Students in work study positions at ETSU are among the lowest in terms of wages among other Tennessee Board of Regents institutions. The Department of Education mandates that a student holding a work study position must make at least the current federal minimum wage, but leaves room for more pay based on the type of work and the skill level required for a job.
ETSU sticks to the minimum wage, offering $5.15 per hour to all students who hold a federal work study job.
At other Tennessee schools, how-ever, some students are making more.Walters State Community College in Morristown and Pellissippi State Technical Community College in Knoxville for instance, pay students participating in work study more than $6.50 per hour.
But it’s not only smaller campuses that pay more than the minimum wage to work study students.
Tennessee State University in Nashville, which has a student population of 9,000, pays from $6 to $8 per hour for work study.
At the University of Memphis, which has 16,000 students, work study jobs can pay anywhere from $5.15 to $10 per hour depending on which department a student works for and the skill level of the work.
The reason for the wide range of pay across the state deals with the amount of funding a school receives from the government and how the school decides to use it.
“Each school is allocated a different amount depending on the school’s population,” said Lori Acord, the client services coordinator in the financial aid department at ETSU. “It’s the school’s responsibility to spend the whole amount, or risk losing funding the next year.”
A school with fewer students participating in the work study program would have to pay more per hour in order to spend all of its allocated funds if they wanted to receive the same amount of federal money for the next year.
Larger schools with more students who are interested in holding work study jobs have the opposite problem. They must find ways to spread the federal money around so they can help as many students as possible.
“At ETSU, we try to offer aid to as many students as we can,” Acord said. “We want to have enough funds for everyone willing to work.”
The University of Memphis uses different techniques to stretch its funding. There, only 75 percent of a student worker’s pay is from federal funds. The department in which the student works is responsible for the other 25 percent.
“We’re able to offer a higher rate of pay because each department is responsible for paying its student workers,” said Martha Bowman, the office associate for student employment at the University of Memphis. “The department sets the pay rate depending on the skill required for the job and they have to pay 25 percent of the wages.”
Student workers’ pay would also be increased if the federal minimum wage were raised.
The current federal minimum wage of $5.15 has been blasted by economists who say the figure is too low.
According to Business Week a petition introduced to congress by the Economic Policy Institute had been signed by 664 economists calling for the minimum wage to be raised to $7.25 per hour. They point out that while the minimum wage has remained the same for nine years, the cost of living has risen 26 percent.
Some student workers are feeling the squeeze of their minimum wage pay.
“I live an hour away and I commute every day,” said Amanda Morelock, a sophomore who works at the Child Study Center. “A salary increase would help me tremendously.

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