Wages for students working on Emporia State’s campus have increased this semester to $10 an hour. This change was implemented by Associated Student Government (ASG) president Bella Price and vice president Hailey Kisner and university president Ken Hush.
ASG announced all undergraduate and graduate student employee positions will increase to an hourly pay of at least $10, in an email sent to campus on Aug. 1. This decision was made to alleviate students’ struggles to meet basic needs and compete with wages within the community, according to Price.
Price said the idea started within ASG after evaluating their budget. She wanted to ensure her staff was being paid fairly. From there, Price and Kisner began looking at wages for all students working on campus.
Price said she then began to evaluate wages within the community and found that most were more hourly than the campus minimum wage of $7.55. Additionally, not all students have access to a car for transportation, according to Price.
“All that to say, we needed student wages on campus not only to be competitive with the community, but also to be able to allow students to live off of them, or at least function basically off of them,” Price said.
When the idea was presented to Hush, Price said Hush was almost immediately on board with the idea.
“It was kind of amazing,” Price said. “He took the idea and was like, ‘The next time we meet, come to me with this again, and we’re going to discuss it further.’ So the next time we met, which was the next month, he basically said, ‘This sounds perfect.’”
Price says despite the Basic Needs Coalition existing on campus, students should not be relying on the program to live comfortably.
The Basic Needs Coalition (BNC) was created in 2020 by former university president Allison Garrett in response to multiple surveys conducted on campus in the fall of 2019 regarding basic needs insecurities among ESU students. The BNC offers a wide variety of services for students to meet basic needs such as Corky’s Cupboard, ESU’s on-campus food pantry for students located in the Memorial Union.
Price says that it is now up to individual departments to decide if wages should be raised for individual students.
“I like to think of what we did as kind of setting a minimum wage for the university, you know, how we have a federal minimum wage of $7.25,” Price said. “Not the best, but you know, I think it is now up to the departments to look at their graduate students and look at their undergraduate student workers and decide the value of the work each of them is doing. And maybe decide for themselves how they’re going to pay that or compensate for the work that’s being done.”
Graduate teaching assistant (GTA) Brandon Franta says he’s grateful for the pay bump, but it could be more.
“As a graduate teaching assistant, we’re basically doing a lot of the same tasks and jobs as professors are doing and they’re getting paid at a way higher rate than we are,” Franta said. “I think we should definitely be getting paid more. Definitely not to the level of a professor but there should definitely be a difference there.”
To help save up money for rent, bills and school supplies, Franta says he worked a job over the summer and works for Instacart delivering groceries during breaks.
Despite only being paid for 20 hours per week, Franta says some weeks he can put in as much as 25 hours at his position as a GTA.
Students, however, are only allowed to work at a maximum of 20 hours per week during the academic year, according to the student employment guidelines found on ESU’s website.
“I knew what I was getting myself into,” Franta said. “And it’s very well known that we don’t get paid well. It’s kind of frustrating in the moment, but also you hope, because you’re getting your masters, you’re gaining all these skills, experience teaching and whatnot, that you’ll get to a position that you want to be in happy with. It’d be more competitive down the road.”
