The Tutoring Problem

In an elementary school classroom in eastern Connecticut, Katie Kubisek, a college senior, and Cameron O’Brien, a second grader, are taking turns reading aloud from a book called A Little Spot of Giving.

Kubisek, a work-study recipient who visits the school every Friday, along with three volunteers she recruited, helps O’Brien sound out tricky words like empathy, compassion, and encouragement, breaking them down into chunks. When Cameron gets it right — or close — she praises him or offers a high five, and he beams.

Over the next hour or so, Kubisek, who is studying Spanish and elementary education at Eastern Connecticut State University, will work with four students — two native English speakers, and two whose first language is Spanish. She’ll sit with Adel Cabrera de la Rosa, a second grader, as he reads aloud from Océanos, and tells her that he almost drowned once, but has since learned to swim. She will listen, rapt, as Francisca Chach Zapon, a fifth grader, breezes through a chapter book titled El Misterio de los Árbitros Dormidos (The mystery of the sleeping referees).

This is the first year that students from Eastern Connecticut have worked as reading tutors in Windham Center School, where three-quarters of the 211 students come from families who speak Spanish at home. The tutors’ presence here is the result of a nationwide push by the Biden administration to get colleges to play a bigger role in helping schools recover from pandemic-related “learning loss.”

A year ago this month, Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona wrote to colleges to urge them to significantly increase the number of their students who are employed in tutoring, mentoring, and other student-support roles. Fifty colleges, including Eastern Connecticut, answered the call, with many pledging to devote at least 15 percent of their federal work-study dollars — double the amount required under federal law — to community-service roles by the end of the 2025 academic year.

If the White House’s effort succeeds, it could be transformative not only for schools, which have struggled to hire and retain tutors, but also for colleges, which could see better-prepared applicants — and more of them. College students could gain valuable job skills and résumé fodder, and might experience the sense of purpose that comes with meaningful work.

Expanding tutoring would also enable colleges to stretch their federal work-study dollars further, since the government covers a larger share of students’ salaries for community-service jobs than it does for other positions.

But the effort, now entering its second year, has gotten off to a sluggish start, stymied by bureaucratic and logistical hurdles and private-sector competition for student workers. While some colleges are on target to meet or even exceed their public goals, others have struggled to recruit students and revive programs that were put on pause during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the chief advocacy organization for financial-aid administrators is arguing that colleges shouldn’t be required to spend any of their federal work-study money on community-service positions.

In a report issued early this year, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators found that colleges are “having difficulty re-establishing off-campus partnerships post-Covid,” as organizations “have changed their policies as to who is allowed access to their facilities.” Schools have been particularly hesitant to let outsiders in, because of new health and security restrictions, the report added.

Tutoring advocates say it would be a mistake to remove the program’s community-service requirements at a time when school-aged students remain academically behind where they were before the pandemic, and when low-income students and students of color face the biggest gaps in learning.

“This is an equity issue,” says Katie Tennessen Hooten, founder of Teach for America’s Ignite Fellowship, which pays college students to provide tutoring to schools, and which has been trying — with very limited success so far — to tap into work-study dollars.

“Affluent families have always been able to pay for tutoring,” Hooten says. “Making it accessible for all kids during the day will have a game-changing impact.”

President Biden is not the first sitting president who has tried to ramp up tutoring using college students. In 1996, President Bill Clinton proposed a national literacy campaign that would marshal a “citizen army” of volunteer tutors and work-study recipients to get all kids to read independently by the end of third grade.

Clinton asked college presidents to devote at least half of their new work-study slots to the effort, and issued rules — still in effect — that allowed the work-study program to pay 100 percent of the wages for students who work as reading tutors for elementary-school children. More than 800 colleges pledged to support the campaign, dubbed “America Reads.”

Though the program is still in existence, it hasn’t achieved the impact that Clinton hoped. That’s partly because Congress didn’t provide colleges with funds for supervision, materials, and tutor training, one study found. In 2021-22, the most recent year with data available, only 11,588 college students were employed as reading tutors under the work-study program, far fewer than the 100,000 Clinton had aspired to. (In 2019-20, the last year before the pandemic, that number was a little under 24,000).

Yet the federal work-study program remains an attractive vehicle for tutoring advocates, given its size and (relatively) reliable funding stream, says Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University. The federal government spends more than a billion dollars a year on the program, placing roughly 600,000 undergraduate and graduate students in jobs both on campus and off.

Kraft acknowledges that hiring college students as elementary- and secondary-school tutors has its drawbacks: Misalignment in academic calendars can leave schools without tutors during college breaks and at the end of the year, and changes in tutors’ schedules can cause turnover that makes the support less effective. Still, he says, “it taps into a pool of potential tutors that is quite large.”

Some of the colleges that have joined President Biden’s National Partnership for Student Success say they’re trying to make student employment more meaningful. Work-study jobs have a longstanding reputation for being flexible — a way for students to make a little money between classes and for colleges to keep their labor costs down — but menial.

“We want it to be purposeful, something they’re proud to put on their résumé,” says Robert H. Vela Jr., president of Texas A&M University at Kingsville, “and not just some student sitting at a desk shredding papers.”

Helping local students get caught up could also make those students less likely to need remediation when they get to college, adds Vela, who says he’s been “seeing the effects of those Covid years” in incoming freshmen.

Denise Reid-Strachan, director of financial aid at Onondaga Community College, in New York, hopes that tutoring will give her students “real-world, practical, professional experience” and inspire more of them to become educators, helping to ease a local teacher shortage.

At the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University, the impetus to join the coalition came from students, who had “seen the impact that Covid education interruptions have had on youth” and “stood up and asked how they can make a change,” says Danielle Emeny, the college’s senior financial aid advisor. When the White House issued its call to action, “I finally had a channel to funnel my eager students into,” she says.

Eastern Connecticut’s Kubisek, who plans to become a teacher, says tutoring has allowed her to apply what she’s learning in her classes, while also practicing her Spanish skills.

“As a second-language learner, getting to practice with kids in this context has been amazing,” she says. “They’ve taught me things.”

Federal rules require colleges to spend at least 7 percent of their Federal Work-Study allocation on community-service jobs, and to employ at least one student as a reading tutor.

Colleges can exceed those minimums, and the government provides incentives for them to do so, offering to cover up to 90 percent of the salaries for students serving in community-service roles and 100 percent of the salaries for students employed as tutors. For most other jobs, the federal share is 75 percent, with colleges or nonprofit employers responsible for the rest. (For-profit employers are expected to cover half of a student’s salary.)

But even before the pandemic, many colleges had a hard time filling community-service positions. Low pay was a major factor: Many work-study jobs pay the minimum wage, and students could often earn more in retail or fast-food jobs. If colleges offered a more competitive wage, they couldn’t hire as many students.

Transportation was another barrier, particularly for low-income students without cars and for students attending colleges in rural areas without public transportation. In some cases, students would spend twice as long getting to and from a job as they did actually working.

Institutions that could prove that meeting the community-service requirements would impose a hardship on students could receive a waiver. During the 2018-19 and 2019-20 award years, roughly 200 colleges sought a waiver from community-service requirements, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Education Department.

The spokesperson was unable to provide statistics on how many colleges were granted waivers in each of those two years, but a March notice to colleges said that the education secretary has historically approved a “limited number” of waivers for colleges “that were able to demonstrate an exceptional circumstance.” The notice gave the examples of a rural college “located far from the type of organizations that would normally provide community service jobs,” and a college with a work-study allocation so small that 7 percent wouldn’t support even a single position for a full year.

Under federal law, colleges that don’t meet the community-service requirements, and don’t receive a waiver, may be required to return a portion of their funds, face a “substantial” fine, or even be suspended from the work-study program. But the Education Department spokesperson says the agency has never sanctioned a college for falling short of the requirements.

During the pandemic, when many schools were closed, the government waived the community-service requirements for all colleges and allowed them to transfer unused work-study dollars into the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Program, which provides grants to low-income students. That transfer authority expired last year, and the waiver will be lifted at the end of this academic year.

Yet the consequences of the monthslong closures linger, with more than half of colleges saying they’re struggling to revive programs interrupted by the pandemic, according to a survey by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations for the association, says some schools “got accustomed to not having outsiders in the school, and are reluctant to re-establish those relationships.”

Meanwhile, the task of recruiting students into community-service jobs seems to have only gotten harder, financial-aid administrators say.

“Students are finding creative ways of making money that provide more freedoms — like [driving for] Uber,” says Melissa Stephens, director of financial aid at Western Connecticut State University, which is part of the coalition. “Getting them to work in a traditional setting is increasingly challenging.”

Rebecca Hilts, senior financial aid advisor at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, another coalition member, says getting students to take any work-study job at all has been difficult, post-pandemic. Priorities have changed and work no longer leads the list, she says. Two years ago, in an effort to attract more applicants, the college raised the eligibility cutoff for federal work-study and increased the maximum award. Hilts thinks it’s slowly making a difference.

Still, when she posted a job seeking tutors for city schools this year, only one student applied.

Despite these challenges, some colleges in the coalition have managed to expand their tutoring programs significantly over the past year.

The Community College of Philadelphia increased the number of work-study students in its tutoring program from four to 15 — a nearly fourfold hike it attributes to its extensive recruitment efforts.

Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, got around transportation and scheduling hurdles by offering its tutoring program mostly online. It’s K-12 Connect program, which pays its tutors up to $25 an hour, was the largest employer of work-study recipients this academic year, with 110 students serving as tutors. The program is now working with six other colleges to hire their students as tutors, says Amirah Vosburgh, the program’s director.

And George Washington University, which has been involved in tutoring for more than 25 years, has more than doubled the number of federal work-study students in its new Math Matters program, from 22 in the spring of 2022 to 55 this academic year.

Both Grand Valley State and George Washington’s programs qualify as “high-dosage,” or “high-impact,” tutoring, generally defined as at least 90 minutes a week, spread across two to three visits, with the same tutor, in groups no larger than four. The Education Department has aggressively promoted high-impact tutoring as a pandemic-recovery strategy, pointing to research that suggests the practice can dramatically accelerate student learning.

But while states have invested billions in federal recovery dollars on tutoring, only slightly more than a third of schools offer high-dosage tutoring, and barely 11 percent of public-school students receive it, one survey found. Many of the programs that colleges offer fall into the larger, low-dosage category.

One way to expand high-dosage tutoring — beyond developing a college’s own programs — would be to make it easier for third-party tutoring organizations like Teach for America and Step Up to receive federal work-study dollars.

As it stands, tutoring organizations must seek separate approval from every college that sends them students, negotiating reimbursement rates and hiring processes on a campus-by-campus basis. While some colleges will cover a student’s full salary, others ask the organization to pay a portion.

Step Up, which matches college students with low-income schools in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, has had the most success so far, earning approval to receive work-study dollars from 17 California colleges, according to its chief executive, Sam Olivieri. Hooten, of Teach for America, just signed her first contract, following months of negotiations with colleges.

Olivieri and Hooten argue that the government should adopt a standardized approach to vetting tutoring providers, so programs that meet certain standards could automatically qualify and receive a uniform pay rate. Olivieri, who has hired a full-time staff member to build and maintain relationships with colleges, and a second to manage time sheets and supervision of work-study students, also suggests that Congress set aside funds to help organizations with the administrative costs of participating in work-study.

That’s not likely to happen anytime soon, though. The federal budget for work-study has barely budged in recent years, and some Republicans are pushing for an end to the program. The education secretary’s May 2023 call for colleges to spend more of their work-study dollars on tutoring didn’t come with an increase in federal funding.

The lack of new money means that colleges that want to add tutoring positions often have to cut work-study jobs elsewhere on campus. And that has made some colleges in the coalition proceed slowly.

Salisbury University, in Maryland, which pledged to place 12 work-study students in student-support roles, sent just one student into a local high school this year, in part because it didn’t want to steal slots from departments that depend on the students for help with administrative tasks.

“If we don’t have work-study students doing it, then we will have staff doing it,” says Alexander (Sandy) Pope, director of the university’s Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement. “And we have a lot of open positions” on campus.

Eastern Connecticut State, which has pledged to place at least five more work-study students in tutoring roles by the end of next June, added only one tutor this year, for similar reasons.

“Shifting students into these roles takes time,” says Taylor Bischoff, director of financial aid. “We want to do it gradually, so we don’t leave offices understaffed.”

“I wish they gave us a little more money to really make this happen,” she adds.

Still, watching Kubisek read with the kids, it seems that the college’s program, however small, is having an impact. Halfway through A Little Spot of Giving, Cameron is feeling so confident that he takes over the reading entirely, drawing the book to his side of the table. And when Kubisek tells Adel that the following week will be her last in the classroom, he frowns slightly, and asks if she’ll be back next year.

“Eres bonita” — you’re pretty — he tells her, as he gets up to leave.