Admissions fires nine students without warning

This semester, students working in the admissions office who were paid by institutional funding were laid off via e-mail without any forewarning.

“We hired roughly the same number of students with the same amount of budget,” said Melanie Mickelson, vice president of enrollment. “There’s usually a normal amount of attrition that happens. After about two, maybe three weeks, students just stop showing up for work. Also, students start cutting back on their hours.”

Mickelson said that this is typically caused by said students being busier with classes as the semester goes on. This year, there were less students cutting back and there was also a change in leadership.

Mickelson emphasized that the student personnel cuts had nothing to do with budget cuts, because there simply were no budget cuts. This round of firings was because of a change in employee pattern. There were also more interested and committed students doing the work this year.

“We have students who help around the office during the day and we have students who work the phone calling prospective students in the evening,” said Patton. “We did a really good job in attracting students to the job, so we had more work study students than usual.”

Patton took over as interim director of admissions on January, 15 replacing former director Matt McCaffrey. The new position requires Patton to directly manage the University's budget.

“I didn’t have access to any of the budget information until after January 15,” said Patton. “But, I think [prior to taking the director position] when we’re looking at the time cards and seeing how many hours students were logging, we realized that this might be an issue.”

Patton also said that she decided that when she took the position, she would look into the number of hours students were accumulating. Once she took the position and the budget was evaluated further by both Patton and Mickelson, they realized that they had a problem.

“When Amy took over as [interim] director of admissions, she and I sat down and started reviewing everything. We quickly realized that there just wasn’t enough institutional funding to keep the students employed,” said Mickelson.

Patton said that at this point, she went through the budget and found some extra money that she transferred from the operating budget to keep the students employed by admissions as long as possible. Even so, this funding only lasted long enough to employ the students for an extra month.

Mickelson said that letting go students is a normal part of the cycle in the admissions office. Still, she went on to say that this usually doesn’t happen until closer to the end of the semester and that there is also generally more warning.

“In the past when we had to lay students off, we would review the payroll and it would be more ‘Okay, you guys, you can work this month, then after this month the money’s gone.’ However, that usually doesn’t happen until April or May,” said Mickelson.

To make up for the work that the students who were fired would be doing, Mickelson said that the students who are funded by federal work study dollars will pick up the slack.

“We do still have our federal work study students who are still employed and that budget is perfectly stable, so those students will be able to remain with us through the end of the semester,” said Mickelson. “Plus, we have restructured so that we will have somewhat less need.”

According to Mickelson, admissions knew after the December payroll that they would have to let students go. After Winter break commenced, the firings began.

“It [the firing?] was not all at once. It varied based on what jobs they were doing, because we employ students doing a lot of different jobs in admissions,” said Patton.

Though nine of the 30 students lost their jobs, all of the office-related jobs were eliminated. The admissions office also employs admissions ambassadors, or students who give tours of the campus to prospective students; those students were kept on. According to Patton, they will most likely only be used during Wilkes’ upcoming VIP Day.

As for the future, both Mickelson and Patton said that they will be making some adjustments when it comes to the process of hiring students.

“I think we will definitely be reviewing all of the things that we need to address with students prior to the start of the semester,” said Mickelson. “There’s been various work study issues that have come up throughout the years that we’d like to address upfront with students [in the future.]”

According to Patton, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  This year students came in and we assumed that they would drop off, but they didn’t. So next year, we’re going to assume that they won’t drop off either.”

Both Mickelson and Patton also said that, in the future, they will tell students upon hiring that there is a chance they will not keep their jobs the entire year. Also, there will be more advanced warning as to if or when the students will be fired from admissions.