The first step is to contact your business center to set up a new student employment posting. When creating this posting, you can choose whether you want the posting to be either “competitive” (meaning it is open to both Work-Study and non-Work Study students) or have it open to Work-Study students only. If you choose to create a position for Work-Study students only, you can email all of the students in your class/department/college and advertise that you are interested in hiring a student who qualifies for work-study. It is important that students self-identify as Work-Study-eligible to maintain confidentiality. 

Hiring students receiving Federal Work-Study support is an economical way to pay undergraduates to engage in research or scholarly work with faculty mentors. Faculty may be surprised to know that 75% of the student’s pay would be provided through Work-Study dollars, leaving the faculty mentor responsible for only 25% of the student’s pay. This matching 25% has to be eligible OSU dollars and the student has to be paid purely an hourly wage. Students paid on stipends or with a combination of stipend/hourly wage will not be able to use the Work-Study award for that position. Grant funds can be used as long as they are allocated to pay a student hourly wage.

While this may have happened in the past, there are new OSU policies in place as of December 2018 that should prevent this from happening in the future. If you hire a student who has received and accepted Work-Study (and has maintained their eligibility), they will automatically be paid through Work-Study when hired. In other words, you may have a Work-Study student working in your lab (and you may be paying only 25% of their wage) without even knowing it! You can double-check with your business center to find out.

Faculty with a student employee are able to see if their student employee has work-study funds by accessing EmpCenter.