Working Students’ Perceptions of Paying for College: Understanding the Connections between Financial Aid and Work

For many students at urban commuter colleges, the process of financial aid is unknown or mysterious; and so they work—often many hours a week—to pay expenses that financial aid might have covered. Missteps, unforeseen events, and limited resources can have severe consequences for the academic progress of these students. The broader study, of which this paper is a part, represents an effort to explore and describe students’ college-going, working, family responsibilities, and academic success at three commuter institutions in a metropolitan region in the Midwest. The encompassing project aims to introduce new qualitative data and situated description into the study of these phenomena. In this article, we explore students’ views and experiences with financial aid, centering on the research question: How do students describe and conceptualize financial aid policy