WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Graduate students at Purdue University, strapped this summer by a confusing change in how they were paid for their on-campus work since the start of the year, have been filling social media in recent days with stories about trying to make ends meet with paychecks cut by as much as half since the end of the spring semester.

“I’ll be paying bills late and will need to ask for an extension on rent,” said Roberta Weiner, at Purdue Graduate Student Government Senate representative the past year from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.

“I’ve spent more time combing the Lafayette sharing gardens to save money on produce,” Weiner said, after finding pay from Purdue was cut this summer. “I’m deciding which of my possessions I should try to sell.”

In question – and appearing in a series of blunt, hard-luck stories appearing on Twitter and Facebook under the hashtag #PurduePay – is a changeover from distributing monthly checks to ones every two weeks.

In an attempt to ease the shift, Purdue delivered what it called “transition pay,” starting in January and continuing through the spring semester. Instead of divvying the money in equal payments throughout the year, transition pay offered bumps in cash in each of their bi-weekly checks for teaching courses, doing research or other work at Purdue.

“The goal was to provide a semester transition for the graduate employees to acclimate to a bi-weekly frequency and to minimize the financial impact,” said Tim Doty, a Purdue spokesman.

Here’s the rub, now spilling out on #PurduePay tagged discussions on social media: The money that went out as “transition pay” during the spring semester was docked from paychecks once the summer started.

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“It initially came off like it was some type of bonus,” said Brandon Allen, a fourth-year doctoral student at Purdue.

And it might have seemed that way, starting about the time Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced a one-time, $500 “appreciation payment” to all West Lafayette campus staff who made $75,000 or less. That bonus, by Purdue figures, went to 83 percent of all non-faculty Purdue staff members employed as of Dec. 31, 2018. But it didn’t include graduate students.

“It was almost like a loan,” Allen said, referring to the “transition pay” for graduate students.

“The transition pay was just a portion of our summer salary that we had to pay back,” Allen said. “If their intention was for us to save it for the summer, why wouldn’t they just leave it in place for the summer when we would have received it anyway? … Their excuse was it was supposed to help us. What it actually has done was kick the can down the road so that the summer months is when we would feel the burden.”

What, if anything, Purdue planned to do about mounting complaints wasn’t clear at the end of the week.

According to an explanation posted on Purdue’s online site, the shift from monthly to bi-weekly paychecks in January was part of the university’s “Human Capital Management” project, which included streamlined payroll processes.

Doty said some graduate students move between appointments based on academic year positions and fiscal year positions. He said graduate student also often take additional hourly appointments on campus that pay bi-weekly, instead of monthly. When graduate students moved between a monthly-paid job and a bi-weekly-paid job, they could wait five to six weeks for a pay adjustment to show up in their checks under the previous system, which required Purdue’s business offices to manually process the adjustment.

During the 2016-17 fiscal years, for example, 3,900 graduate appointments were manually adjusted that way, Doty said. The transition to the bi-weekly pay cycle would eliminate 90 percent of those, he said.

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Purdue offered a spreadsheet template to help graduate students figure out how the “transition pay” would affect them. The example on Purdue’s site is based on a graduate student making $24,000 in fiscal year 2019, which ends June 30. In that case, the graduate student would have received a total of $1,230 in “transition pay” between January and May 22. The checks that came after that, and through mid-July, would subtract $1,230.

Doty said graduate students were the only employees on campus affected by the “transition pay” situation.

Weiner said Purdue didn’t do a sufficient job in explaining the process, even when an administrator came to the Purdue Graduate Student Government meeting to discuss the changes in November. Follow-up emails to graduate students during the spring semester didn’t clear matters, either, Weiner said.

“Had graduate students been properly informed and consulted … many would have made the point that these types of ‘solutions’ add to the burden and stress we already face and may actually contribute to the debt burden they were supposed to help address,” Weiner said.

In social media posts at the end of last week, Purdue graduate students were sharing tips about campus food pantries and side jobs that might be available that don’t run afoul with the rules of their graduate appointments. Some were more blatant, going hat in hand to family and friends with PayPal and Venmo accounts.

Brock Warner, a master’s student studying information security, was flipping laptops – picking them up, repairing them and selling them on the side – at the start of summer to make ends meet as paychecks from Purdue were docked. He delayed paying several bills. He also took out a couple of small loans from family in the past week to get him through these two months.

Warner said he reviewed Purdue’s communications about the pay change, “though it wasn’t super-clear what would change and when.”

“It was a struggle for many grad students before the reversal pay issue started,” Warner said. “May of us are making below the poverty line. … I love this university and doing research here, but I’ve had to take on extra projects and jobs, which cuts into the time I can dedicate to research and teaching.”

Weiner described what was “definitely going to be a very lean month for me” that had already caused “a lot of anxiety on top of the stress related to the day-to-day tasks involved with my research.”

“But I’m pretty lucky,” Weiner said. “I have in-town family and friends who can feed me if all else fails. There are many who don’t have that kind of support that I’ve been seeing on Twitter and Facebook.”

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.