The Struggle of Work-Study at USC

by Avery Thunder ‘26

I often joke that getting work-study at USC is harder than getting in, which isn’t entirely untrue. I’ve spent hours completing work-study job applications. I started with high hopes when I arrived my freshman year. Before going to college, everyone told me, “Just get a library job, you can do your homework during it.” Seems easy enough when you put it that way. I attended the job fair and met people who were enthusiastic about hiring new students, but the first difficulty I noticed was the sheer amount of work they were asking me to do for such low-paying positions. Not to say that you shouldn’t have to do some amount of work for it to count as employment, but at the job fair alone, I met several people who wanted me to redesign their websites or write, shoot, and edit multiple videos a semester while still working under 20 hours a week. I was immediately overwhelmed. How was I supposed to balance all that work and college at the same time?

The job fair was also intimidating. Maybe that’s a personal thing, but job fairs, career fairs, involvement fairs – they’re all so vast and crowded that it feels impossible to identify what is worthwhile or what fits your skill set. I walked away with 20 pamphlets and more confusion than I came with. 

However, I wasn’t totally dissuaded from finding an on-campus job, I figured I could just use the online USC jobs database. It would be easier, right? I could see what potential employers wanted from me, they would get my application instantly, and they’d be able to respond quickly, as well. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

In my personal experience, USC’s online employment portal is almost completely useless for students. Most of the people who are searching for students to fill positions aren’t even on Connect SC, and as a result, every job there is incredibly competitive. I’ve read applications that say they not only have an interview process, they have multiple rounds of interviews! This isn’t my career; I’m not going to be making a giant contribution to your organization as a minimum-wage worker. Why does every position require so much time and energy to just end with a rejection?

Because of this, the process of finding a work-study job is painfully long. Let’s say you apply at the beginning of the fall semester – around the middle of August. Maybe you apply for ten jobs around campus – the libraries, some front desk jobs, etc. Out of those applications, I would guess that you hear back positively from about two of them, and from my experience, they would take at least a month to contact you. Then you have to interview. Because you always have to interview. For everything. Just accept it. 

I remember having two interviews in a week, which was good – one for a filing job and the other for a front desk job. I went to both interviews, answered their questions, and got positive feedback from the interviewers, but I was always told that the position was “very competitive.” They also told me that I would hear back in a couple of weeks. Spoiler alert! I didn’t get either job.

This brings me to possibly my biggest gripe with the work-study system at USC: the time it takes for anyone to get back to you. There are around four months in a semester, and if it takes a month to learn if you even got an interview, another week to set up an interview, and another two weeks to hear back, you’re really only going to work for around two months in the first semester, and that’s if everything goes as planned.

What about future semesters? Well, that depends on how flexible your job is. Can you work at virtually any time? In college, your schedule changes every semester, so you often have to leave jobs or sacrifice important classes to keep them. Even though classes can be at fairly random times, most jobs are only offered during regular work hours. It’s like the eternal capitalist paradox – if I work nine to five, how am I supposed to go to your store that is only open from nine to five?

This is basically what happened to me. I finally got my first work-study job in late October of the fall semester, and I worked until winter break, but I had to quit when I got back because my classes conflicted with too many of the shifts. I wasn’t going to be able to work the minimum amount of hours that they required of me, but I also couldn’t drop my classes that conflicted with their shifts. 

This is the never-ending struggle of work-study, which is meant to be a form of federal financial aid. It is offered as a way to pay for tuition or other university fees by working a part-time job on campus or associated with the university. It comes in your financial aid package, and you’re assigned a certain amount of money you can earn through the program. That means if you have too many hours, you’ll quickly hit your allotted limit, but if your job offers too few, you won’t get your full amount of aid. And if you can’t find a qualifying campus job, you get absolutely nothing!

According to USC’s admission website, almost two-thirds of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid – that’s over 20,000 students. Additionally, work-study is an incredibly common form of financial aid and is often the first type given out. This means that a massive amount of the student body is searching for qualified jobs, but it feels as if there are simply not enough to go around.

The fruitless job hunting to simply afford being at college seriously hurts a student's mental health and academic performance. The stress of not making any money, never-ending job hunting, and having a full class load is taxing. College in itself is enough to cause severe, irreparable burnout, and this additional stress places additional strain on low-income and middle-class students at a university with wildly outsized tuition costs. 

USC needs to find a way to address this discrepancy and streamline the hiring process for work-study jobs so students can access the funds they desperately need. 

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