Student employment cuts spark frustration

By Skyler O’Kelley

The way the student-worker budget and position cuts were handled left me with a few grievances. While trying to make sense of the situation, I reached out to friends and strangers alike to get their opinions. Here are some of our thoughts on the matter.

My first issue comes from the timeline. Many of the people I talked to received word that the budget to pay student workers was being cut, or they lost their jobs mere days before the fall 2025 semester started. Senior acting for film, television and theatre major Chloé Le Breton said, “I was upset because it was very, very soon before school started, it was like days before.” For me, I had to actively reach out after classes started to figure out why I had not heard anything. There was a very limited amount of time for people to find new jobs, regardless of when they heard the news.

This leads me to my second issue, the lack of communication. There was no email from the powers that should have told us that things were changing. If we had heard as soon as the decision was made, even a little warning along the lines of “Hey, our budget is changing and it could impact student workers’ jobs, just a heads up” would have been better than the silence we received instead. We would have been able to start looking for jobs before the semester began, so we could work around our classes. Understandably, things are chaotic during this important restructuring of the university, but leaving students in the dark does not encourage us to support the new leadership. It has fostered mistrust, for if we could not even be told that our jobs were on the line, what comes next?

My final concern comes with the aftermath. Now that the damage is done, many of us are struggling to find a job. And yet, there seems to be a low supply of paying jobs on campus. Now, yes, we could go off campus to find a job, but not everyone has a convenient means of transportation. Taking an Uber back and forth between work and school would add up, diminishing the power of a job. Selah Johnson, a junior pursuing a degree in elementary education, said her only option is to work on campus, yet her experience with applying for jobs has been tumultuous. She said, “When I was looking for a job, I kept applying and I kept getting an email back that they couldn’t accept me, and I was like, ‘wow, I see a lot of people working, why can’t I work?’” 

As for what is on campus, it is not much. People are looking on Handshake, Rider’s student career management platform, but many of the jobs are expired listings or have qualifications that some cannot fill. Even what the student job fair offered was minimal in terms of open positions. Senior accounting major Asia Adkison attended one job fair and said, “It was really pitiful … Out of 15 tables, five or six were informational … [the other] half was for the federal work study. If you don’t have federal work study, then you’re completely screwed.” 

If you are a senior trying to save money for after graduation or for graduate school? Forget it. Who would want to spend their time training someone new, just for them to be gone in a few months? Better to invest in those who will stick around for a long time. 

Overall, the lack of warning, communication and lack of new opportunities has left me and many others feeling frustrated with the university for this sudden decision. In the words of senior environmental science major Alexis Burns, the way this situation was handled “showed that I cannot rely on this campus.” The situation could have been handled differently; even minimal effort would have been better than this silence.

Skyler O’Kelley is a senior acting for film, television and theatre major