Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
WCU students want wage hike, tuition freeze
Students at West Chester University are joining with others across the state to demand a raise in minimum wage for them and other campus workers, as well as for a five-year tuition freeze.
They have joined a new but vocal group of those who attend the schools in the state’s 14-university State System of Higher Education (SSHE), including those at neighboring Millersville University in Lancaster and Cheyney University in Delaware County. The group calls itself the Pennsylvania Student Power Network (PSPN), a loose organization that grew out of last year’s faculty strike at the
SSHE campuses.
“I’m fighting for living wages because it’s unfair that I need two jobs, at a minimum, to support myself at school,” said Nahje “Jay” Yancy, a West Chester University sophomore from Philadelphia and PSPN leader. “I have the stress of being a full-time worker and a full-time student and am still barely making it. I shouldn’t be struggling just to study here.”
According to the student group, over the past five years tuition and fees at state universities have gone up more than 20 percent, thanks in part to what it calls misleading
“pay-per-credit hour” schemes. Group members say the result has been greater student debt – over $30,000 for every graduating student in Pennsylvania, the second most of any state.
Meanwhile, most student and campus workers receive poverty wages for work-study, food service, subcontract work, and other campus work, the group contends.
PSPN is collaborating with United Students Against Sweatshops, whose national #15onCampus campaign has raised the wage to $15 at Columbia, NYU, and the University of Washington–Seattle. A kick off to the campaign is scheduled to be held Thursday, Feb. 16, in Sykes Student Union.
In response, a WCU spokeswoman said that the school does its best to pay decent swags for those who work on campus.
“West Chester values its student employees and we provide the best compensation level that we can,” said Nancy Santos Gainer, executive director of the university’s Office of Communications. “For Federal Work-Study employees, we pay $7.75 - $12.00 per hour depending on the job and the responsibilities required.
West Chester pays more than minimum wage and works from an allocation of federal funds.
She said doubling wage rates would “ultimately limit and possibly reduce the number of student hires in the program. We want to make sure that as many students as possible who qualify for need-based Federal Work-Study are able to work on campus.”
On Tuesday in his budget address, Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a statewide minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $12 an hour. He also proposed an additional $9 million of funding for higher education.
College students in Pennsylvania on average graduate with nearly $35,000 in debt, the second-most of any state in the country, according to
the latest “Project on Student Debt” report released by the Institute for College Access & Success.
Students who graduate from state-system schools graduate about $30,200 in the hole, the report found.
For West Chester, whose total cost of attendance was $25,996 in the 2014-2015 academic year, students graduate with nearly about $32,000 in debt, the 2015 report said. At Lincoln University, in southern Chester County, which is a state-affiliated school, those figures are $10,232 and $22,498, the report stated. Figures for Cheyney University, located in Delaware County, were not available.