By INDRAYUDH SINHA

In most American colleges and universities, the Office of Institutional Research makes an unlikely impact in presenting a persuasive choice of institution to prospective students. For each academic year, the office generates what’s known as the Common Data Set (CDS) pertaining to that year. The CDS contains a whole range of information and statistical data summarising the institution, like the institution’s type (whether college or university), length of study (2 or 4 years), calendar of academic year (trimester, semester etc), enrollment data, gender of students, graduation rate, basis for selection and so on. The CDS has been rising in the world of American college admissions for quite some time now, to become the go-to source to assess a student’s compatibility with an institution. Education influencers, college YouTubers, and admission gurus, everyone’s directing their clients and consumers to this greyscale, euclidean, unappealing document full of tables and numbers. The CDS came onto the scene of college admissions as if through an expedition of archaeology: some keen, focused college guru dug through the rummages of the World Wide Web to get their hands on this unassuming collection of data from college websites. Colleges release their Common Data Sets quietly every year, almost as a non-event. The document itself looks like it meant more for bureaucratic purposes than gauging a student’s compatibility. Yet in the loud, exuberant world of college admissions, the CDS has become a quiet guiding tool. 

Once in college, most students forgo the act and occupation of measuring themselves against different colleges and finding their “fit”. The Office of Institutional Research then acts like experimenters behind a two-way mirror, ensuring smooth academic functioning and measuring college satisfaction among students. On the other side of measures, metrics, and academics, many college students in the U.S., whether international or domestic toil throughout their shifts at different venues in their college, entirely away from the gaze of Institutional Research—as part of their “work-study” component of financial aid—a promise from institutions to raise a sizeable amount of money through wages which they can use to pay a part of their tuition. 

The newfound uses of data, quantifying the seemingly humdrum aspects of our lives to reveal insightful trends has fuelled the rise of a fashionable social science. Most institutions complement their literary, marketable facades with a deeper, unseen dimension of data which more inquisitive customers and clients dig through. “Show me the data!” is the new slogan, demanding reliable, ‘truthful’ evidence about matters.

It is high time that colleges extend that practice to the realm of all forms of labour on campus. This past weekend, I was at a meeting of the rising Beloit Student Workers Union, and one of the things members of the union unanimously agreed upon was the imperative of being transparent about student compensation and student work types to prospective and present students. I had written previously in the Round Table, about the nearly flat rate of compensation for students around the campus, ranging from $8.25-$8.75/ hour, the only exception being, someone remarked in the meeting, if a student is a nude model for the portrait classes in the Art Department. 

Some broad elements which require more transparency are a) the rate of students who are in the labour force within campus and those who chose to work outside campus, and those who do both, b) job description and venue, (example: food service, Hamiltons or front desk, library), c) average hours worked by a student on campus and off campus (it’s understandable that the college would be dependent on students’ self reported hours for off-campus jobs), d) citizenship status of students (whether domestic or international), e) gender identity of students f) number of students working more than a single job, and lastly the most important, g) vacancy across college venues contrasted with total working population, h) departments and venues with the most student workers and student work vacancies, I) source of compensation (federal or institutional)  j) whether a student can pay back at least 50% of their college fees with their compensation and how many jobs or hours a students needs to put in within the campus to pay back at least 50% of their college fees. 

I had written in the previously referred Round Table article of mine, how it was mostly international students who work multiple jobs on campus, to make up a decent wage in total from all their combined jobs and working hours outside of academic work since all international students are bound by visa rules to campus work. A student confessed to having four jobs on campus, while most international students I talked to expressed considerable anguish on the widening exchange rates between their home currency and the U.S. dollar, and the increasing difficulty of paying the college fee by their families back home.

Economists usually estimate the standard of living of a certain population by looking at a ‘basket of goods’. This approach is used in multiple measures of economic health, notably by the Bureau of Labour Statistics in the U.S. to measure inflation, by indexing certain day-to-day consumer goods that most people consume in an economy and looking at changes in the price of goods over time and whether a certain population’s incomes can afford this fundamental basket of goods. A college labour report should be based around this ‘basket of goods’ approach, with each report showing whether their wages can adjust to the rising or lowering prices of a basket of goods, demonstrating what economists call the ‘real income’ of a population. Any effective college labour report should reflect the real income of students over at least the last 5 to 10 years, depicting the change in the purchasing power of student wages. 

To provide a composite picture of a report of labour in an institution, it’s a reasonable compulsion to be transparent about the compensation of non-student staff and the compensation of different department faculty in the college. A coherent report of labour in a college can only be constructed with a collective transparency of the college’s total rate of compensation, including faculty and staff, on a departmental level. 

Transparency about labour and compensation in American colleges would only increase its spirit of autonomy, and restore faith and agency, in place of the precarity and discontentment of labour across campuses in the nation. 

Featured Image: Beloit College