Skip to content Skip to navigation
Vassar
Skip to global navigation Menu
Student Employment

Vassar College

Opportunity to Improve the Student Employment Experience

posted

Dear Student Employees,

This past Friday, the Working Students’ Coalition (WSC) student org delivered a petition regarding improvements to the student employment system. Vassar administrators have met from time to time with members of both VSA’s Student Financial Affairs Committee (SFAC) and WSC, and we expect to meet with WSC members again soon to learn more about the petition and their experiences with student employment.  We appreciate their advocacy and the engagement of so many students in this important conversation.  

Vassar’s established channel for providing input and reviewing and prioritizing proposed initiatives related to student employment is the Student Employment Advisory Group (SEAG), which includes student employees, supervisors, and representatives from student-facing offices. The group, which will be meeting again soon, prioritized several improvements that were implemented last year, last year, including:

  • Students may work up to 120 hours per semester, eliminating the weekly earnings cap and making employment opportunities more equitable.
  • Students, including those without work study, can now be rehired into the same job and start during the 30-day waiting period, improving job transparency.

These measures have already had a positive impact, resulting in a doubling of the number of students who were able to earn their full Work Study allotment. We intend to continue to increase that number as aggressively as possible.

Building on that progress, we have identified several new priorities, through dialogue with the VSA this past Thursday, including:

  • Transitioning away from the JobX hiring platform, with a target implementation of a new system by 2027
  • Better access to employment opportunities for work-study students, and exploring a slotting system to support this
  • Increasing awareness across campus of the standing legal requirement that all student employees be paid for any hours worked, including during summer training periods
  • Increasing communication about recent policy changes, including removal of the weekly earnings cap
  • Deepening efforts to eliminate inactive or misleading job postings ("ghost jobs") by working with supervisors to ensure listings accurately reflect available opportunities

We also are seeking to increase student participation in the SEAG and will set a regular and more frequent meeting cadence that works for SEAG participants. We believe this will strengthen the group's ability to surface concerns and shape improvements to the student employment experience.

We will discuss these updates, along with continued discussion of student wages and any new feedback, at the upcoming Student Employment Advisory Group meeting. Student employees may indicate interest in participating and/or propose agenda items by submitting this form.

Thank you for your continued contributions to Vassar’s campus community through your work.