Budget cuts hit student employment

By Cal Sutton

Many student worker positions have been eliminated since supervisors found out about universitywide budget cuts early in the summer.

The Rider community was recently informed of the large debt the university has accumulated in a Sept. 19 universitywide email from Rider President John Loyack. In the email, Loyack said Rider is facing “a severe cash deficit … that, if left unaddressed, would jeopardize our ability to meet core financial obligations later this fiscal year.”

In recent semesters, there have been multiple faculty and staff layoffs throughout the university, such as Heeyoung Kim, former chief diversity officer, director of the Teaching and Learning Center and dean of libraries and Kim Barberich, director of the Gail Bierenbaum Leadership Council and assistant vice president of Career Development, Engaged Learning and Leadership.

Alongside these faculty and staff layoffs, there have been budget cuts that have impacted student workers campuswide.

Sophia Fleischer, a senior behavioral neuroscience major, has been a student worker with the Academic Success Center since spring 2024.

Fleischer is currently a content tutor for various courses. She previously was a supplemental instructor for sociological imagination but that position was cut.

“This semester, there was just no funding for me to be the SI. … So I don’t have set hours every week,” Fleischer said.

Students who were previously SI for courses do not get steady hours or pay in the same ways they used to.

While student workers in the ASC previously had opportunities for logging timesheets with consistent hours each week, students with on-campus jobs like Fleischer who now only tutor for classes by requested sessions could potentially only be paid for one hour a week, if at all.

Director of Academic Tutoring Shane Conto is also the budget manager for the Academic Success Center and had to adjust student workers’ positions over the summer.

Adjusting the general functions of the ASC, their embedded tutors and SI were a conversation in the  works between Conto and Provost Kelly Bidle, he said.

“We wanted to start moving away from having mandatory supports put on the schedules of most students,” Conto said.

Attendance to sessions by embedded tutors and SI has not been high in recent years, even though the sessions were mandatory, so the ASC decided to make an attempt to restructure and eliminate those sessions.

While the restructuring of the ASC benefits the students, of which some had to have up to three hours of mandatory tutoring or instruction sessions, the cut in SI and embedded tutor sessions have drastically reduced the amount of money student workers in the ASC make.

In a March 2025 interview with The Rider News, Conto said, “It’s an important thing to make sure that we’re finding that balance between using the money appropriately that’s been entrusted to us … and getting support to our students.”

During this time, the ASC was not directly impacted by budget cuts. Instead, the organization was attempting to budget wisely.

The ASC was not the only on-campus student employment that was impacted by budget cuts, leading to the elimination of jobs in different niches around the university.

Starting this year, budget cuts are the cause of changes in student workers’ positions.

The Eco Reps, a paid position supervised by Director of Sustainability Melissa Greenberg, was also cut by the university.

While Greenberg declined to be interviewed, in an email to The Rider News she stated, “The university is struggling financially and so there have been several positions eliminated, including student positions. The Eco-Reps fell into this area. It’s unfortunate and I was very sad about it at first, but I am hopeful that when things get better, this position will return. In the meantime, the Green Team club carries on.”

Another position that has been cut and is no longer accepting applications are Residence Life’s Office Assistants.

Along with the cut of student employment around campus, faculty advisers of paid on-campus positions were encouraged to prioritize the hiring of students in the Federal Work Study program, according to a Sept. 23 faculty and staffwide email.

The concentration on hiring Federal Work Study students also impacts students who were not deemed eligible for the program, since that puts students on Federal Work Study funding at more of an advantage than others who were not eligible for the program.

Now, faculty advisers for on-campus positions have the ability to look up students by their name or Bronc ID, which will now disclose if a student is on Federal Work Study funding or not.

Whether the various impacts from budget cuts are in the form of receiving less hours of work or a job loss in its entirety, on-campus workers have been enduring a lot of change with the new semester.