal Work-Study Aid Per Student Participant

Other Key Findings:

Average Amount of Aid

  • On average, participating public colleges and universities gave $2,200 in federal work-study aid to each participant
  • On average, participating private colleges and universities gave $1,928 in federal work-study aid to each participant
  • On average, all participating colleges and universities in this study gave $2,032 in federal work-study aid to each participant

Total Amounts of Aid

  • Amongst all participating schools in this study, $646,296,533 was the total amount awarded in federal work-study aid
  • Private institutions accounted for $366,101,644 of that money, while public institutions accounted for the remaining $280,194,889

Number of Jobs

  • In total, there were 300,098 jobs awarded through the Federal Work-Study Program amongst the participating schools in this study
  • Private institutions accounted for 58 percent of those jobs, while public institutions were responsible for the remaining 42 percent
  • On average, participating private colleges and universities gave 694 jobs as part of the Federal Work-Study Program
  • On average, participating public colleges and universities gave 796 jobs as part of the Federal Work-Study Program

Methodology

The data that comprises this report was licensed by LendEDU from Peterson’s Financial Aid dataset. Data from Peterson’s is voluntarily submitted by U.S. colleges and universities that choose to submit their financial aid information. This particular dataset reflects financial aid statistics from the 2016/2017 academic year, the most current dataset available to the public. The dataset here also only includes four-year not-for-profit private and public undergraduate colleges and universities.

For this particular study, any institution with less than 200 federal work-study program jobs awarded to students was removed from further analysis. This left the dataset with 409 colleges and universities, all of which were included in the report.

The numbers reported in this study come straight from Peterson’s dataset. For the “Other Key Findings” section, LendEDU completed our own analysis of the numbers found in the table above, most of which involved simple addition, division, or averaging. The total amount of money awarded was found by multiplying the number of jobs at each school by the average amount of aid rewarded at the same school and then adding together all of the resulting numbers from that same addition from each school in the report.

See more of LendEDU’s Research