Recently, I went to a conference for higher education professionals. It was a space that managed to be simultaneously educational and affirming. I started working in higher education almost on accident, but the conference helped to reinforce that I had joined the right field.

Over the course of the four days I was there, I learned an incredible amount from all of the conference sessions I was able to attend. There was one on the program that particularly caught my eye:

"6 Strategies for Your Student Affairs Side Hustle"

At first, I was happy to see it. I freelance for multiple websites and work on my own fiction in addition to my full-time job, so I was interested in learning how others balanced their commitments.

I added the half-hour session to my schedule and made plans to go.

But then I thought about it.

This was a conference for higher education professionals. Everyone had at least a master's degree, if not a Ph.D. Why did we even need a side hustle?

Why aren't universities paying their student affairs professionals enough to live off of in the first place?

Starting salaries in student affairs are in the mid-to-low 30 thousand range. This is after usually incurring significant debt in order to get a master's degree, usually in higher education administration or college student development.

Faculty members may be teaching classes (and adjunct faculty aren't valued highly enough either, but that's another story), but student affairs professionals are the ones creating the college experience for students.

Your residence hall was run by an SAPro. Your orientation experience? Student affairs. All those clubs you want to join to get involved? You guessed it -- student affairs.

These are the same people who never work a 40 hour work week so that they can get all of their work done and support their students. They're on campus in the evenings for student meetings and on the weekends for events.

It is shameful that the issue of underpaying student affairs professionals is so widespread that a session at a conference was dedicated to helping educated professionals pay their bills.

I won't pretend to have an answer to the problem, because the issue is complex. But I do think that we need to have a serious conversation about what it is that universities value and why.