To comply with the University of New Hampshire (USNH) system, students who received bi-weekly stipends for on-campus jobs will now receive half their pay at the midpoint of the semester and the other half at the end.
“We were asked last spring to begin looking at how we could move stipends from being processed through payroll, which processes our employees payments, to accounts payable,” Director of Student Involvement Jess Gagne Cloutier said. “It is a cumbersome process because we’ve been using the payroll system for so long.”
Gagne Cloutier said the change was brought upon halfway through the academic year because Student Involvement, “Had to look through some historical data documents to make sure that as we made that change, we could do it in a way that aligned with the organizations’ constitutions.”
According to Gagne Cloutier, the difference in taxes with the new stipends are, “payroll is taxed as you’re paid and stipend is taxed after the fact. So students will have to report that income on their future taxes versus historically those taxes had already been pulled as appropriate based on their paperwork.”
She added, “It’s not saving us any dollars as far as the cost of the stipend or the lever that goes into it on our end, you’re getting the same amount, just taxed differently.”
Even though students will still receive the same amount in total with the new stipend change, students still find the change as a whole inconvenient.
“We still have eboard members that rely on that [bi-weekly] money to be able to get groceries or buy themselves food,” WKNH Event Coordinator Ryan Stone said. “It was a little disappointing honestly … It’s not affecting anyone on the administrative side, they’re not losing money, it’s only affecting the student employees.”
Stone said she wished there would be a way for the organizations affected to figure out a student-hourly system as opposed to stipends.
“I wish there was a way for us to get hourly instead of having to accept it,” Stone said. “We’re required to do eight hours a week of office hours and our [General Manager] and [Assistant General Manager] are required to do 10 hours a week. That’s a lot of time commitment for 40 to 50 dollars a week.”
Stone said it has already been difficult to keep members on the WKNH eboard due to the low pay, which is now exacerbated by the inconvenience of the stipend change.
“Without everyone’s participation, we can not run this radio station, we have a lot of legal stuff that we have to keep up with,” Stone said. “… One of the main reasons why everyone quits was the pay and the time commitment did not balance out the pay, it just doesn’t feel right because it makes people not want to work as hard.”
Another organization that was affected by the stipend change was the Film Society.
“I’m sad about it honestly because it’s a check I look forward to every other week because I don’t work a lot of hours a week at my on campus job, so it was money I knew I could count on,” said Film Society Secretary Mariah Rodriguez-Costa.
Rodriguez-Costa said the stipend change has members of the Film Society eboard having to pick up another on-campus.
“One of my friends on eboard is looking into another on-campus job because of [the change],” Rodriguez-Costa said. “I know another person on eboard is upset because it’s also money that they were looking forward to every other week, especially since some jobs you only work three hours a week and five hours for others.”
She added, “I wish that they waited until the school year was over and not the spring semester, but I hope it was worth it.”
Nicole Dumont can be contacted at
ndumont@kscequinox.com
