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.