Admissions Offices Scramble to Comply With New Overtime Rule

An appetite for long hours, a stomach for low pay. Those are unofficial requirements to enter the college-admissions field, where 12-hour days are common and starting salaries meager.

But a new federal rule is changing the landscape. A recent update of the Fair Labor Standards Act makes more full-time salaried workers eligible for overtime pay. Starting in December, campus employees who earn less than $47,476 a year and work more than 40 hours a week must be compensated for overtime. To follow the law, colleges must give raises to those below the threshold, pay them overtime, or scale back their hours.

Those are especially difficult — and potentially expensive — options for admissions offices. The field has long relied on cheap labor to execute time-intensive recruitment campaigns, and many staff members’ salaries are well below the new mark.

Context matters here. For years the demands on admissions staffs have grown as colleges’ ambitions have soared. Amid escalating competition for applicants, admissions officers are expected to visit four or five high schools a day and college fairs at night, while scheduling one-on-one interviews at Starbucks, meeting with community-based organizations, texting answers to applicants’ questions, hosting campus events, returning emails from inquisitive parents, and reading a record number of applications.

The new law forces colleges to reckon with the value of all that labor. In an era of tight budgets, many colleges are opting to convert lower-paid admissions officers to hourly status, despite the logistical challenges that poses. Other institutions, wary of adding up all the night and weekend hours put in by admissions road warriors, plan to raise their salaries. That could necessitate increases for senior staffers, who now make about $50,000.

While weighing strategies, admissions leaders are also grappling with how the law might, for better or worse, change the profession’s all-hands-on-deck culture. The new rule is meant to ensure that employees are paid fairly. But will admissions officers who are required to submit weekly time sheets end up feeling more — or less — valued than before?

What You Need to Know About the Overtime Rule and Higher Ed

A change in federal labor law, originally scheduled to take effect in December, has colleges and universities scrambling to sort out what to do now that a federal judge has blocked the change. Here’s a look at how colleges are coping.

• Blocked Overtime Rule Sows Uncertainty for Colleges
• Colleges Brace for Impact of Overtime Rule
• What Obama’s Overtime Rule Could Mean for Colleges
• What Hourly Higher-Ed Employees Made in 2015-16

“It could go either way,” says Tom Weede, vice president for enrollment at Marietta College, in Ohio. “My hope is the law could signal to colleges that this is a serious profession, and that we need to treat our young employees well. But a lot of people are worried about the morale effects of telling them, ‘You’re no longer a salaried employee.’”

When the new rule was announced, this past spring, Mr. Weede knew that Marietta couldn’t afford big raises. Six of its eight admissions officers earn less than $47,476, he says; only one is close enough to bump up.

The other five, he explains, very likely will get a choice. They can become nine-month employees, earning about $35,000, a prorated salary based on the new threshold that would exempt them from overtime pay. (For some, that would be a raise.) Or they can remain year-round employees earning what they do now, but paid hourly and eligible for overtime. “It’s not an easy question,” Mr. Weede says.

‘Underpaid and Overworked’

Transitioning to an hourly system requires managers and employees to plan ahead as never before. Erica Sanders, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has learned that firsthand.

After a legal review of campus policies a decade ago, officials there made admissions officers eligible for overtime. That meant supervisors had to sit down with employees regularly to estimate how many overtime hours each one would need in the forthcoming two-week period. The estimates varied according to individual travel schedules, evening recruitment events, and so on.

Eventually the admissions office adopted a model in which each person gets a “bank” with a certain number of overtime hours that he or she can use as needed.

“That provides some autonomy. They know they’re not going to exhaust their bank if they stay an extra hour,” Ms. Sanders says. “The nature of admissions counselors’ jobs is to be independent, with leeway to manage their calendars. You can still give your staff autonomy — you just have to manage it.”

The university also has tried to reduce the time admissions officers spend responding to emails and calls, by shifting some of those duties to a call center. “A triage model,” Ms. Sanders calls it. “The goal is to make them feel like part of a team instead of feeling that they are the only one who could answer a question.”

These days, each of Michigan’s 17 admissions officers works, on average, 112 to 120 overtime hours a year, which costs the university a total of about $63,000.

Elsewhere, some colleges facing the new rule have determined that raising salaries to the threshold is the most cost-effective plan, not to mention the simplest. “It would be really difficult to calculate overtime during fall travel season, asking when does a trip start, when does a trip end,” says Greg MacDonald, vice president for enrollment management at Lafayette College. “And we have people reading applications from the moment they wake up until they go to bed, with an hour for lunch.”

Lafayette’s admissions office recently increased pay for beginning staffers, which will take some of the sting out of the costly plan to bring all salaried admissions officers up to the new mark, Mr. MacDonald says: “Entry-level staff members have been underpaid and overworked here for many years. This is a step in the right direction.”

The University of Delaware’s admissions office has created an intermediate position — assistant director — for those who, with two or three years of experience, have taken on additional responsibilities. Christopher Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, plans to move seven of his 12 admissions counselors into those jobs, with salaries high enough to exempt them from the new rule. The other five staffers will become eligible for overtime, at an estimated total cost of $12,000 a year.

Mr. Lucier sees several challenges ahead. One is making sure that those above the threshold don’t take on too much work. “It will be a balancing act,” he says. “It will be incumbent on us as leaders and managers to make sure there isn’t too much trickle-up.”

At the same time, supervisors must help overtime-eligible admissions counselors manage their heavy workloads. That means keeping an eye on their hours while also keeping them motivated.

“These are dedicated people, and they might say, ‘That’s OK, I’ll put in the extra time,’” Mr. Lucier says of young admissions counselors. “And we’ll have to say, ‘No, stop. Those hours have to be approved ahead of time.’ That’s a culture shift.”

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.