What people are getting paid on The Bluff is a hot button issue this year. Professors say they don’t get paid enough. Many UP staff also feel they are underpaid. But what about students? In particular, student leadership stipends in government and media?
Stipended positions can be a tricky line to walk. When students aren’t clocking in every day, a stipended position could be a sweet deal, or it could be a job paying well below the minimum wage.
While many students working these stipended job may feel they aren’t making enough, comparably, some believe that certain positions may be getting paid too much.
Each member of the ASUP Executive Board makes $6,000 a year. In comparison, KDUP general manager and The Log editor-in-chief make $4,000 a year. That’s a 34 percent decrease in wage for jobs that could presumably warrant the same amount of hours.
An executive board stipend is unmatched by any other stipend on campus. Even The Beacon’s editor-in-chief, who manages a staff of 30 and oversees daily content read by thousands of readers at UP and beyond, makes $5,150 — a wage still 15 percent less than any member of the board.
Yet for current ASUP Secretary Joseph Rojo, it’s not only the hours that matter.
“You’re seen a lot and you kind of get thrusted into that public spotlight,” Rojo said. “You get paid the most not necessarily because there’s more to do but because you get put in that position where you can no longer separate yourself from the role.”
Senate decides the stipends for both ASUP Executive Board and positions on Campus Program Board (CPB). Executive Board stipends took up a little under 30 percent of the ASUP upper budget (ASUP budget excluding funding for clubs and student organizations) this semester.
According to student activities director Jeromy Koffler, Senate has allowed these Executive Board stipends to remain high for two reasons: to attract the best students on campus to apply and to reflect the weight of responsibility each job holds.
“We’re asking them to be the people that represent the entire student body to the administration to the faculty to all students,” Koffler said. “If we’re going to have that level of responsibility then (Executive Board stipends) should be differentiated between what a regular student worker would make.”
Former ASUP President Khalid Osman, questions the influence Executive Board actually has on the student body. During his time in office, Osman said his hour to dollar ratio fell far below Oregon’s minimum wage. Yet he still feels that Executive Board’s highest paid stipends do not reflect the lack of impact the board has on campus.
Osman presented the question: Are the Executive Board members the ones making a change on campus or are the clubs and senators — unpaid positions — the ones that are having a direct impact on the student body?
“If it’s something like increasing mental health awareness on campus, it’s the clubs that do that. It’s not Executive Board,” Osman said. “(Executive Board) empowers people, but I don’t think we roll up our sleeves and get down and do the grit to actually accomplish those goals.”
The former president, a senior, said he has always found it strange that Executive Board gets paid the same across the board. For Osman, “It doesn’t create any accountability. When everyone’s equal, it’s hard to get things done.”
Now that roles have been updated based on the recently-passed revised ASUP constitution, Osman sees it as the perfect time for Senate to lower certain stipends, create a greater level of hierarchy on the board and leave room to pay the newly-added Speaker of the Senate position.
“You’re talking about a vice president whose role just got cut in half; they’re not president of the Senate anymore,” Osman said. “I think they should look at what five people are getting paid and restructure that to pay six. They won’t like me for saying that, but that’s the truth.”
While Executive Board stipends are paid for with student government fees, each student media organization —The Beacon, The Log and KDUP — is allotted a budget from the University through student activities.
According to Koffler, stipends for big leadership roles like editor-in-chief of The Beacon and The Log or General Manager of KDUP tend to stay consistent from year to year in order to create an incentive for students in lower positions to work their way up.
According to The Log editor-in-chief Tori Dunlap, the yearbook has been looking into getting rid of the stipend system.
Dunlap said that she has run into problems with certain yearbook staff members not doing their fair share of the work but still receiving their full payment. Dunlap and her adviser, Rachel Mills, have apparently spoken with Koffler about implementing a “pay to play” system in which staff members get paid when they turn in their work.
The strongest drawback to the stipend system for student leadership may be the hardship it presses on students who have to work to support themselves or try to pay off student loans while still in school.
A $6,000 stipend might make a small dent in a student’s tuition costs, but other positions within student media and leadership get paid as low as $1,000 a year.
Students paying their way through UP may have to forgo the valuable resume-building, quasi-professional experience of a stipend job for something more mundane but lucrative.
“There have been students who have had to quit because they’ve had to take an hourly position at Starbucks,” Nancy Copic, assistant director of student media, said. “One time we had a student who wasn’t doing his job very well and it turned out he had been working at UPS on the graveyard shift five nights a week in addition to doing his Beacon job.”
While Copic wishes she could pay her staffers more, ultimately she’s grateful she gets to pay them at all. She pointed out that a few colleges don’t offer any type of payment for student media.
Even on UP’s campus, there are unpaid positions that many argue warrant a stipend including ASUP senators.
CPB director Sammy van den Berg believes that raising stipends or providing any type of senator stipend is unlikely after a year in which Senate has had internal issues and has passed zero resolutions. However, she finds this to be a real shame.
“I know there are people that wish they could do Senate, but they need to work at The Commons instead because they need the money,” van den Berg said. “I love student leadership so much and that just breaks my heart that that has to be a deciding factor for people.”
For KDUP General Manager Jack Greenwood, the stipend system points to a greater problem within the administration.
While Greenwood admits that he is envious of the higher pay on ASUP Executive Board, he thinks that leaders in all student-run organizations would be better off working together.
“Overall, the focus should be less on interorganizational competition, less comparative bickering and more of a large scale picture on student employment and “Is it fair what students are getting out of what they’re putting in?” Greenwood said.
Rachel Rippetoe is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at rippetoe18@up.edu.
