With housing, food and financial insecurity plaguing the university, a growing number of students are seeking part-time employment while they continue their education. The University of California Riverside’s (UCR) Department of Residential Education (ResEd), offers part-time positions as a solution to these issues, but at the hidden cost of students’ mental and physical well-being.
For those unfamiliar with UCR’s Housing, ResEd oversees the experiential and educational aspects of on-campus living. This includes policy enforcement, event programming, incident response, community building and more.
Entry-level positions with ResEd come in two main positions. The first position is Resident Advisors (RAs), who focus on the needs of their assigned residents and conduct administrative tasks, including roommate agreements, check-ins and crisis management. Secondly, there are Program Advisors, who primarily design events and initiatives to serve those living on campus. Both of these positions compensate students with a living space in an assigned residential community, a meal plan and a biweekly stipend of $50.
Though the job descriptions seem reasonable and the compensation appears to fulfill a student’s basic needs, ResEd student staff tend to find themselves overworked, underpaid and stuck in a vicious re-hiring cycle with little job security or stability. ResEd preys on students experiencing housing, food and financial insecurity, creating a dependency on the department with no assurance of re-hiring the following year.
Student leadership with ResEd presents itself as a high-commitment but high-value employment opportunity due to the enticing incentive of free on-campus housing and meals. However, the steep physical and mental health costs of ResEd’s overwhelming job expectations greatly outweigh these benefits.
For RAs, these easily overlooked expectations include “regularly scheduled duty shifts.” Duty involves 13 or 24-hour overnight shifts for weekdays, weekends and holidays respectively, where on-call RAs must respond to resident issues, including lockouts, noise complaints and other policy violations. The shifts vary from night to night, and while staff members may sleep or do homework while on duty, they are required to stay on campus and respond to all situations.
In my experience, this means that neither sleep nor productivity is a guarantee. This responsibility is on top of event planning, designing bulletin boards, weekly staff meetings and 50-90 resident check-ins throughout the quarter.
The student staff contract stipulates four weeks of summer training at 40 hours per week, including in-person training from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., then online asynchronous training. This format overwhelms student leaders with information and is too general to sufficiently prepare them to begin work as specific responsibilities and details vary from community to community, such as in Lothian or Dundee. Due to the style of compensation, the four 40-plus hour workweeks result in a total pay of $100, which is a clear abuse of our time and energy as part-time workers.
During the school year, entry-level student staff positions average around 20 hours per week. As such, the compensation for room and board seems more reasonable during the year, but these benefits are still deceptively valued and inadequate, and the lack of additional benefits means that workers continue to face financial and housing instability.
Firstly, the provision of housing is not equivalent to living in a dorm or apartment as a regular resident and should not be valued as such. Staff members live where they work — meaning that even just returning home can mean interacting with residents, posting or removing flyers and keeping an eye open for policy violations.
Secondly, the meal plan barely provides enough meals for each quarter. Staff members are compensated with the Staff 120 Meal Plan, consisting of 120 meal swipes, 150 dining dollars and four guest swipes. Since quarters consist of 10 weeks of instruction and a finals week, eating two meals a day adds up to 154 total meals per quarter.
Using all meal swipes and guest swipes leaves 30 meals unaccounted for. If you were to only use the remainder of your meal plan as the contract suggests, this would mean spending $5 a meal in dining dollars — a near-impossible find at on-campus dining locations.
On top of that, the position’s minuscule stipend results in a lack of economic mobility for students. Should student leaders wish to leave the department rather than be re-hired, effort must be made to find housing and another job. The re-hiring process may also not even afford student workers the luxury of choosing not to return.
Stability is a large factor for ResEd student staff. The promise of free food and housing for a few years, provided you get re-hired, almost seems too good to be true. Unfortunately, a combination of restrictive application processes and counter-intuitive departmental expectations result in a stark lack of job security.
In the past, applications for re-hire have been an open-ended portfolio to demonstrate your experiences. More recently, however, re-hire applications for ResEd positions have been points-based written applications with stricter questions and hidden rubrics. However, these systems don’t always accurately reflect a student leader’s ability for the job. As a result, ResEd’s hiring process lacks nuance and flexibility, in favor of standardization.
Moreover, ResEd’s re-hiring process this past year has favored those with areas for growth, rather than for excellent job performance. Ultimately, this means even the highest-performing candidates aren’t guaranteed re-appointment and must instead demonstrate they can still develop professionally from returning to their current position. Otherwise, they must adapt to new positions or will be rejected entirely. Thus, ResEd fails to provide residents with the most adequately equipped role models while punishing those who do well in their positions.
Given the current state of UCR’s ResEd, it’s difficult to recommend anyone to serve as a student staff member. Although you get free room and board for a year, some professional development and community-building experience, none of these benefits are worth the cost of your mental and physical health.
With a fuller understanding of the costs and benefits of ResEd, finding different employment may be more rewarding and worthwhile. Being intentional about your interests and educational goals while factoring in your time and health is critical to making the most of your time here at university.
After all, what good is work if it’s not work worth doing?
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