University of North Dakota to house some Williston State financial services

GRAND FORKS - Williston State College is partnering with the University of North Dakota to house some financial aid and human resources employees as the oil field-based college struggles to find and keep its own workers.
As soon as possible, UND will hire three new full-time employees and rework the job duties of one that already exists to work on WSC’s financial aid, human resources and accounting paperwork.
“This is just the institutions within the university system trying to be helpful to each other,” UND President Robert Kelley said. “It’s not much more complicated than that.”
UND’s Associate Vice President for Finance and Operations Alice Brekke said WSC will fund the venture, which will cost about $200,000 for salaries and initial training costs.
But UND needs to house the staff because WSC is struggling to keep employees in an area of the state where the cost of living has skyrocketed with the oil boom in recent years. There is also a lot of money to be made in the oil fields as opposed to at a college.
“It’s still a very competitive workforce,” WSC President Raymond Nadolny said. “Williston is a very expensive place to live.”
Nadolny said the partnership goes back about a year ago when WSC transferred one financial aid employee to UND so they could continue to keep someone in that position and then simultaneously lost another employee in that area, making it difficult to keep up with paperwork.
The deal was then talked about in more concrete terms at a meeting with State Board of Higher Education Interim Chancellor Larry Skogen and the university presidents a couple of months ago, and then again at its Feb. 13 budget and finance committee meeting.
This spring, student enrollment at WSC was higher than 1,000 for the first time ever and Nadolny said that number is projected to increase 20 percent next fall, putting even more of a strain on financial aid services.
There have even been talks of creating an Energy Institute in the western side of the state for the College of Engineering and Mines.