"I think it's important to have a job away from campus," says Deborah Paine '89, who teaches arts and crafts in the Boys' and Girls' Club in South Boston. "It's so relaxing to be around kids. I enjoy it a lot more than I would working in a library." Another work-study student, Shannah V. Braxton '88, tutors in the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club, and earlier this year worked in a Mission Hill Service project through Phillips Brooks House as well. "It makes you realize that there is more to life in Boston than Harvard," says Braxton of her job. "It's a whole different world."

"This is more of a challenge to me," she says. "It means a lot to teach someone to read and to associate things with numbers. I don't like to work for the sake of working. I wanted to do something that would make a difference."

Both Paine and Braxton say that they thought that community service opportunities and their benefits should be made better known to Harvard students. "People don't know how to look into public service work," Braxton says. "I don't think it's made clear enough that you can do community service and work-study," Paine says. "It's hard if you think you will have to work as well as doing community service. People should be more aware."

At some colleges, no off-campus work-study is offered at all. At MIT, there simply are not enough funds to support off-campus work. "We absorb the work-study funds and it helps us with financial aid," says MIT director of student employment Jane Smith. MIT students do community service through other jobs and volunteer work, but work-study remains strictly on-campus.

Nearby Lesley College normally has off-campus opportunities, but this year has restricted its work-study program to on-campus work. "It is an institutional policy," says Donna Getz, assistant director of student employment. "We thought it was in the best interests of the students and the school."

At Boston College, about 10 percent of their work-study students work in the Boston community. "The preference is to work on campus," says assistant director of student employment Deborah Jackson. She says that students didn't want lose time commuting, and the student employment office actually had to encourage and force work-study students to work off-campus because all on-campus jobs were full.

Boston University was once cited as an institution with a model off-campus program, and still works actively in community service. Still, about 90 percent of their work-study students work on-campus.

"This is a change from the way it was 10 years ago," says Ann McCormick, director of off-campus work-study at BU. She says that the ratio of on-campus/off-campus workers was once 60/40 but has continually lessened through the years. "Students find it convenient to work on-campus. Campuses create more jobs for work-study, and reward students with merit increases for staying at the same job."

The number of work-study off-campus workers are increasing rather than diminishing at the University of Pennsylvania. Employment director Banfield says that there are more students working in community jobs than four years ago, and that this is largely due to more available information provided by the student employment office.

The university's president, Dr. Sheldon Hackney, is particularly interested in social service and expressed a desire that the CWSP be expanded to allow more community service work in an article he recently wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Higher education can and should enhance its role of service to the nation," wrote Hackney. "The tools of this enhancement--service payback and an expanded work-study program--are by no means the only approaches, but they can help remove some of the critical financial and institutional barriers that preclude wide-scale public service by current college students and recent graduates."