Common Sense 101: How to Save Money

Hey Vassarians! Tired of seeing the faculty wearing red and protesting? Wish all the economic crisis would go away? Me too! And so would the rest of the college! It's so awful that so many people are losing their jobs. Vassar's backbone of operation are the librarians, the people who clean the dorms, DC workers, and everyone else on the sidelines making our education possible. How many times a day do you rely on them? And in comparison, how many times a day do you rely on a Dean? Or an administrator? Or Cappy? Yes, yes, the college is run by those people. But on a daily, individual basis, your paper gets printed by the guy from CIS who fixes the VPrinter. Or the damn light in your dorm room stops blinking when the people from B&G come to fix it. And the college is repaying them by cutting their jobs. I know a librarian, 2 years away from retirement and paying off her car, who just lost her job. Or another librarian who is losing their home. The buyout isn't quite as nice as it sounds: with all the taxes, a lot of their buyout amounts are less than a year's salary. So here is my advice to Vassar on how to save some money:



1. Stop printing stupid shit. It was a good start to stop printing the course catalogue. But we can go so much further!! What about those Student Handbooks? NO ONE READS THEM. Except maybe freshmen. Put them online. All those mailings from Field Work?  Put it in an email!  Do we really need nice laminated posters about CIS or how to use VPrint?  Emails!  Websites!  Stop paying for paper copies!!

2. Get rid of the dorm room phone lines.  How many people honestly use their personal dorm room phone numbers?  Yet, to provide this service to a minority of students, the college has to keep all the lines active.  If we increased the number of phones in the hallways or made this service into an option for the hall phones, we'd save a ton of money.  And I didn't come up with this myself: Bret Ingerman mentioned this at the Fall Leadership Conference.

3. Give employees optional non-paid days.  From talking to librarians and other employees of the college, they'd rather have less of a paycheck than none at all.  Lots of state governments started giving "furlo" days this year.  As in an unpaid day off.  The employees can still come in and work if they want, but they won't get paid.  So lots take the day off.  And productivity isn't effected all that much.  We could do the same thing here!  Maybe not an entire day off, but maybe only pay for 3/4 of the day?  If we did this small cut once every couple of weeks, we'd save some money.  And I bet 3/4 salaray for one day is better than no salary.

And finally, probably the most obvious:

4. Pay cuts for administraters.  I'm sorry, but they make a lot of money and live really comfortably.  They can have the 3/4 salary day and still make a ton of money.  Or you can give them a furlo day and their lives wouldn't change that much.  Or just cut back from their salary a tiny bit.  Or stop hiring in administration!  Or start fundraising with alumns!  Build our endowment back up!  Please do something so we stop firing the middle class workers!  We're cutting their jobs while the administration gets raises?  This doesn't make sense.  I hope someone in charge of our finances has a good head on their shoulders and can see that our solution isn't solving anything...

*Disclaimer:  I'm not an economist.  These are just ideas that seem to make sense at the moment.*