James Redmond
News Reporter

MavWorks is a developing no-need based financial aid work program at Mesa State College. The program had its pilot test run during the spring semester. Now the program is in its first official semester with a capacity of 150 students to be a part of the program.
As an institution based program, the money for MavWorks comes directly from the school. MavWorks is a program that Curt Martin, financial aid director at Mesa State, is happy to see up and going.
“We saw a need to expand aid for students,” Martin said. “When we actually looked at the types of programs, we factored out socioeconomic status and factored out even academic preparedness. Work-study seemed to be the biggest common denominator that kept students in school, no matter what their GPA was and no matter what their socioeconomic background was. So while we were looking to find ways to help students, we figured it would be best if we could find ways to also get them employed on campus.”
The MavWorks program fills an interesting niche at Mesa State College. Martin said that he is hoping for more money in the future for need-based financial aid programs and need-based work programs. The federal and state programs are need-based. The state has a little of what’s called a no-need work stipend which Martin said does not provide much money for middle-income students.
“The middle income students aren’t getting anything,” Martin said. “In fact it’s kind of out of style. The feds don’t like it when you have scholarships that are expanding because they believe they all go to the upper end of the socioeconomic level. So we wanted to find middle-income students and come up with a program that would assist them.”
Martin added that traditionally Mesa State has a very high percentage of students that work while they’re going to school.
“We tried to decide if we can expand [MavWorks] to students who didn’t meet the finical requirement because they didn’t make enough money,” Martin said.
Martin said that there is the possibility of MavWorks slots opening in the next couple of weeks. After some deliberation a change for the MavWorks program was made this fall.
“We are not going to reopen [MavWorks] and instead we are going to award students that could have been awarded need-based work-study if we had not ran out,” said Martin. “We thought that was more fair. Of course, we ran out before we could award everyone that wanted it.”
The program still has a long way to go and Martin knows that the program needs more support than it already has.
“If we get some success with it, we are hoping that maybe there’s somebody out there on the private side who says ‘Hey that’s a cool program. Let’s help fund this’ because you can only use your own funds to a certain point,” said Martin.
Part of the responsibility for the future of MavWorks is on the shoulders of Mesa State’s students.
Martin said, “If the students find this beneficial, we would like to continue and expand. To really get the ball rolling, the students have to get behind it and say ‘I like it’.”
To find out more information about MavWorks, visit the Financial Aid office in Lowell Heiny Hall.
u
jredmond@mesastate.edu