After surveying over two hundred students, the Wage Review Board has made its final recommendations to Senate. We recommend that Senate almost double the amount of money it spends each semester on monthly stipends for student body positions.
Read the Wage Review Board’s full recommendations here: http://tinyurl.com/WRBrec
After issuing a pre-survey survey to the student body over winter break, we identified two primary obstacles that discourage students from applying for student body positions: low pay and difficulty holding another job concurrently. We seek in our recommendations to remedy these difficulties while focusing on those positions for which equal representation is most important.
To this end, we advocate two primary changes to student body position wages as a whole: a significant increase in monthly stipends to make certain positions more financially competitive, and the creation of a need-based grant system to ensure that these positions are accessible to everyone. Recognizing that implementing a need-based grant system may pose so many logistical challenges as to not be sustainable in the long run, we have also recommended an alternative option that uses the money that would go toward grants to simply increase the monthly stipends of key positions instead.
The need-based grant system would increase the amount of money Senate spends on base stipends from $30,000 to $40,000 a semester and also add an additional $15,000 in need-based grant awards, totaling $55,000 a semester in total wage spending. Our second option simply increases Senate’s total spending on stipends to $55,000 a semester while focusing on making those positions that are grant-eligible under the grant system (i.e. important student governance roles) financially accessible.
Increased wage spending could be paid for both from the increased student body fee revenue after the recent student body fee increase of $20 per semester and from the increased interest generated by the student body endowment, which recently ballooned from $300,000 to $500,000 after the Treasury consolidated available funds. Assuming 5 percent interest annually, the enlarged endowment generates an additional $10,000 each year. With increased semesterly revenue totaling $33,000 — $28,000 from increased student body fee revenue and $5,000 from increased endowment interest — our recommended wage spending increase of $25,000 a semester would leave an additional $7,000 per semester available. If Senate adjusted semesterly grant spending downward to $10,000 for the first year of the grant program, it would have an additional $12,000 per semester available instead of $7,000 per semester.
We also recommend that Senate and the Treasury create an educational booklet and SIN page explaining the student body position wage structure to the student body. If Senate chooses to create a need-based grant system, this booklet would be a good place to outline how it works. Current wage data is not readily available, and we had to go to the Treasury and Appointments Committee Chair in order to obtain monthly stipend information. This data should be easily accessible to all students on SIN.
The current student body position wage structure is “need-blind” in that it is completely blind to the financial needs of the student body.
We believe that higher wages, whether in the form of grants or increased stipends or both, are necessary to ensure that student body positions are a realistic option for a majority of students. Raising student body wages and creating a need-based grant system as we have recommended would make student body positions more accessible to the 40 percent of non-position holder respondents who said in our survey that they considered running or applying for a student body position but chose not to for financial reasons. This would broaden the pool of applicants and candidates for each position and afford students who hold those positions more time to focus on their work for the student body.
Student body wages are intimately linked to student participation in student body governance, and thus intimately linked to student body autonomy. While this relationship is impossible to fully quantify, it should be taken seriously. Reedies participate in student body governance by right, not by privilege. Senate should implement the recommendations outlined above in order to guarantee that student body positions are accessible as such. While our recommendations would constitute the most significant change that the student body wage structure has ever seen, we offer two final points for consideration. One: Changes to student body wages are not set in stone. And two: Our recommended adjustment is large because the current system is unfair.