I wish they'd clear this stuff through me first...

I know I'm not a school VP or director...but it's pretty clear I can do all these jobs. So today our director informed us that the 'Collaboration Council' decided that the new school's work study policy would be to up everyone's pay and increase the maximum hours of work from 20 to 30.

What was the driving force behind this decision? Was there an analysis done with a relation to graduation rates and workstudy hours? Did our school get an increase in federal funding and we had to spend it? Were we underutilizing our current federal allocation? No, no and no. It turns out the Cashiers office wanted to hang onto some people they hired.  Wow...that was dumb. To my director's credit she doesn't agree with the new policy and neither do I. I'm all for getting more money into student's hands...uh...but these are students we are talking about. Students are supposed to graduate. Student's are not supposed to make up your most imporant positions in your office. In fact that thinking discourages the school from graduating anybody it sees a valuable employee.

What boggles my mind is that highly educated / highly paid people made this decision...with no understanding of how incentives work.

No one is going to get any more money. Here is why: We are given an allocation to spend from the Department of Ed (which hasn't increased). That is awarded by our office to eligible students. We offer $5,000 to each student that is eligible. They work to earn up to that amount in an academic year. Done.

Oh, by the way, $5000 is the most any college in the state offers. So if you increase the wage rate and total number of hours a student can work by 50% that $5,000 is just earned at a faster rate. We can't increase the $5000...because we are getting any more from the feds...and there is no talks to increased work study funds for next year either.

I know, I know...easy for me to just criticize so I have crafted my own solution. Hang on it's going to rock: Currently all refund checks as derived from financial aid and tuition credits are sent as a paper checks to the student which require postage and considerable amounts of processing time by the (you guessed it...) Cashiers office. Per my sources (State Higher Ed Dept.) this costs the school a total of $9 per check. Currently our school has 5,523 financial aid recipients...92% of which receive at least one financial aid refund check from disursements made in excess of their tuition. 5523 x .92 = 5081 students. Oh, and this is per term so x 2 is 10162 for a year. 10,162 x $9 = $91,458. While the $9 figure isn't direct dollars, the cost is carried almost entirely by the Cashiers office. Moving to a direct debit system to reduce costs or outsourcing the process entirely would result in savings to the cashiers office directly. My second recommendation would be to close our campus cafeteria which currently operates at a considerable loss. Convert this space and rent it out to a third parties creating a food court which would offer a variety of food services rather than the multitude of egg salad currently being offered. Use this revenue source to bolster the school budget and hire needed staff and let students study so they can get real jobs. I'm just saying is all.

So I'm left with a desicion...work to get out of this line of work and go work with my dad...or continue working on my masters so I can protect the public from decisions like this....or say screw it and play my COD 4 tonite.