This slip inserted into a college financial aid office offer letter is the first evidence I’ve seen of the dreaded sequester. I know that many of you have already been affected, but as the common middle-class suburb dweller who doesn’t rely on federal contracts and hasn’t wanted to visit the White House, this warning that loan fees, work study and grants might be reduced is the first real clue that something’s going on that might actually affect my life. I would expect that this is fairly typical–the press in DC acted as if the world would end on March 1 but what’s really happening is a slow, steady, grinding, ugly process as federal agencies start to re-budget and warn their constituents.
I worked in a financial aid office in a red state university for a while, and many of the work study students I knew were not products of grinding poverty. Like a lot of lower-middle-class families, their parents didn’t exactly live paycheck-to-paycheck, but they had little savings and lots of bills, so their kids were eligible for a fair bit of financial aid, including work study. I’m sure many of those parents voted straight Republican tickets, and I’ll bet they see work study as the perfect financial aid program: kids work for their school in return for an education. The name “Federal Work Study”, and the subsidy it implies, probably never penetrated their consciousness, until now. I wonder how long their Republican representatives think they can hide out in DC and avoid angry town hall meetings with those parents.