Student supervisors at Augustana College can expect to see an increase in their hourly wages, beginning in their April 14 paychecks. On Thursday Feb. 9, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Administration Kirk Anderson sent out an email alerting the student body of the $1.25 wage increase. This will bring the wage to $11 per hour.

The decision to increase the wage was made during J-Term, weeks before the campus was notified. However, the question of who exactly will be seeing that increase still remains. 

“What we’ve communicated already is that the focus will be around positions that have supervisory roles and also jobs that have specific skill traits affiliated with those,” Anderson said. “I won’t go any deeper at this point in time because work is going on that is related to that.”

In order for the decision to be made, Anderson and his team are working closely with people in CORE to determine the criteria a job needs to meet to qualify for the increase. The goal, according to Anderson, is to distribute the money that is available as fairly and among as many students as possible. 

While the raise does not make Augustana wages equivalent to Illinois minimum wage, it is an increase that Anderson hopes will allow students more financial ease in attending the college. With tuition increases on top of an already high ticket price, many students and families are struggling to pay. Augustana prides itself on making tuition as affordable as possible and hopes to continue that through various forms of aid, including the wage increase.

“I hope it just makes it that much easier for students to attend the college,” Anderson said. “We view the student wage portion of [affordability] as being just that something a little extra that maybe provides a student to pay for whatever it is that makes their pathway maybe a little bit easier and that pathway is going to be different for many people.”

An increase of $1.25 per hour, while more than the raise of $0.50 per hour in Nov. 2022, is still less than many students have openly expressed the desire for. With wage increase comes the possibility of further expenses to students, and this raise is expected to give students a bit more money while not incurring additional expenses in areas such as tuition.

“It’s a little bit of a circular reference in regards to okay, we hear you, you want higher wages, but does that mean we’re going to have less jobs or have higher tuition,” Anderson said. “This move allowed us just enough wiggle room to make some adjustments that were necessary to not disrupt the entire apple cart and make things very difficult for us in other areas.”

Many questions still remain for student workers, and Anderson hopes that these will be answered come March when the criteria for the increase is announced.

“I think there’s still a number of things that we obviously need to share,” Anderson said. “I think the second that we’re able to communicate [the criteria], there might be additional questions, but that’ll answer about 95% of the questions that I’ve received ever since I sent out the communication.”