Unions and Students

Many of us worked to help pay our way through college, and if we were lucky, we were hired to do that work on our campus. Some jobs were simple, such as covering a reception desk while doing homework. Other jobs could have felt diminishing—like those in which students were visibly serving food to wealthier fellow students. Others of us were lucky enough to receive truly meaningful training, the chance to shadow an administrator, mentor fellow students, or work closely with faculty on their research. As graduate students, we were hired to teach in the classroom, enabling us to learn by doing.

Today there is a wave of unionization of student workers, those who hold part-time employment while going to school.¹ Thousands of students, including undergraduate resident assistants, are now engaged in a growing national movement for better wages and working conditions.² Harvard’s non-academic undergraduate student workers voted to unionize in October 2023.³ Student workers at the University of Oregon did, too.⁴ In February 2024, nearly 20,000 students in the California State University system voted to unionize, creating one of the largest student unions in the country.⁵

Unions have found fertile ground on our campuses as higher education has become one of the industries that have seen the largest increase in organized labor over the past several years.⁶ Those unions grew from organized maintenance and clerical workers to an increasing number of faculty unions (often divided by various status or sometimes trying to straddle the differences).

Now we negotiate with unions of our own students, especially graduate students eager to mirror the professional norms of the full-time profession to which many aspire. We even see a growing number of unions of undergraduate students who work in the residence halls to do peer mentoring and programming and to be on call in case of emergency. Thirty new student bargaining units were established between January 2022 and June 2023.⁷

How should universities respond? Especially for those of us who worked our own way through school, it can be difficult to understand the demand from students that we support them with “living wages” for part-time work. But we should remember that students face a far more treacherous landscape than we did. Most students and their families worry about how to pay for college in the face of inflation and rising tuition costs.⁸

In many countries overseas with which we compete in the global economy, young people go to colleges supported primarily with taxpayer dollars, able to comfortably pursue an education without scrambling for basic support or piling on unsustainable debt. Many of us went to college in this country with similar support, attending state institutions or private schools, using the GI Bill or what were then far more robust Pell grants. Our students face much harder terrain.

Public investments have waned significantly, both direct and through financial aid, and none but the wealthiest of institutions can afford to make up the difference. Colleges and universities face agonizing choices about how to bridge the gap between the excellence our students deserve and the price they can afford. Should they focus on scaling the cheapest model? Or rely on the value of that degree to be worth the resulting debt?

Students understandably direct their anxiety and anger at this situation at their own universities. While we see our endowments as puny compared to our wealthiest peers, students see vast untapped resources. They do not understand the accumulation of endowments to fund operations or the limitations on donor-restricted funds.

We have work to do to explain.

First, we need to correct the impression that we hire our own students to save money. Every institution in which I have worked paid students market wages or above—hiring students to provide them convenient and sometimes very meaningful work. At Fordham, we spend millions more on resident advisor programs than we would in hiring full-time staff that could cover the same work. We pay graduate students the same (and often more) to teach courses than we would spend to hire far more experienced lecturers who already have their graduate degrees.

Some of this impression also comes from the ways we pay students in kind (and tax-free). Resident advisors often earn housing, meals, and sometimes tuition credits. To students, that dorm room feels free to us rather than foregone income. To graduate students, the full scholarship they receive on top of their wages seems without cost. But of course, running a graduate program costs plenty. We need to articulate that better.

And we need to look for the underlying causes of pain. For example, higher education creates incentive structures for graduate programs that fuel an institution’s research prestige, even while producing far more doctoral graduates than the teaching market can support. We have moral obligations to pay more attention to the balance. The solution is not to lure students into graduate programs by paying them more to be students than they can earn thereafter. As with undergraduate students, we should provide timely advising about career pathways and embed valuable skills in programs of study.

Most of all, we need our communities to understand that a demand to spend more on any particular cause equates to a demand to cut elsewhere or to raise tuition further. This requires a far broader effort at real transparency around budgets, taking the time to explain the sources of our revenue and how we spend it. It also means visible efficiency and care with tuition dollars, avoiding the waste that makes every group call the bluff of constrained resources.

Institutions face tricky choices about whether to speak out about the realities above or leave negotiations at the table. I believe we should do more to explain ourselves, and to make clear that the question isn’t what students deserve but rather who can and should pay for it. We need to join forces and solve the affordability crisis, not render meaningful student employment an economic impossibility.

Tania Tetlow is president of Fordham University.