Ohio University leaders announced last week that, despite sending students home in response to the coronavirus pandemic, they would continue to employ and pay any student workers who wanted to keep their jobs. If they couldn’t work remotely — staffing a residence hall’s front desk, for instance — university officials said they’d find those students new roles.
“We’re committed to providing opportunities for them to do meaningful work,” said M. Duane Nellis, Ohio’s president, in an interview.
That was good news for Noah Wright, a junior at Ohio who works in the admissions office calling prospective students. But Wright, who uses income from his admissions job to pay for everyday expenses, said his hours had been cut nearly in half. One of Wright’s roommates, meanwhile, is a manager at a campus dining hall, and while the university says he’ll have remote work to do, he doesn’t know how.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Wright’s situation shows that even the best possible solution at a time like this might not be a perfect one. As classes and operations move mostly online at colleges across the country, many undergraduate employees are out of work and afraid they will lose crucial income for the rest of the semester.
Administrators, meanwhile, are trying to figure out how to keep students on their payroll if there is no meaningful work for them to do. Colleges have not landed on a standard response. Some have pledged to keep paying out-of-work students; others have made no such promises. Still others, like Ohio, look to tap students for remote work whenever possible. Each approach faces challenges.
In Wright’s case, he was already running low on money this month, and he was banking on increasing his hours after spring break. But now, he said, he can work a maximum of only six hours per week, down from his usual 10. Before he returned home, on Tuesday, he had to ask his roommates and his parents to help cover a couple of days of groceries.
Wright is one of about 6,200 Ohio students — undergraduate and graduate — who hold jobs on the campus of 29,000. Student workers fill a wide variety of roles, including teaching assistants, research assistants, resident advisers in dorms, housing and dining workers, front-desk staff members, lab technicians, library workers, writing-center tutors, call-center workers, and IT support staffers.
At Ohio and elsewhere, some are part of the federal work-study financial-aid program, which offers subsidies to about 700,000 students nationwide. Others are part-time employees paid by the institution. Forty-three percent of full-time undergraduates are employed in some capacity, according to the Education Department.
For many students, their job is the only way they can afford to stay in college.
‘I’ve Lost Both My Jobs’
The wide variety of ways students are paid for work — federal work-study, federal grants, department funds, and contracts with off-campus entities — makes the issue complicated, Jeff Lieberson, a spokesman for the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, wrote in an email. “Schools absolutely want to support students during this crisis, but there are many external factors at play,” he said.
As colleges scramble to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, they have closed many of the facilities that employ students, such as libraries, dining halls, and recreation facilities, both because most students have gone home, and because it might help slow the spread of the virus. Another complicating factor is that many states and cities have issued “shelter in place” orders that discourage people from leaving their homes for nonessential reasons. And full-time students often aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits.
Guidance from the federal Office of Student Aid indicates that, if colleges temporarily close due to Covid-19, they are allowed to keep paying “disaster-affected” work-study students. Still, colleges aren’t required to continue employing students, even if they are part of the work-study program, though the institutions wouldn’t be able to use federal work-study funds for anything else.
College leaders should be consistent and transparent in communicating with student employees, Bridget Schwartz, president of the National Student Employment Association, said in an emailed statement. “Student employees are integral to university and college daily operations,” she said.
Work-study students at one college will be paid whether or not they work.
New York University is among the colleges that will pay all student workers through the end of the semester. Pennsylvania State University and the University of Northern Colorado will cover salaries through at least the end of April. At Saint Louis University, all work-study students will be paid whether or not they work, and non-work-study students who can’t do their jobs remotely will each receive a one-time $750 grant.
The University of North Carolina system and the University of Michigan system are offering temporary paid time off for hourly employees, including students. The University of Memphis and Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, like Ohio, are trying to find remote opportunities for students who want to keep working.
But on other campuses, the outlook for student workers is less certain.
Western Washington University’s student workers “may elect not to work during suspended operations” and would not be paid if they don’t, according to the institution’s website. “The university is in the process of reviewing implications to student employment,” a spokesman wrote by email. The campus’s residence halls typically house about 4,000 students, but now just a couple of hundred remain. That means far fewer students are using the dining halls, which employ 100 full-time and 400 part-time student employees.
At Wells College, in New York, work-study students “may still be eligible to work remotely, at the supervisor’s discretion.”
Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, has approved “a limited number of student positions” and will offer a “transitional allowance” of $420 each for work-study students who lose their jobs.
Chloe Jensen, a senior at Mount Holyoke, applied for the stipend. She said her work-study job, as a student assistant in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, had been discontinued. Jensen said she had mostly planned and advertised events. Because the college has moved classes online and sent students home, she said, there are no events for the foreseeable future.
Jensen also worked as an assistant in the college archives, though not through work-study. She said her boss there had tried — without success — to figure out a remote-work arrangement.
“When I heard that we were closing, I was like, I’ve lost both my jobs,” she said. “I just kind of assumed that.”
Jensen said she’s OK for now because her mom has a stable job and can help her out while she’s at home. But she won’t be able to save money to land on her feet after graduation this spring, as she’d planned.
‘One of the Lucky Ones’
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, new guidance states that no students “will be terminated or disciplined if unable to perform duties.” All students who hold work-study and hourly jobs will be paid for the last two weeks of March, during the university’s extended spring break. Work-study students will be paid for 10 hours per week, while others will receive two lump payments of $130 each.
But many student employees in housing and dining learned last week they wouldn’t be able to keep working because the institution had pared down operations in response to the pandemic. Izzy Boudnik, a junior who lost her job at the front desk of a residence hall, is among them. She and other students have petitioned for students to receive the money they would have made this semester.
Administrators haven’t been heartless, Boudnik said. But she doesn’t understand why the university can’t pay student salaries that are already in the budget, from now through final exams: “We’re not asking for anything extra.”
We’re not asking for anything extra.
The university has sent several emails offering a list of financial resources, but many of them are loans that would have to be paid back, she said.
Chelsea Yigan-Kohoe, another junior at Madison, also has a work-study job that can’t be done remotely. As a research-lab technician, she cleans equipment and prepares other materials. On Monday, she said, the university approved her application for an emergency grant from the financial-aid office. The $2,750 she received will cover her rent, utilities, and groceries for three months. So for now, she has some peace of mind.
But she had planned to stay in Madison this summer and keep working at the lab. If the university hasn’t transitioned back to normal operations by then, she doesn’t know what she will do. Her boss at the lab has said she can babysit his children, if she ends up in a pinch. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she said.
Even for students who can work remotely, say as a teaching assistant, the Covid-19 crisis has had a major impact. Abigail Sepich, a junior and a TA at George Washington University, said her workload in an international-business course had doubled because the syllabus had shifted heavily toward assignments that she was responsible for grading — for 130 students. Yet her pay remains the same. She’s also back home in rural Kansas, where the internet isn’t always reliable.
“Online is always more work,” Sepich said.
‘A Financial Dimension’
Some of that wide variation in campus policies stems from the fact that, for some colleges, it might not be financially feasible to continue to pay student workers, especially those who are not part of the work-study program.
Nellis, the Ohio president, said his university was taking a roughly $18-million hit to issue housing and dining refunds to students this spring. “Certainly there’s a financial dimension of this,” he said. Still, he felt it was important to preserve student jobs.
“We feel like we owe this to the students,” Nellis said. “We made a commitment to them, just like they made a commitment to us, through this semester.” Depending on how long remote learning continues, he said, he may re-evaluate Ohio’s plans for student workers this summer and fall.
We feel like we owe this to the students.
Ohio officials are trying to find new assignments for student employees whose jobs don’t translate off campus. Supervisors are getting creative, Nellis said. Students can use their work hours to “learn new processes or procedures that might help them when they do come back to work,” Nellis said.
Students can also conduct virtual campus tours, make calls for the advancement office, or help with the college’s transition to online learning, by either providing technical support or researching other institutions’ approaches.
Vanderbilt University and Texas A&M University at College Station, too, are recruiting student workers to ease the transition to remote learning.
Still, the rapidly evolving situation has left many student workers confused and stressed.
Yigan-Kohoe, the Madison junior who works as a lab technician, said her boss told her this month that she’d be able to keep working even as the university moved most operations online — reduced hours at first, but then more over the following weeks as Covid-19 subsided. That’s no longer the case.
The university’s newly released guidance indicates that she’ll get at least two more paychecks, for the last two weeks of March. But her job remains in limbo. She described her status as: “You’re not unemployed, but we can’t have you in the lab.”
