Talking Stick - July/August 2016 - 55

housing, it was estimated that a housing
department choosing to raise salaries to meet the
threshold would see an increase of 86 percent
for each hall director and 49 percent for area
coordinators.
Beyond the dollars and cents, though, the
fallout from this decision will have ripple effects
throughout the profession for years to come as
the salary exemption will continue to increase.
Associated guidance from the DOL revealed that
the exemption figure is subject to an automatic
update every three years to keep pace with the
40th percentile in the lowest wage region in the
country. While many campus housing officers
understand the need for the increase and the desire
to pay their staff a fair wage, they also point to the
disparate level of impact they face, given budgetary
constraints and the outcry that already surrounds
the cost of living on campus while earning a
postsecondary degree.
Some campuses will be able to find the
additional funds, raise staff salaries, and continue
their work. But many others are going to have
to closely examine their staff structure, services
provided, and departmental policies before they
set their new course. If hall directors and area
coordinators were to become hourly employees,
what would that mean for emergency response,
evening programming, and meeting with students
outside typical office hours? What tasks truly need
to be done by professional staff or could be done
by a graduate student? And, ultimately, what will
all these revisions mean for the student living
experience?

hypothetical outcomes."
During an ACUHO-I-sponsored webinar in May,
Mike Adams, a human resources administrator for
the division of residential and hospitality services at
Michigan State University in East Lansing, reported
that, based on their impact analysis, raising their
live-in staff to the new threshold, versus changing
some staff to being hourly employees, was the
right choice. This was the case because with the
estimated amount of overtime pay they would
have to lay out, they "would spend more than
the minimum threshold." In the same webinar,
Bush Hobgood reported that entry-level staff at
Clemson would not be moved to threshold level,
but she advocated for the use of time studies to
clarify this issue. Referring to an RA time study
conducted at Clemson to inform discussions about
the Affordable Care Act (ACA), she explained that
this exercise helped to reveal "flawed assumptions"
about the time engaged in work. More specifically,
she noted that they assumed that RAs spent more
hours engaged in day-to-day activities and fewer
hours involved in openings and training. Based on
this experience, she concluded that time studies
could be similarly "instructive" for understanding
the role of full-time staff.
In the case of NYU, it helped that they had
previous experience with this type of situation.
Previously, they considered reclassifying the
residence hall resource managers (employees who
monitor the facilities' conditions, repairs, and
maintenance), and this potential change led to a
process of modeling the possible outcomes and

Senior Director of
Residential Life Kate Baier
shares that when she
and her staff first started
talking about FLSA impacts
"We thought about what
the options might be, then
we modeled the costs of
those scenarios." See the
formula they used at
www.acuho-i.org.

Once the original FLSA proposal was released,
several housing and residence life units began to
conduct impact analyses and time studies in order
to understand the reach of the issue for individual
campuses. Through these exercises, housing
leadership gained insight into the number of staff
affected and the size of the financial shortfall,
while also beginning to unpack the realities of
the live-in staff role at individual institutions. For
instance, Kate Baier, senior director of residential
life at New York University, reported that her
department began thinking about the impact
of FLSA "in earnest" back in June 2015. "We
thought about what the options might be, then we
modeled the costs of those scenarios." She adds,
"Creating the initial model is where the bulk of the
work lies." After that, "it's a matter of copying the
model structure and changing the compensation
and hourly duty numbers to create different
PHOTO COURTESY OF NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

JULY + AUGUST 2016

55
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Talking Stick - July/August 2016

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