Campus leaders are insisting that although budget cuts will affect students, they will not necessarily take away their campus jobs.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on Sept. 12, saying budget cuts Gov. Walker signed into law for the University of Wisconsin System earlier this year could affect student jobs on different UW campuses.
But some department heads at UW said they have no plans to make cuts that would affect undergraduate student jobs. Nancy Westphal-Johnson, senior associate dean for administration and undergraduate education, said student job wages make up a small portion of individual departments’ expenses.
“We don’t anticipate that there would be cuts to the student hourly budget per se,” Westphal-Johnson, said. “Student hourly budgets are not usually a huge part of a department’s budget.”
Departments decide for themselves how they want to spend their funding — and therefore where they will make cuts, according to Westphal-Johnson. The biggest part of a department’s budget, she said, are faculty and other staff.
Westphal-Johnson said Letters and Science will be making their budget cuts more centrally this year, and departments are making individual plans for next year.
The departments employing the most undergraduate and graduate students are student academic affairs, chemistry, computer sciences and School of Music and physics, Westphal-Johnson said
Students might notice the effects of cuts more in departments heavy on research. Faculty that head research labs where students work for credit — or possibly get paid — could be cut, which is what happened in the chemistry department, Matt Sanders, the department’s executive director, said.
Sanders said the department lost faculty positions because of the budget cuts, and this accommodated for the majority of the budget cuts the department was required to make.
Though budget cuts affect graduate students more than than undergraduates, he said students who were taking research credits with a faculty member who was forced to leave would no longer be able to pursue that opportunity.
“We’ve been damaged,” Sanders said. “We’ve been hurt by budget cuts. Any future budget cuts would be significant in what we can offer to our students in classes, but also in terms of jobs.”
Mark Hill, chair of the Computer Sciences Department, said while not many student jobs will be affected, the cuts the department has to make will hurt students overall.
Hill said some undergraduate students work in their computer systems lab, so cuts the department has to make this fall might affect the number of students they can hire.
“I think the important effect [of budget cuts] is that our major, … or even taking a class in computer science, is valuable to people’s 21st century skills,” Hill said. “It would be great if more resources could come our way, but obviously it’s very difficult with budget cuts.”
Outside academic jobs, other positions on campus are being cut for reasons unrelated to the budget cuts.
Memorial Union began the final phases of its construction earlier this summer, and all except the west wing of the building has been closed to the public since Sept. 1, according to the reinvestment website.
Many undergraduate students who held positions at the Union— like Der Rathskeller — were not able to come back to those jobs because of the renovations.
Stephanie Webendorfer, spokesperson for Memorial Union, said they offered students positions at other markets and cafes at Union South or other campus buildings, but some students did not accept because of location. She said she does not know the exact number of jobs that were cut because of the Union’s construction.
As of the beginning of September, Webendorfer said the Union employs 1,500 students, with an average wage of $9.25 per hour.
Parts of the Union will re-open on a rolling basis, Webendorfer said.
Brendon Dybdahl, spokesperson for Division of University Housing, said students play essential roles in all campus programs.
“The student employees that we have are really crucial to operation,” Dybdahl said. “It’s a staffing level that we kind of need to maintain in order to operate the way that our customers and our residents require us to.”
