by Camille Perlman and Tori Negash
The resident assistant position plays a foundational role within student housing, providing a developmental experience for both the RA and the students living in their communities. For the RA, it’s a leadership development opportunity, and for the students, it’s having a peer they can reach out to for answers about housing, classes, or campus. In recent years, though, a number of forces both inside and outside of student housing have been reshaping the RA role. In addition to an increase in students’ mental health issues, RAs must deal with traumas that can not only lead to RA burnout but can also cause a decrease in the number of students applying for the job. There is more pressure now to increase compensation in a way that doesn’t diminish RAs’ financial aid package. Also, some feel that the RA position competes unfairly with other student jobs on campus because being able to include paid housing as part of the compensation is considered to be a greater incentive than that for other student jobs. This can cause tension between students and departments looking for student workers.
Expectations are another force at play here. Students in the role of the RA, as well as their parents, expect this to be a valuable learning experience that will provide transferable skills and free housing and still allow time for classes and studying. Meanwhile, supervisors expect RAs to be extra eyes and ears on the floor, to respond quickly in urgent situations, and to be on call for a portion of their work week. And all these expectations play an important part in what motivates students to apply for the job. It also has students questioning if this is the kind of work they want to do and supervisors questioning if it’s the kind of work that students should be responsible for.
With all these forces in motion, people are questioning what the RA role should be and what the RA should be responsible for. And they are questioning everything: What changes would bring less trauma to the job? What changes would bring less burnout? What changes would entice more students to apply for the job? What changes would allow RAs to be more of a community builder than a community rule enforcer? How should RAs interact with resident directors? What does change in this role mean for the department and the institution?
Proposed changes like these are not entirely new to this position, since it has evolved over the past six or seven decades in response to societal and campus influences; however, some of the added responsibilities resulting from the pandemic sent all staff on campus (and their defined responsibilities) into a spiral. Many pieces and parts have shifted, and departments are weaving job roles and tasks back together in a new way. Some changes feel like they make sense immediately, but others feel like risks.
And to establish a baseline of what members were doing, data from the Campus Housing Index (CHI) for the 2021-22 academic year, which was compiled in the last quarter of 2022, revealed how participating campuses regarded role responsibilities, compensation, RA-to-student ratio, and hours worked.
According to results from the nearly 200 institutions that submitted CHI data, most of them still expect RAs to fulfill responsibilities for duty, policy enforcement, and crisis response. However, after decades of adding more and more responsibilities to the role, most agreed that it should be restructured by shifting or eliminating some responsibilities from the RA role in order to make the job less stressful and more fun, motivate more students to apply for the job, and align the responsibilities more with their campus mission or culture.
Texas Christian University made the switch to a less disciplinary RA role years ago and is still finding success with it today. They have found that it makes the job more appealing to students and builds a stronger community. “The most profound thing we have done here is to change the role of RAs,” says Imani Wimberly, assistant director of housing and residence life. “When we survey our residents using Skyfactor, the number one thing residents view their RA as is a friend. This is something we are incredibly proud of and took time to build. In many places RAs are told ‘You are not friends with residents.’ Here, we are showing that being a friend is exactly what we do want RAs to be to their residents. They have other roles, too, but knowing their residents well and developing mutually enhancing relationships is friendship. And it matters.”
They train their RAs to emphasize being a valued peer and friend by using a tool called Knowing, Connecting, Empowering (KCE), which their executive director for housing and residence life, Craig Allen, learned about from Community Renewal in Shreveport, Louisiana. As Wimberly explains, “In laypersons terms it means we care about all of our residents and build relationships with them. These relationships can be built in a number of different ways: conversations, programs, door knocking, hanging out at the desk, etc. You can find the formal job description here but the main role is to make sure the residents the RA is responsible for feel they are known.” Wimberly adds that making friendship the top responsibility of the RA, along with increasing RA compensation, has made the job so desirable that they recently had more than 300 students apply for 50 positions.
Making residents feel known is also the main responsibility of RAs at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), who are charged to work intentionally with this purpose. Stephen Berg, associate director for apartment and residence life, explains why they used this approach. RA roles at his prior institutions looked the same as UTA’s do now, and the overall responsibilities have gone unchanged for 35-40 years, but the time RAs spend on their work has increased. As he explains, “These responsibilities occupy more of their time and require more attention. At past institutions in the Midwest where binge drinking is a norm, our RA position was shaped by trying to curb alcohol use by providing alternatives and through enforcement. At UTA we do not have a high number of alcohol incidents, but mental health concerns have risen. Therefore, we focus our RAs on engagement, including personal, social, academic, and diversity engagement. Our hope is to give residents a sense of belonging and connection which will help their overall well-being and also provide a community for them to reach out to when they do need help.”
The RA (community advisor) role at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) is peer focused. Each CA is assigned to a community (first-year, sophomore, or upper-division), and their work is supported by their curricular approach to programming. “Since implementing our curricular approach, much of the CA role is dictated by the needs of our residents and our curriculum goals,” says Michelle Forbes, an associate director in their Department of Residential Education and Housing. “Our main focus is helping TCNJ to develop and help graduate healthy, successful, engaged, and caring humans while focusing on the mission of TCNJ; our CAs truly are the boots on the ground for this work. We often refer back to the 10 Essential Elements of a Curriculum (from Roompact), and point number six reminds us that ‘Student leaders and staff members play key roles in implementation but are not expected to be educational experts,’ so the professional staff create the guide for all our educational strategies, and we work with our student staff to bring it to life in a way that our residents can and want to engage with.”
The CAs at Texas Tech University work with directors to engage students in their curricular programming. Tanya Massey, senior managing director of university student housing, highlights how this RA model aligns with their institution’s strategic plan. “As we move into the next phase of our university strategic planning, there is a strong push for student engagement and retention efforts. Our CA staff is poised to provide ongoing support for these goals through their knowledge of their residents and the relationship we encourage them to have in their community.”
The approach to changing the RA role at the University of Central Arkansas was to carve out several distinct student positions so that student staff could focus on specific areas of work in the community. “We have just recently revamped our student staff positions, in particular the RA position, to streamline their job duties and responsibilities,” says Craig Seager, director of residence life. “The RA position has evolved so much over the last 15-20 years, with many new responsibilities being added over time, so we decided to make the position more ‘traditional’ where their primary duties include policy enforcement, crisis response, serving on duty rotation, and intentional interactions. We created other function-centered positions from some of the duties we removed from our old RA position. Our function-centered positions are programming assistants, complex assistants, marketing assistants, maintenance assistants, hosts, and peer coaches.”
Their motivation to approach the change in this way evolved from one of Seager’s earlier studies. “The initial idea for this remodel was first born out of some research I published back in 2021 as well as data I had collected for a study in regards to RAs and predictors for success. Turns out I wasn't the only one that was on this path. An article published in 2022 described how George Washington University revamped their RA position. Another institution here in Arkansas (Arkansas Tech University) had already developed and rolled out a new staffing model similar to GWU's last fall. I had some detailed conversations with ATU's associate dean for residence life, Delton Gordon, and he was a great resource, providing me with valuable information on how they implemented their model and the various challenges they had to address. I used their model as a framework to build ours.”
Expectations that students and staff have about the RA role can dictate how it is shaped. Discussions about expectations have motivated some campuses to do away with the RA position entirely. George Washington University dissolved the traditional RA position a few years ago and broke up the responsibilities across several student staff positions such as program assistants, peer mediators, and communication assistants. “We have multiple student staff positions dedicated to certain aspects of the residence hall programming and oversight,” says Seth Weinshel, associate vice president of business services. “Our student staff do desk operations, programming, mentoring, mediation, building operations, and communications.” The need to restructure the position was made clear in exit interviews with RAs about what they liked and didn’t like about the job. GWU also used several resources to help them determine what student positions they needed: the Talking Stick (Vol. 33, No. 6, published in 2016); George Blimling and Denise Baumann’s The Resident Assistant: Applications and Strategies for Working with College Students in Residence Halls (2019); and discussions with senior housing officers throughout the MACUHO region and ACUHO-I.
More recently, Clemson University has also decided to dissolve the RA position. “This year will wrap up what I believe most would have come to understand as the more traditional responsibilities to a more focused role and scope next year, as reflected in their position title change, residential community mentors (RCMs),” says Michael Parrish, coordinator for fraternity sorority housing. “This change makes a shift from the RA position we all have come to know to refocus our RCMs and senior student leaders, residential community leaders (RCL), with direct attention towards building individual relationships, building a sense of community, and shaping the residential experience (through our Residential Experience Model).”
Parrish explains that this change was a necessary response to the increasing complexity and stress of the RA role. “Many different factors have indicated a need for change in the RA role, as far as shaping the role into its new version. We had qualitative data from before 2018 that told us that the way that our positions are perceived and lived out weren’t how we wanted them to be structured. We started asking ourselves why and what to do differently at the same time that ACUHO-I formed the task force on live-in roles, which found many of the same things that we did: that RA jobs have become increasingly complex, and the current population of undergraduate students couldn’t navigate (and shouldn’t be navigating) all aspects of current position descriptions. Ultimately, many of the things that we are doing still need to be done but can be done in different ways. The reevaluation and reconstruction of roles has allowed us to narrow the scope to really highlight the work of our educational priority with RCMs: Living on campus at Clemson University is a transformative experience that will prepare and empower students to explore who they are, connect meaningfully with others, engage intellectually, and lead as global citizens.”
Parrish goes on to provide details about their changes to the scope of RA work. “As we have made a shift to the RCM role, we have pulled various responsibilities out of the role, allowing us to refocus and realign the responsibilities so that they are grounded in our curriculum model’s learning goals and outcomes. Over this past year we have made the transition to area desks from community desks, which removed desk hours from the RA role this year and the RCM role in the future. Additionally, we are finalizing a new student staff role that focuses on residential operations’ on-call response. This will allow for RCMs/RCLs to enhance their work by not shouldering the complete load of responding to after-hours situations. Of course, we know that residents will come to them because of the relationships that have been built, but more players on the team will be able to direct the response within our new model.”
In addition to reshaping RA responsibilities, it’s also important to consider their compensation, which is a big factor in motivating students to apply for the position and must be carefully balanced with student staff’s financial aid packages. CHI results show that the biggest piece of the compensation package is paid housing, followed by paid hours and meal plans. Clemson’s compensation includes a stipend, a meal plan credit, and a rent waiver. The rent waiver required special attention since it can affect the amount of a student’s aid award. As Parrish explains, “The first major evolution of our compensation package came as our student staff sought to find an answer to the concern of RAs not being able to serve in the position due to there not being any type of waiver or reduction for the cost of housing outside of their stipend. Even then, the stipend was not offsetting the cost of housing in a way that they could afford the bill upfront. To make the cost of being an RA more affordable for all of our residential communities across campus, the flat rate method was developed to average the cost of the most and least expensive housing options on campus to which an RA could be assigned for their community and room assignment. At this time, the RAs paid the average rate across campus, rather than the rate for their assigned community in a goal to be equitable. This changed to the rent waiver method in fall of 2021.”
Parrish notes that making these complex changes took a team of campus professionals. “These changes have been in response to student needs and responsibility on our part so that we are respecting our students’ rights and primary roles as students. Leasa Evinger, director of residential living, and Suzanne Price, associate vice president of auxiliary enterprises (formerly director of residential learning), have worked diligently to strike a balance with our campus partners in student financial aid so that our compensation package is not undoing a student’s awarded aid. They also worked with human resources to understand best how we maintain the accountability for our student staff member hours they are working throughout the academic year. This was not just a one-time conversation; this is revisited any time there are changes to laws like the Affordable Care Act or policies regarding the award of student aid.”
At the University of Central Arkansas, Seager explains how their recently created student staff positions are compensated. “Our RAs receive a stipend that essentially covers their room and board which they pay back to the university. All our student staff are assigned to private rooms that are billed at our double rate. Our peer coaches receive the same compensation as the RAs. The rest of our student staff positions are all hourly, with all of them receiving the room discount as well. Compensation is shaped primarily by the workload and duties that are assigned to each position.” Seager is the current chair of SWACUHO's Research, Assessment, and Information Committee, which is surveying its member institutions on this topic “so that we can report out data and gauge where we stand in terms of RA responsibilities and compensation based on factors such as institution type and size.” They are also investigating the RA-to-student ratio in their region. (According to the most recent CHI data, the average RA-to-student ratio across all housing types is 1:39.25.)
Forbes at TCNJ explains how they incorporate student feedback into decisions about their compensation package which includes an annual stipend and a full housing credit. “We have a Student Staff Advisory Board (SSAB) which is a group of student staff with a representative from each staff who gather bi-weekly to discuss how they want to develop the student staff positions, provide resources, advocate for change, and work on solutions. This group is advised by Lea DiFonzo, program assistant for selection, training and conduct, and assistant director Chris Trautman. Proposals have been made by our SSAB staff at the request of their peers for a compensation increase with an ask that the stipend be revisited in the future again so that inflation doesn't far outpace wages. That proposal is currently being reviewed by our director of residential education and housing, Tina Tormey. I would say that in the coming years, it makes sense for us to continue to utilize the stipend and housing credit model. Being able to be present in the halls is a primary requirement, so I can say with confidence that our housing credit will remain even if the amount of the credit decreases to a partial credit to allow for increased compensation in other areas (i.e., a possible meal plan or increased stipends).”
Allen at Texas Christian University credits their decision to fully cover room and board for aiding their RA recruitment efforts. They have also added a stipend for training over the years and have recently increased it. Allen explains his motivations for making these changes. “I didn’t like the fact that some RAs ended up paying for room and board, and I wanted to compensate them better. By writing off room and board and creating non-revenue beds, I essentially gave them better pay and saved payroll, which I then used to pay them even more in the form of a stipend. In some respects, it was just a budget/accounting change – but the difference to RAs was significant.”
Wimberly adds that they had a large increase in applications after making these changes. “We have seen constant growth and desire to be an RA since then. Today we have over 300 applicants for a little under 50 vacancies. It is difficult to say what the role will look like in the future, but we certainly hope to continue to make it a highly sought-after position. We know that there are institutions moving toward more specialized work of student staff members. Why have someone do safety checks if they would rather program all day every day? Perhaps we see a move toward people being hired toward their strengths and interests. We have raised the amount we pay student staff for training stipends in the last few years, and it will be important for us to keep evaluating to make sure we are keeping up with the market.”
As the needs of campus communities keep evolving, experts suggest that making decisions about the RA role should include consideration of the fact that changes, big or small, will be felt up and down the staffing ranks. And that change can be felt in both a positive and a negative way, so professional staff should think about who and what they will affect.
When imagining the future, Seager thinks about many issues affecting the RA role and campuses at large. When asked what the RA role and compensation look like in the near and distant future, he says, “This is a tricky question because of the current climate of higher education. We are heading towards an enrollment cliff in 2026, and that is going to impact every institution differently. This could affect the RA-to-student ratio on average, the number of allocated RA positions in general, and compensation packages, depending on how well institutions have prepared themselves financially. We are also noticing students not being as engaged outside of the classroom as before, so there may be a greater emphasis on student engagement and, more importantly, how and when we are engaging them. Furthermore, many residence life professionals are leaving or have left the field already, with many being replaced by newer professionals that may not have the required educational background and experience in student development that was considered standard because the field is thinning out. This could likely impact the RA position at some institutions in the future based on what these new incoming professionals value or believe the primary roles and responsibilities of the RA should be.”
There is no universal template for the RA role. This is clearer now more than ever. Stewart Robinette, a former director at GWU, has assessed RA roles and outcomes extensively as well as presented on the topic at the 2022 ACUHO-I annual conference. He shared this as he left the position: “I hope that departments continue to think about getting to the outcomes in the best way possible for students rather than continuing to have the RA role stay very much the same with add-ons. However, the RA (rather student staff) role cannot be thought of in a bubble. How the frontline professional staff role changes has an effect on how the student staff role can change.”
Camille Perlman is the managing editor of Talking Stick for ACUHO-I. Tori Negash is the research initiatives manager for ACUHO-I.
