Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

GU Fails to Make Student Pay a Priority

For some students who have jobs on campus, hard work for the university isn’t paying off — literally.

On Jan. 3, 2012, the university switched to the new Georgetown Management System, which was meant to streamline the payroll and human resources systems. On Feb. 24, Georgetown sent out an email to student employees apologizing to those who had not been paid since the beginning of the semester due to issues caused by the switch.

Nearly a month later, problems remain. Many students have received too little pay — or none at all. While glitches are understandable, letting students go two months without compensation is unacceptable.

At this point, some students have yet to receive paychecks totaling hundreds of dollars. While many students have an on-campus job merely for the purpose of picking up some extra spending money, others rely on that income to keep their bank accounts afloat.

When the university finally sent its email six weeks after the semester began, it asked unpaid students to contact their supervisor for help; departments were expected to handle requests individually. Students who depend more heavily upon a federal work-study paycheck requested and received emergency loans from the Student Employment Office, but the burden here should not have been on students or on individual departments.

System changes of this magnitude are often accompanied by unwanted glitches. The university should anticipate such mishaps and preemptively develop a timely, temporary solution to them.

The university’s failure was twofold in this instance: Not only did it fail to react in a timely manner to the obvious problem of students left unpaid by their various departments by waiting until the end of February to address those students’ concerns, but it also failed to implement a suitable fix to compensate students for their time and effort.

We can only hope that these issues will soon be rectified. Student employees work hard for their money, and while they may not be full-time employees, they still deserve the right to a punctual paycheck.

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