Anne M. Hornak
So a sabbatical in academic world is about every seven years, and it’s pretty standard across most institutions in the United States. So every seven years, faculty can apply for a sabbatical. It can be a semester long or a year long experience and full disclosure at most institutions, I think the average is, if you do a semester long, it’s at full pay. If you do a year long, it’s at half pay. So I don’t want to pretend that it’s not paid, so you’re still paid your salary. And there’s multiple ways that you can engage in a sabbatical. It doesn’t always have to be research. I chose the research option, and we’ll kind of unpack that and explore that in this episode. But you can also do faculty do teaching, so they go to other institutions, and maybe they’re working on some, you know, teaching and learning. You can also do administrative. So there’s faculty that take leave to go do administrative type work too. So there’s lots of different kind of ways that you can engage in a sabbatical.

Heather Shea
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW the online learning community for Student Affairs educators, I’m your host, Heather Shea, today, we’re diving into the first of a two part conversation with Dr Anne Hornak, Professor of higher education at Central Michigan University. Anne’s work centers on supporting rural students in their college journeys, advancing student affairs and community colleges and tackling issues of access and equity in higher education. Last spring, she took on a very unique sabbatical project that offered fresh insights into these areas, and we are so lucky to have her share these experiences and findings with us. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs, we hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com, on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. I am super excited to share that we are launching a new podcast format featuring storytelling and reflection. Our new series captures the essence of Student Affairs through the power of personal narrative, featuring impactful moments shared by professionals in the field with stories that range from funny and heartwarming to profound and challenging, each episode will explore the deeper meaning behind these experiences. We are super excited to welcome three new host correspondents to join us in our new podcast format, and you should stay tuned for more information about how you can contribute. So let’s get to the episode. Welcome, welcome to the podcast Anne.

Anne M. Hornak
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Heather Shea
Yeah, I’m so glad that you were able to join and that you pitched this idea, because this is a fascinating way to spend your sabbatical. So maybe let’s begin by Tell me a little bit about how you framed the sabbatical. Tell tell us maybe what those listeners who don’t know what a sabbatical is like, what it is, what it was for you, and then kind of what motivated you to do what you did during your sabbatical. Yeah,

Anne M. Hornak
thank you. So as Heather said, my name is Anne Hornack. My pronouns are she? Her, i. So a sabbatical in academic world is about every seven years, and it’s pretty standard across most institutions in the United States. So every seven years, faculty can apply for a sabbatical. It can be a semester long or a year longexperience and full disclosure at most institutions, I think the average is, if you do a semester long, it’s at full pay. If you do a year long, it’s at half pay. So I don’t want to pretend that it’s not paid, so you’re still paid your salary. And there’s multiple ways that you can engage in a sabbatical. It doesn’t always have to be research. I chose the research option, and we’ll kind of unpack that and explore that in this episode. But you can also do faculty do teaching, so they go to other institutions, and maybe they’re working on some, you know, teaching and learning. You can also do administrative. So there’s faculty that take leave to go do administrative type work too. So there’s lots of different kind of ways that you can engage in a sabbatical.

Heather Shea
Cool, that’s, that’s, I think, super helpful context. And it’s typically just faculty, but I do know that there, at least at Michigan State, some staff who have also applied for and received approval to do sabbatical. So if you’re watching or listening, don’t, don’t believe that this is just just for faculty, but I think it is significant that there was this research and inquiry component, absolutely.

Anne M. Hornak
And the Fulbright administration, the Fulbright scholars, has scholars for administrators, and I believe that institutions are more receptive to that, because Fulbright pays, you know, does a backfill on your salary. So, and that’s for administrators, which is also another way to engage and kind of work outside of your institution, which you know makes us all better, scholars and thinkers, administrators and practitioners. So yeah. So my sabbatical, I I’m going to start back in 2009 when I read a little show and tell here, nickel and dime, I’m getting by in America by Barbara Heinrich, pretty famous book that many, many people I know have read over the years. Her I was, I would, this book has sort of guided and framed and been really my North Star and a lot of my own work. It was fascinating to me that her project, and she’s pretty open that her project was not an empirical study at all. She was working at Harper’s at the time as a staff writer. She does have a PhD in biology, but she didn’t set the her project up in any way that was, you know, a research design. And she’s really, really clear on that in the book. But hers was a year she traveled all around the United States, and her work was following the 2008 revisions to the welfare act. So when we put in place was language about sober living, so alcohol and drugs related to welfare and then had to be actively seeking a job. Now, we know, in hindsight, in 2024 many of those were actually, like, really marginalizing, pretty kind of classist in terms of how they manifested, but she was really trying to understand, like, how did these welfare we’re calling reforms really impact the people who most need this social safety net? So I, and again, I’ve been just kind of obsessed with this book and her work. So when it came time to think about I was ready for a sabbatical, what might I want to do. And I thought I am at an institution where a third of our population are Pell Grant students, and we also have a significant number of students who aren’t Pell eligible, but really struggling, struggling financially. So we do a pretty good job of understanding our lowest income students, we also do a pretty, pretty good job, pretty good job, of resourcing our lowest income students. Where I think we have a lot of work to do is that middle group of students that they’re not Pell eligible, they’re getting some money. We all know from all the literature that we do a really good job and hire at a front loading money, but that doesn’t sustain you know, sophomore, junior, senior year, and college gets more expensive. We charge more when students become upperclassmen and lab classes and college every year just gets more expensive. So I’m interested in students that don’t get a lot of support from home, their option is to take out massive loans. You know, it doesn’t take much to read about our student loan situation in this country, and that what they’re doing is they’re working, and they’re working sometimes on campus and off campus, because off campus or on campus, jobs limit the number of hours you can work, and the pay isn’t always so great. So I my whole entire promise was, I want to understand what it’s like to be a financially strapped student, which is what I there’s some literature on financially strapped students, which are those students that are just really living, you know, kind of on the edge. They sometimes take a little bit longer to get through school. Another kind of catalyst for this study is we do a pretty good job of tracking community college students in terms of transfer. So, you know, we look at, we have these, I call it the arbitrary notion of time. So you go from high school and I’m talking about traditional age students, but obviously that’s, I don’t mean to be. It’s not all inclusive of every student, but go to high school, go to community college, we say, Oh, is it? It’s a two year, you know, degree, then you go on to something else, graduate, go work, whatever. A lot of times, the student, financially strapped students will take three years, four years, sometimes five at a community college. They’re paid as they go. We, we lose track of those students. We, we and they don’t become completers in some of our data sets, same with our four year students that you know, we’re not really good at tracking graduation like after six years. Not that we call them failures, we don’t, but we’re just not really good at kind of capturing that. We’ve, again, arbitrary notion of time. Four year degree we track pretty good. Five years, we do okay job with six years, but some of these students are taking a lot longer. And one of the things when I was setting up the study that I realized is, yes, we capture them on our census data. So, as educated, you know, in our 10 year, but even our little check in census data, so they they get captured in that data set. But in terms of, like, how we define success and graduation rates is, we’re losing a lot of these students are just they become invisible in our data sets. And my whole thing was, they’re struggling. They’re really they’re struggling, and they, some of them, also feel really invisible. So that’s kind of a catalyst for why I want to do this. So I you’re like, What did i What did you do? I took a job as a server and enrolled in nine credit hours at a community college, and lots of caveats. So I wanted to replicate Barbara einreg study. It’s not as pure. So I want to be completely ethical and upfront about this. I had a house that I lived in that I didn’t, you know, I did not account for, like, rent, utilities, those sorts of things, right? I also have a vehicle that was incredibly reliable, and I did not account for, like, car stuff, but I did, but I did in food. Food was while I was at work and while I was at school. I did account for food. So those are my three kind of caveats. The money that I made in my serving position, I had to pay for all my tuition, all my books and fees, uniforms for work, and gas to and from and then food while I was working, you know, on the job or at school, I intentionally chose on campus classes and some online classes so I could get a little bit of a mix at a community college, and then spent time I was a server, I think I said so

Heather Shea
at A restaurant. How many hours a week did you typically work in addition to the nine credit hours of class?

Anne M. Hornak
Yeah, I figured it out, and I averaged about 25 hours a week over 16 weeks. So well, it’s probably about 15 by the time I got going. But the community college I was I had 16 week semesters, and I’m at a university that has 16 week semesters too, and it actually probably was 16 weeks because I worked a week longer after classes ended in May, and I was there January to May, so yeah, about 25 hours a week. There were weeks where I worked quite a bit more. It kind of became known that I could pick up shifts that I had a little bit more flexibility outside of I had classes two days a week where I didn’t have a lot of flexibility. You know when, when, chunks of time in the morning, I was mostly a night person, which, for those of you listening who’ve ever worked at a restaurant, you know that there’s sort of norms that go with different shifts. And I became, you know, kind of the night person. When I, you know, as we go into some of the stories, I’ll there’s a big difference of, you know, kind of knowing the rules and the the Standards of Practice night versus morning.

Heather Shea
Yeah, when you when you think about like, the specific goal, um, or question, research question, right? That motivated you for this. If you had to say it in one or two sentences, how would you describe it? I

Anne M. Hornak
wanted to understand personally. So this was a auto ethnographic study. I did not interview anybody, um. I did, let me, let me. Can I couch that question for a second? Yeah, I’m setting up the study. So when I was going through IRB, we went back and forth, and I had to work with the IRB, because it’s probably a unique sort of situation. I did not disclose the restaurant. I did not disclose the institution that I attended. I also did not gender at all. When I was I blogged through the whole experience. I did not gender at all, and I worked really hard. I did not talk about what classes I took. So I can’t talk about, like, the subject areas. And although that’s probably I can talk generally. And then I didn’t talk about any of the food that I delivered. So because it was fairly unique, even though it was a corporate restaurant, it’s a pretty unique, you know, menu. And my other kind of big ethical thing was I wasn’t going to not tell the truth, so does people at the restaurant did not know what I was doing outside of management, because they hired me, and I was pretty forthcoming with them. So when people asked me, you know, have you ever served before? What are you doing here? You know, how did you you know, not how to get this job, but tell me a little bit about yourself when we were just kind of standing around is I always said I was taking a break from education, and nobody really asked any other, you know, questions. We might think that’s sort of an interesting way to respond in education, but not. I didn’t have anybody who asked me that in in the restaurant. And. And in my classes, I had one faculty member who asked me about what I was doing, and I fully disclosed, kind of the middle of the semester to individual I would go to the fitness center in between my classes because I didn’t have anything else to do and just walk on the treadmill and read. And she came and looked at the book when I was reading once. And so we got into this great conversation so that those are the only people who knew what I was, what I was doing, but even my instructor didn’t know where I was working or anything interesting,

Heather Shea
yeah, so So you wanted to personally experience what it was like to be in that role. So, yeah, frame, yeah, famous the like, research question.

Anne M. Hornak
So in my years, so I approached this as not only replicating nickel and dime for college students, because I think we’re learning so much. I think post COVID, our mental health crisis, we’re learning so much more about our students and what drives our students, but I think we’ve done a really good job of the community piece, the sense of belonging. And I’m not saying that we kind of solve these, but we’re beginning to address these. And sort of what you know, living, living in on a college campus following COVID, what I was really, really curious out and of course, my study had nothing to do with COVID. It just was the timing of it is we still have so many students that, or we have so many students that are struggling with the financial piece, and I think the timing of my study could not have been more perfect with inflation. And I actually delayed it a year, because coming out of COVID, one of the things that happened was hourly wages went way up because service, the service industry, which I knew I was going to work in, the service industry, couldn’t find people, so the wages were just kind of a little bit out of alignment. So I delayed it a year for that reason. And also we the prices of stuff. So it was, you know, we’ve lived this now. Groceries are extremely expensive, and most of our many of our students, especially our community college students, are don’t do a meal plan, and there’s not option of a meal plan. The institution that I attended didn’t have an option of a meal plan, but yet, they still have to pay for food when they’re on campus, when they’re out and about, when they’re working and stuff, most of the so I did a lot of informal conversations with people throughout and kind of captured that. Again, I did not gender. I did not say, you know, talk anything about their life. It was very general about their life situations. As, if you go to the blog, you’ll, you’ll kind of see that. But I was truly trying to understand. So as I stand up in front of my classes and teach students, like, I want to understand, like, what is it really like? What what are they bringing to class? Like, what does it be a financially strapped student? You know? What drives that stress? Like, how do students do it? I was just really, really curious about that. Having read a lot about this, I there’s something about an experience and immersion that I think has sort of reshaped the way I think about the how our students show up, and especially our our students kind of in the middle of this financial situation, and I think we try to be really transparent in higher education about the cost of higher education. We don’t do a good job, though. Um, for example, at a $200 textbook, $200 so I I could pay for a $200 textbook. Um, here’s the other thing about a $200 text for a class. I don’t have a physical copy. There was never a physical copy of the textbook. So it was a site, and I had to go from the learning management system that the college used to this site where most of the work was done, and I would consider myself to have a bit of educational capital. And it was probably the most confusing. I actually missed an entire exam, because there’s checklists on this site and checklists on this site, and then every time you did it, the linkage was a little like always in a it was just it was so difficult. And I thought, how many students would have just pieced out on this and said, can’t do it? Well, they probably would have saw the $200 textbook, and that would have been kind of the end of that. It was shocking. It was shocking to me that the materials, and, you know. Fees that we have in that I think sometimes those of us that assign these things like really need to be thoughtful about and think about it. That was the one that that was my biggest like, wow. But now I I see how incredibly stressful that can be the other, the other. So I was really trying to understand, like, what is it like to navigate and and to do this and to manage and try to balance and integrate school and and and work and, you know, think about this. I don’t have caretaking. I don’t have a multi generational home. I I didn’t have mates I had to worry about. So there’s also those things that I recognize, are, you know, incredible limitations, or just they weren’t part of my lived experience for this study.

Heather Shea
When you were designing your study and your sabbatical experience, what were your expectations kind of going in? Like, what did you think was going to happen? And then, how did your perspectives and motivation kind of change over the course of the semester?

Anne M. Hornak
Yeah, that’s a great question. So one, one of, kind of, some of my assumptions that I had was this is going to be hard.

Anne M. Hornak
I thought I’d be really good at the school side of it, like I knew, like I wasn’t worried about that. I wasn’t worried about navigating the institution, getting along in class, those sorts of things. That was not true. Back to that here in a second, I knew the work side of it was going to be really hard. I’d never been a server like that was not I mean, I did lots of service jobs throughout my, you know, journey, but I’d never served so I knew that would the learning curve there would be really challenging, and it was the other pieces I thought I would be, I thought I would meet more people, like, I thought there’d be more kind of community in, I should say, on the academic side, like, I thought that I would be in classes where, like, I had a class in the history department. I’ll just kind of keep it that general. And I thought, well, there’ll be opportunities to be in small groups and stuff. No, that was not there was I didn’t meet, I didn’t meet a single student. I never talked to a single student. I also thought people are going to wonder, like, what I’m doing there. That was not there was lots of people. I mean, it was a multi age traditional post, yeah, that was that was pretty true. Blended in and totally blended in my online class was, I mean, I don’t, I have no idea who anybody was in the online class. And then at work, I thought I knew I’d blend in a little bit more. I was also extremely concerned. And this is, I share this with Barbara too, because the first role she took was in the community that she lived in. I’ve worked in the community that I live in, like the greater community that I so I thought, I’m gonna and I also have a son who, at the time, was sophomore in college, so the people he graduated with would have, you know, in the community that I live in, it’s the community college that a lot of and I only once saw one of his friends. So I thought I was going to be at this restaurant and know people my first day of work, one of our doctoral students was in there, and I have an apron on, and I just get really wide eyed. I talk about this in the blog. All I thought was, please don’t say Doctor Hornet please don’t say Doctor Hornick, like really, and thank goodness they said, hey Anne, and didn’t say, What are you doing here? Yeah, that was not I did. There were other times where I had to slip people, customers, my blog site, like on a napkin, because before they said anything. So I was never, like, found out nobody,

Heather Shea
you weren’t exposed to the whole server.

Anne M. Hornak
Nope, um, that was good. I did have one other time where someone said, I think, I think I know your son. I think I follow your son on Instagram. And I was like, Oh, it was a very interesting I sort of headed that one off, yeah, but that’s, you know, that was kind of to be expected. I had sort of a idea that that that was an assumption that I had, but I had no idea that the there’s such a lack of community for I just thought faculty in these classes would create a bigger sense of community. And that just wasn’t my experience at all. And there was no like attempt to do that. That’s, I mean, that’s, maybe I do that a lot in my classes. Maybe students don’t want that. I don’t know,

Heather Shea
ice breakers or team builders or group projects or anything like that, yeah.

Anne M. Hornak
Part of it I was kind of happy no group projects. But part of it was I wanted a little sense of community.

Heather Shea
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was reading through your blog, it’s definitely, you know, I went to class and did it, but then all of the conversation is largely around the people you’re engaging with in the restaurant, right? So I think it’s clear that there was a stronger personal connection with your co workers, yes, then yeah, classmates, yeah,

Anne M. Hornak
yes. And I so my first day on campus. I so I when I was preparing for this. I knew I started classes in January, but I knew in December, you know, I started getting all the materials applying for a community college in your own community, like I thought would be kind of easy. I applied, and then I got all the placement tests, like you have to take all the placement tests. And so I set my transcripts, and obviously didn’t have to take all the placement tests because of my degrees. And I’m sure they were probably like, this is really interesting, and I didn’t sign up as a lifelong learner, and then I got a bill for out of county. And if you get a bill for out of county, the steps you have to take to get it changed, and we’re talking a significant amount of money. It was a lot. Like, I can see how someone that it was another data point of, we don’t make this easy. Like, you know, there’s a bunch of hoops you have to go through. So that was my first like, wow, why can’t we make this just a little bit easier? Like, nobody gets a utility bill in the mail anymore. How come I can’t just, you know, send in my electronic but you have to print it off and take it in. And it was so there was that. And then the other thing that really threw that really gave me pause was my very first day of class. I pull into the parking structure and I’m, like, really excited, you know, first day of college, and I see students swiping something on the door, and then the door would open. And I was like, Oh, I wonder what they’re doing. And then I see them taking out something, and, you know, doing this. And I thought, oh my gosh, I don’t have anything like this is, am I going to

Heather Shea
be able to swipe? It’s like, an ID, or something like that, an ID.

Anne M. Hornak
I don’t have an so I follow someone in. Get in really easily. And then I went up to my first class, the professor, and I said, I’m curious about this card. And it says all over, you know, must have whatever. And they said, Oh yeah, you have to have, like, you can go downstairs to the Student Service Center, whatever, and and get one. And I was like, okay, and I had time in between classes. So I go down, sign up. It’s taking forever. I had to go to my other class. I had to go back and all i Then I thought, I must have missed something. Like, there must be an email. So in as a academic person, I went through all the emails. I went through they send you, you know, the materials from orientation that you attended, nothing, nothing about this card and Id buildings being locked. And I guess there was a soft lock in the fall. And I get it. I mean, you know, our college and universities are pretty porous. They’re, it’s easy. So I nothing, nothing. So that was my first, like, wow, this would have been, I mean, this could have turned out really differently. I could have just turned my car around and, you know, full refund, and not done this. So it, I mean, I’ve worked at a community college, so, so I know that the the keeping students like we have to make it easy. We have to make seamless. We have to, you know, do these things. Because it, even though it, I mean, we all know intuitively, it’s not, it’s it becomes a, oh my gosh. I should have known that I’m not going to be successful in this. Like that was that kept going through my mind. And I remember that from students when I worked at the community college, and students literally, like, lack of planning. They were driving by, and they’re like, I just decided to go back to school today. And I’m like, This is awesome. And that’s Community College can do that, but we’re, we’re now adding like these barriers and hoops that students can’t do that anymore. And I, I understand the safety element and stuff like that. But that was a that was a moment where it was, it was a little bit stressful. The other one about the. Learning side. That was really, I thought, Oh, I’m going to rock this learning management system, like I build classes. You know, CMU uses Blackboard. I’m pretty good at this. No, I think technical skills it, and I don’t, I don’t want to disclose what LMS they use, but there’s, and maybe it’s the setup. So I a very different understanding of the back of the user side now that I think has informed by teaching, and really different ways that I think it was an unintended consequence of doing this study that, you know, we we think these are kind of cool things to our classes, and they’re really barriers to learning. They’re really barriers to access. So I’m so much more thoughtful about that now to having been at, you know, on the user side of it,

Heather Shea
yeah, yeah. When you think about, like, the process, and it sounds, it sounds like the logistics kind of worked their way out. But maybe talk a little bit about how you chose the roles of a restaurant server and community college student, you know, when you had to create a schedule, you know, of like, these are the times that I can work. These are the times that I can go to class. Like, maybe just a little bit about that. Like, What was a typical week in your life? Like, logistically, yeah,

Anne M. Hornak
so I should probably say the reason I chose the restaurant I chose was my next door neighbor is the general manager. So this, I want to be pretty Yeah, and I also didn’t want to be, you know, I know how hard it is to get service workers. I mean, I saw so many people come and go. It’s, I mean, it is a revolving door. I didn’t want to go in, get trained, someone invest in me and then leave. So I was super upfront about I’m going to work. You know, if you will have me. I will work from January, and I’ll, you know, finish before Labor Memorial Day. So I stayed a little bit into May, um, beyond the classes or when school ended. Um, so that was I felt, you know, I felt pretty lucky by that so, but I still had to go through the application process I still had to go through all the training it was, I can say it was a corporate restaurant. There’s so many rules related to uniform and dress, hair, makeup, jewelry, some of it’s really, you know, I as someone who kind of pays attention to these things, I thought, Wow, this, some of these are sort of steeped in sexism, definitely, classism, um, you know, and I’m Sure, you know, we’ve had lots of national conversations about natural hair, and some of them I get from a safety perspective, like nail polish and nails and length of nails and stuff like that. But some other ones, I think, as an industry, could probably think about, um, what, you know, the way that they represent and that. So that was, that was the first thing I noticed. So I buy so when you go in for training, you have to wear the uniform, and the uniform was khaki pants, black pants, or jeans with no distress. So you couldn’t have any like distress on your jeans. And if you have belt loops, you have to wear a belt that was super weirdly interesting. Whatever your shirts could be, white, pastel yellow, pastel pink or pastel blue, and that was it, yep, and they had, you can wear short sleeve or a long sleeve. You had to have a collar. So I got on Amazon and got, like, a bunch of cheap shirts, because you blow through your shirts. And here’s the other thing I learned, when you carry a tray, it burns the forearms of your, of your so wearing short sleeves was, like, really, you your arm would get, like, a little bit burnt because they’re hot, you know, you take them off the the hot to keep them hot. So that was a, yeah, that was interesting. But so I go in the first day for training, and I have on black shoes with white soles. And so as someone who’s a little bit older, I bought nice shoes because I didn’t want to slip and fall, but I also wanted to be comfortable knowing that I’d be on my feet every single day. Those were wrong. I couldn’t wear those. They have to be black shoes with black soles. Oh,

Heather Shea
like this, the color of the souls was important. Yes, you had to provide all of these things, right? Yeah, you had to. You had to buy your own if, how about your full attire? What did they give you? I gave you an apron and an apron. Apron, one apron,

Anne M. Hornak
you said. You asked me how long, how many hours I worked? So I worked, I averaged about 25 hours. So I worked almost every day because most shifts were anywhere from like three to five hours. Um, I didn’t always have time to wash my apron. I did have access to a washer and dryer. I found that that’s a massive luxury for most of my co workers who didn’t have access to a washer and dryer in their home. And, you know, that only happened. But imagine you’re a patron at a restaurant and someone comes up with an apron on that’s mean they get really dirty and gross. That was, you know, I did, couldn’t wash it every single day, but I at least had the option to, you know, clean it and stuff. If you wanted more aprons, you had to buy them. I don’t remember how much they were. I never bought them. So, yeah, everything was provided by you, besides the apron and the name tag and everything was the apron had to be tied in a certain way. Your name tag went a certain place. You had, oh, they gave you a little booklet, you know that your little folio thing that you can write in, and, yeah, that’s it. Or the uniform, yep, wow. And there were people that were dress coded at work that got sent home. So I always thought about that. It was never people my age or, you know, it was always probably, I’m just going to guess the my co workers that needed the money the most, so then they’re spending extra gas. So some of the punitive things that I saw also had the most impact on, you know, my co workers, in ways that was, you know, probably the difference between eating and not in some cases. The other thing one of my big ahas was when, so I chose to work the afternoon, evening. I did have some guardrails, so I never worked a Saturday. I worked one Sunday once it was so busy that I it was like it was just kind of the most awful experience my entire life. And never worked another Sunday morning, and I picked up the shift, so I had the luxury to do that, but I wasn’t taking away from anyone, because those are the shifts that most of the college students wanted, because you make the most money. So I worked pretty much every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, some Fridays and then Sunday nights. Was mostly my shift. Every once in a while, when a morning shift came up, I would pick it up. If I didn’t have class, I tried to pick up quite a few shifts, because my tuition bill was kind of stressing me out. And even in this experimental, you know, study I was doing, it was super stressful, and all I was doing was paying myself back. So in the whole scheme of it, in 16 weeks, it took me 11 weeks to pay back, wow, fees. Remember, I only took nine credit hours, tuition fees, books and uniforms, um, gas and stuff like that was a little more fluid. But here’s the reason it stressed me out, is if this were real, I would have then been registering for my next semester like, that’s right about when I was getting emails to say, register and most to, you know, most institutions bill at least a little bit before, you know, they so I would have had a tuition bill come due if I had registered for the next semester. So that was jarring to me, when I got that email to think, wow, I’ve just now, like kind of paid myself back. So servers in the state of Michigan make $3.93 an hour. That is the server tipped wage, I would say, on average, when I figured it all out, I made about $11 an hour. There were nights when I like, I went an hour without a table, which you’re not making any money, when you’re just kind of standing around doing nothing. That gets really stressful too. So because I really tried really hard to kind of be be in the study when I wasn’t making money like it really was stressful to me, even though I, you know, I always, I always had a financial safety net, always, always, always, and I knew I had that privilege. Right? But I tried to think, like, you know, it really would be one of the other things that I noticed. And there’s a reason, in enough of my conversations with my co workers who work at a restaurant is they’re intentional about choosing a restaurant, because there’s the illusion of making more money, you know, through tips, and it works. I mean, the better you are, the more you tip, although I I learned that tipping is very much generational, so it depended on, you know? I mean, it’s kind of an interesting I think we kind of know that. But is the they worked at night because food was then an option. So there’s lots of things that can’t be reused at a restaurant, that didn’t automatically just, hey, take it all people. But there were definitely, there was definitely at least two of my colleagues that knew that when they worked at night, they could get food at night, and that would be their food for the night, and then potentially, you know, lunch the next day.

Heather Shea
Wow, wow. Yeah, that’s, that’s another interesting kind of dynamic. Is how you kind of witnessed other people around you, kind of managing their lives and their their essential needs and and everything. Um, I’m curious about some of the biggest surprises or things that you, you know, learned about yourself, you know, things that particularly tested you, you know, at the end of, I mean, you’re here and you’re talking about it, so obviously you made it through. But like, how did you manage it all, and what are some of the biggest surprises or challenges that you thought of as you were doing this.

Anne M. Hornak
So in full disclosure, I am 52 this work is so hard my body. I consider myself to be in really good shape. I run. I’m really physically active. It is back breaking work, though, to get heavy tray, a hot tray, to be on your feet, I wish I would attract steps in working. So I I would average, I would come home and I’d average somewhere between 25 and 30,000 steps after working. And this, I mean, okay, mind you’re on so, you know, I’m four to six miles every day, but, so, I mean, I started with more but, and I was also really bad at serving. So the detail piece for me was, like, really hard. So averaging, I struggled mightily with, you know, not parching people and trying to keep their beverages full. Um, in the most number of tables, like, usually you manage is, like, somewhere between five and six and and, you know, I worked at night, so there were nights when it was, like, out of control. You’re just running back and forth and, but you do get into a temperament of, like, you get into a pattern of knowing, like, go get their drinks, put their food in, you know, not, don’t overwhelm the kitchen. I mean, it does, it does come. It didn’t like quite for me, I I was surprised, and maybe this was my, like, own, you know, sort of lacking humility, but how kind of bad I was at serving. I thought, I’m a really intelligent person. I can manage lots of things at once, maybe not great. I mean, you know, nobody’s really the greatest, you know, dual or multi tasker, but that is like really hard work and such a different way of thinking. It, it. This did not surprise me at all, but I worked with some brilliant people that were just so smart, so caring, so loving, and that’s I think I started talking about it earlier, but the the connection I had with the people at the restaurant was just really powerful. And they asked me to stay. I wanted to stay through the summer. And I was like, um, yeah, my body can’t take this anymore, yeah, you know. And I started to tell people, I’ll talk about this in a little I started to tell people at the end, when I left, because I really, like, I like, fell in love with some of these people. I mean, they’re just wonderful. And I want to, you know, kind of see where where they go, because I got to know them really well. And, you know, they told me things and disclosed things, and I was able to connect them to resources. So there were also times when, I think this paralleled a little bit of nickel and dimed is I was here for a reason, like there was a reason that this came to me and kind of asked me about these things, um, but I knew, I said no to the stain, because I knew that I’d never work, like it wouldn’t be the same if I only work once a week. You know, it just it wouldn’t. I mean, again, people, it’s a revolving. Door like people are leaving all the time with no notice. Usually. I mean, I kind of did the same thing too, but one of the biggest things so I did do three interviews at the very end with the managers, the general manager, the there’s two general managers there. One is now gone. I think they’re like a general manager in training. And then the then there’s a person that kind of oversees all the training and the hiring. And I was really intrigued about their journeys, because one of the things that when people find out I was taking a break from education, a lot of these college students that were like my kids ages, would talk about, like, I don’t like school so hard, it’s so expensive, I don’t know if I need school. And, you know, kind of having these, and I was never there to talk them into or out of or I would just sit and, like, listen and process with them. But that was like, over and over again. So then when I realized that the GMs, who, so if you’re at a corporate restaurant, there’s usually a minimum um, living wage, um most, and I found this out from some other research, but most general managers at a corporate restaurant make about $100,000 a year and up. Wow, are limited an hour. So at the restaurant that I was at, it was 50 hours a week. Now, the work’s not fancy sometimes, and there’s a lot of paperwork. There’s a lot of You’re always like, motivated by the bottom line and people, and you know how fast you turn over tables and stuff like that. So the pressures great, but I thought that’s a like, good living wage, you have to be willing to do anything. So if the line chef doesn’t show up, you’re the line chef, if the custodian doesn’t show up, you’re the custodian. I mean, you also have to be, you know, able to pivot and do that work too, the dishwasher, whatever. But the three individuals that I interviewed, none of them went to college, and they’re all doing well. I mean, if you think about supporting family, all of them are in dual income families with dependents, and you know, that’s above the average for the county that I did the study in by quite a bit. So I was intrigued by, I mean, I think most of us in higher ed are pretty intrigued by the role of higher education. The do you need higher education? Like, is it really the economic driver that you know, the great promise of higher education. And in this case, you know, these are individuals that actively chose, you know, not to and for a multitude of reasons. The biggest one was cost. And then the second one is, I didn’t really like school. Like, school was not my like, this is my jam. Like, I love the hype, the fast pace, the most of these individuals have been at multiple restaurants, but the one person who oversees the training and stuff has been with this company for like, 30 years. Wow. So around a bit again, corporate restaurant all over, all over, at least this side of the Mississippi. And I’m like, Okay, so there’s always kind of a place, place to land, and different opportunities the other two have been at, like, a ton, ton of different, you know, restaurants, corporate, local, and I asked some of the difference in that too, but so that’s a, you know, that was that always kind of interest me. And as I listened to some of the stories of my co workers about just one. So this one’s in the blog, but I’ll tell this one is this person’s a student who maybe didn’t do well on I didn’t quite understand why they had to attend this Zoom meeting. So extra Zoom meeting for a class. So taking a class didn’t do well on one of the quizzes, so the instructor or professor said, you have to attend this mandatory zooming. It’ll be at x time. Well, this person was working and this person needed to work rent to pay. You know, there was no option. And the other thing that I learned is there’s no calling in. So when you call in, you let your whole team down. So when four people work at night and one person calls in like, it is, it is a big deal, and I got COVID in the middle of this, and I called, I called and said, I have COVID, and what’s the COVID protocol? And they kind of laughed at me, and I said, Well, I don’t feel terrible, but I’m not coming in like that’s just so immoral to me. I just can’t I also don’t think that anybody wants their food served by someone wearing a mask like, that’s really like, super cringy. But so this person had to attend this Zoom meeting. So we, the rest of us, said. Um, people take your tables. You attend like, we need you to be successful in this class. And I mean lots of tears, lots of like, stressing out about this. So the other thing I like, a big aha for me was, I think sometimes as faculty, we make offerings to students like, oh, just come to this six to seven extra study session or this. I mean, I don’t really do this, but I know other faculty do, and that is that does not fit into the world of someone who’s working to make it working to pay for classes. Um, it really is just such an extra burden on our financially strapped students that we really have to like, think about that. And how do we, how do we offer extra help and time when there’s already time committed? So can you take some away from class to, you know, help students like, we just have to be way more thoughtful about that, because it has pretty it’s pretty consequential to our working our working students. The other one that really I this is when my sort of outside the research, but you know, just kind of pulls at every heartstring is there was another full time, full time student whose degree program is unique in that there’s lots of, like, extra labs. So it wasn’t like I go to classroom one to three, Monday, Wednesday.

Anne M. Hornak
Like the their ability to work was very limited by their chosen major, and they, this person works at this restaurant in the summer, like at home and makes enough money. But by I think it was about the eighth week of the semester, was starting to run out of money and home, was able to help a little bit, but they were relying on food every night. So there was this sliding scale of food. You could purchase food like, purchase a meal, not just get like, leftover food. And it depended on how many hours you work, how much percentage you got off. I never understood it because I didn’t eat anything there as because of food allergies. And if you So, I know this person worked intentionally so that it was a 75% off meal and would buy two meals so that they would have a meal for the next day. And I mean, you’re talking about the difference between, like 1499 and like 399 it gets a big there’s a huge difference there. And we had lots of conversations about this. And so they were starting to run out of money, like all their summer money, and, you know, so them every opportunity they had to close like on the weekends, they would take work extra hours. And I said, Well, when do you study like, when do you just be be? When do you just sit in no time for that, no time for that. And this person will still be $41,000 in debt when they finish their degree, and I would say, without disclosing major, but probably their highest earning will be about $45,000 a year knowing, you know the field that they’re going into. So yeah, that is the I mean, I got real specifics with this student, but that’s, I don’t think that that was more normal than not normal, probably for the popular the, you know, my co workers, and the population that I was working in and, you know, talking to. So, I mean, that’s the stress of that, and, you know, coupled with so many other things is I think we just need to do more more work on and I think so much of our financially strapped work and our low income work has been numerically to, you know, kind of situate it. And now I think we need to really dig in and really understand like. So what are the what ways can we use policy and practice to guide and aid and, you know, help and demystify it really, because these students aren’t going to pop up on a spreadsheet as high need, they are high need. That’s, you know, that’s kind of the population that I’m really interested in, that and that I met, you know, over and over again, the other big aha for me was health care and health so many of these students are part of the cycle of low income houses. So I. Um, Aaron’s guardians home, um, have insurance for themselves, but not, you know, insurance where, like, I can keep my kids on until they’re 26 years old, like my institution isn’t going to say, you know, that’s, that’s the luxury, the privilege that I have. Um, that is not the lived experience of people who work in low wage, you know, jobs in this country so lots of students without health insurance, but with health issues. And one of my co workers came up to me and just for some reason, disclosed a health issue, and I was able to just from my network, like, get this individual connected to what they needed, and so, so thankful, like they were just, you know, and I thought, Wow, isn’t that? I mean, I don’t know where this, this was never my lived experience, but I don’t know, like, we don’t do a good job of making that transparent and making because most of our community colleges have sliding scales or health centers or community resources that they can go to. Most of our four year institutions. There’s lots of nonprofits and communities, usually county you know, that will help some of our or some of the college students and students in the area. So, but you know, where do we advertise that? Like, how do these students, like, sort of find out and dig for this information?

Heather Shea
Yeah, yeah. And I, I’m thinking about that, you know, because each student maybe has a unique circumstance, whether they’re covered under their parents, or whether they’re on their own, or whether they’re take, you know, taking a university type of if there was a university type of health insurance? Yeah, the it’s almost like, and I’ve used this metaphor before, but it’s almost like you need a secret decoder ring to get all of the components to match up right. And it sounds like the things that you took away from this were really, you know, not just impactful for this period of time, but really has shaped your views, right of going forward in higher ed. So I’d love to unpack that a little bit like, what are, what are some of the insights that you think maybe only were realizations after having done this experience, right? This is this, like embedded experience probably opened a whole new perspective. So I’d love to hear you here talk a little bit about

Anne M. Hornak
that. Yeah. So I think, I think of all the resources we have on campuses, right? We We have so many resources. We talk about underutilized resources that we have all these offices that help, that help our students, that guide our students, that, you know, identity centers. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s huge we have, we also have, you know, most of our campuses have, you know, hundreds of RSOs that maybe aren’t like research risk, but their connection, where, if we have students in and I would say, I didn’t ask this question, but I kind of got quite a bit of insight into, let’s just say, I worked with about 20 different college students, or that came and went in my time in this study, and probably 75% of them were first generation college students. And most of them were on the edge of just being done with, like, being fed up with man, like working and college like it was, you know, and I never, it was, I was not some savior. It was never my job to, like, talk them in and out of I would just, you know, in conversation, this would kind of come up. So I take that now and think these are all students that would fall through the cracks at every one of our institutions because we don’t know about them. We don’t, they don’t kind of fit into enough of an at risk category that they would probably rise to the top of any sort of you know,

Heather Shea
data, poll, resource, resources, yeah, yeah.

Anne M. Hornak
They’re not like, they don’t come in with a label, maybe the first generation, like, I think we do a little bit of a better job, but that’s such a there. It’s so wide and diverse. And, you know, it’s hard to say, you know, we do this for first generation students. It’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a multi layered and then I think the biggest takeaway is these were all students that were second, third and sometimes fourth year students, and I think that’s where we under resource. We like, I think we do a lot in terms of the transition and helping students transition, but then it just sort of falls off. And, you know, we do so much. We I think we think we do a. Really good job of understanding and, you know, we’ve done a lot of work in terms of student development. You know, when they’re at this point, their needs are this and this point and this point. But this is all like kind of new. I mean, some of this is emerging out of a pandemic. Some of this is emerging out of a just really sort of wacky economy that none of us, I mean, I’m not an economist, but there’s just so many sorts of like, kind of weird, weird things. And you know, who’s recovered and who hasn’t? And these are the the parts of our world, the families of our world, the individuals of our world that haven’t recovered, like, they’re, you know, they’re like, spending 699 on a loaf of bread is a lot of money. Um, nobody spends 699 on a loaf of bread unless you are gluten free. Sorry, you’re like, what? Where do you buy your bread? Um, but, you know, I mean, the cost of everything is just so much more so it impacts the individuals that I met and worked with the most. So what do our college and universities? I don’t have a magic answer to this, but one of the things I like, I talked to a group of academic advisors, and I said, you at community colleges and a four year here at CMU, and I said, you are probably someone outside of if they live on campus, that these students will come to, you’re their lifeline, like you’re their person. You’re there everything, especially at a community college where you know you’re, you know, I think oftentimes our students think, oh, an academic advisor, I’m gonna get my checklist, I’m gonna know what classes to take, I’m gonna know what to transfer. But there’s, I mean, we all know that it goes into so much more and it becomes this, like true Lifeline is, but I don’t know that we arm our academic advisors with all of this information and resources and in the same place. Well, you know, saying, Oh, go to the accounts receivable, go to the registrar’s office, go to, you know, whatever, short of walking them there. You know, most of our students don’t, don’t know that. Actually, if you go talk to somebody in financial aid, there’s a menu of, you know, there’s different ways. The other one, that is my I will yell from the top of every mountain, is every single student needs to fill out a FAFSA. If you are the wealthiest student or the most in need student, you need to fill out a FAFSA. And this is I learned this from my friend that is going to run out of money did not fill out a FAFSA because they’ve never filled out a FAFSA, because they’ve never run out of money, because they’ve always, like, their money’s been able to stretch like money doesn’t stretch like it used to waiting on an emergency loan, but waiting for the FAFSA like to now go through in like, March. So that has been, I mean, you can’t get it, you know, you don’t want to go to a bank, like we, at least said, someone told this individual, like, you don’t want to go to a bank. That’s going to cost you so much more in the long run. This is this you need, you need a FAFSA. And if you you know, a lot of our students will not get any free money the first time they fill out a Fauci and they don’t fill it out again. That’s I, yeah, talking to enough people now to know that that’s also but there’s scholarships that are associated with fascis that aren’t that you have to have that on file. It really is a gateway. It’s a it’s a tool that can open up a lot of different economic resources for students that I think we as college educators need to, you know, talk more about. And I also, as a faculty member, think this is not, we don’t put all this labor on the practitioners, so this is in all the work of the academic advisors and the student affairs. Like as faculty, who are in front of students every single day, need to be armed with some of this information to understand. Like, what does it mean when I add a seven o’clock Zoom meeting, a five o’clock study session? You know, hey, we’re going to go do this. There’s an opportunity to go do this field trip like those, those caught, those have cost consequences, maybe not monetary, to our working students, in ways that I don’t think people you know fully understand. And we need to be get better about that.