We all know the broke college student stereotypes; living day to day on cup noodles and instant rice, drinking dollar coffee to stay up late completing papers and barely making ends meet to pay rent or tuition. This is a picture many are used to living, and while work at any retail or fast-food place is often at the ready, it can get extremely difficult balancing enough hours at work to make a living wage and giving oneself enough time to focus on school.
This is where university jobs come in. To many, working at the very university they live or go to school at proves the solution to balancing work and school life. Employers on campus are aware of the demands full time students have and are often understanding of how they schedule student’s hours and their workload. Working on campus also sometimes gives students the opportunity to work in the very field they’re studying to be in, or something adjacent, something that is often hard to find outside the academic walls of the campus.
While jobs on campus provide all these benefits and experiences that are hard to find elsewhere, there is one glaring setback that often stops students from applying: the amount they will get paid.
It unfortunately comes as no surprise that student employees often get the short end of the stick when it comes to how much they are paid. While payment issues differ from department to department, it’s still something that is seen across the board. As someone who has worked in different departments since I began attending NSU, it’s disheartening to see how much budget cuts have affected the various offices that reside within the university. Just a mere four years ago for example, Student Media was known to be one of the highest paying in NSU. Today, a combination of budget cuts and minimum wage increase has reduced it to one of the lowest paying departments on campus. As a full-time student with my own financial setbacks, this has been detrimental to how I manage work and school, taking on another job outside of campus to help the wage gap. It’s not something I would have considered, or would even recommend, if student employment were not as low paying as it is today.
Each student has their own reasons for why school is difficult to pay for. While these reasons vary in severity, no student should put their academic success on the line simply because they must work long hours or multiple jobs in order to pay rent, tuition or simply have a living wage. Campus employment should be there to assist students and offer them better alternatives for work, not give them added stress of not being paid enough. With minimum wage increasing not only in the state of Florida but throughout the country, I have hope for the future of student employment.
