Angst and Hope E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B SS Single Issue Student Services
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 201

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Take an in-depth look at current trends, opportunities, and challenges for senior student affairs leaders. This volume focuses on contexts for understanding student affairs leadership and experiences of contemporary student affairs leaders, including issues of concern, such as: * affordability and access, * student health and well-being, * diversity and inclusion, and * regulations and compliance. The volume concludes with a discussion of the similarities and differences in the data across the themes and questions and offers some propositions regarding the implications for current and future student affairs leadership. This is the 153rd volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education quarterly series. An indispensable resource for vice presidents of student affairs, deans of students, student counselors, and other student services professionals, New Directions for Student Services offers guidelines and programs for aiding students in their total development: emotional, social, physical, and intellectual.

Leseprobe

New Directions for Student Services

Elizabeth J. Whitt EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

John H. Schuh ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Angst and Hope: Current Issues in Student Affairs Leadership

Elizabeth J. Whitt

Larry D. Roper

Kent T. Porterfield

Jill E. Carnaghi

EDITORS

Number 153 • Spring 2016

Jossey-Bass

San Francisco

ANGST AND HOPE: CURRENT ISSUES IN STUDENT AFFAIRS LEADERSHIP Elizabeth J. Whitt, Larry D. Roper, Kent T. Porterfield, Jill E. Carnaghi (eds.) New Directions for Student Services, no. 153

Elizabeth J. Whitt, Editor‐in‐Chief John H. Schuh, Associate Editor

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CONTENTS

Editors’ Notes

What Do (Some) Student Affairs Leaders Think?

Themes: What Troubles You? What Keeps You up at Night?

Themes: What Excites You? What Keeps You Going?

Overview of the Sourcebook

1: Past, Present, and Future: Contexts for Current Challenges and Opportunities for Student Affairs Leadership

Current Context

“A Corrective Look Back”

Back to the Present and the Future

References

2: What Troubles You? What Keeps You up at Night?

Affordability and Access

Student Health and Well-Being

Diversity and Inclusion

Regulations and Compliance

Technology and Media

Student Affairs Leadership

Conclusion

References

3: What Excites You? What Keeps You Going?

It's All About the Students

Making a Difference

Collaboration and Community

Leading and Facilitating Change

Learning, Data, and Scholarship

Our Work

Conclusion

References

4: Embracing Core Values: Finding Joy in the Challenges of our Work

Considering Janus and Other Complications

Revisiting Core Values and Contemporary Challenges

Reframing the Work

Declaring and Affirming Core Values

Declarations (or Debatable Propositions) About Student Affairs Work and Student Affairs Leadership

Conclusion

References

Index

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Advert

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Editors’ Notes

The idea for this sourcebook came from our individual and collective experiences in student affairs and our collective interest in looking back and looking ahead at the nature of student affairs work. Our professional careers in higher education and student affairs span most of the past five decades, so there is considerable looking back we could do! In addition, all of us have experience as senior student affairs administrators, three of us at both private and public institutions, one of us at a private college; all of us have held leadership roles in student affairs professional associations, including examinations of future trends and challenges for student affairs; all of us have taught courses in student affairs preparation programs and two of us are full professors in academic departments at research universities. And all of us still are actively engaged in the scholarship and practice of student affairs and undergraduate education.

Once we had committed to prepare a New Directions for Student Services sourcebook about current trends, opportunities, and challenges for senior student affairs leaders, we identified a number of approaches to that topic, many of which are reflected in the final product. What issues must be addressed? Should we look at student affairs organizations? Student affairs leadership? Trends in external demands that influence student affairs officers? Trends internal to colleges and universities? And how does the past affect the present? There were many directions we could go and issues we could tackle; the choices seemed almost limitless. But we also wanted whatever we produced to be useful (or, at least, interesting) to student affairs leaders.

As we considered options for the focus of the sourcebook, it occurred to us that we ought to start with the people who are on the ground, the people who are facing those opportunities and challenges every day: senior student affairs professionals. But what did we need to know, and from whom?

What Do (Some) Student Affairs Leaders Think?

We decided that if we were going to start with the leaders, we ought to do so in a way that let them speak for themselves and not to our preconceptions. But how might we do that in a way that did not create unreasonable demands on their time? Finally, we hit on the idea of contacting them by e-mail and asking two brief open-ended questions: (a) “What troubles you? What keeps you up at night” and (b) “What excites you? What keeps you going?” We did not know what responses those questions would elicit, but we hoped they would be provocative for the people we contacted.

For specific information about our study process, including participant selection and characteristics and data collection and analysis, please see Appendix A. What follows here is a very brief summary, for the purposes of providing context for the rest of this sourcebook.

We contacted 70 senior student affairs officers in September 2015. The sample was neither random nor representative; instead, we sought a mix of professional experiences, institutional type, geographic distribution in the United States.

We received responses to our questions from 53 of the 70 people we contacted, a 75% response rate, which surprised and pleased us. The 53 (identified in Appendix B) provided the breadth of experience we had hoped for, though, unfortunately, about half of the nonrespondents were senior leaders at private colleges and universities.

The leaders’ responses filled about 40 single-spaced pages, almost two-thirds of which—we were interested to note—focused on what troubled them (Note: You can find the verbatim responses, with identifying information removed, in Appendix C and Appendix D). Their answers were expected and unexpected, and, as we had hoped, both interesting and provocative.

We analyzed the data within and across the broad questions, a process that yielded the themes that follow. Although the themes are listed as though they are discrete, we recognize they are not. Instead, they are interrelated, shaping one another in complicated ways that might differ by campus. So, for example, access to success is likely to be inextricably linked to campus climates for diversity and inclusion, as well as students’ health and well-being.

Themes: What Troubles You? What Keeps You up at Night?

Affordability and access (including affordability of higher education to students and families; access to success, not just admission; access to high-quality and high-impact learning experiences; gaps in achievement and attainment).

Student health and well-being (including mental health challenges and services, campus and student safety, campus resources to support student health and wellness).

Diversity and inclusion (including cultures and climates for diversity and inclusion; inclusive communities; concerns and demands regarding civility, free speech, and discourse of differences; student activism regarding inclusion; multiple and intersecting identities).

Regulations and compliance (including discourse about the value of higher education; external mandates, regulations, and political agendas; perceived conflicts between regulations and compliance and learning and education).

Technology and media (including influences on campuses of 24-hr news cycle and social media; climates of crisis, urgency, and instant gratification)

Student affairs (including roles, perceptions of competence, preparation and experiences, effectiveness of student affairs leadership, models of organization and practice, use of evidence and data to inform decisions).

Most of the responses to “What troubles you?” were framed by concerns about resources; that is, these issues were troubling, in part, because of limited and declining financial and human resources. Therefore, instead of treating resources as a separate theme, we have discussed it in the text of the sourcebook as a critical context for what troubles the respondents.

Themes: What Excites You? What Keeps You Going?

Students (including students as the center of the work, facilitating student learning and success, spending time with students, learning from students).

Making a difference (including the transformative powers of education, creating and sustaining inclusive communities, promoting social justice and equity, uses of digital technologies and social media).

Collaboration and community (including partnerships on and off campus, extending campus borders, teamwork, professional and civic engagement).

Leading and facilitating change (including institutional change and effectiveness, creating transformative organizations, engaging with the academic mission to create seamless learning environments, contributions of student affairs to institutional effectiveness, leading change).

Learning, data, and scholarship (including being a learner; outcomes assessment and program evaluation; using data, theories, and scholarship for decision making; staying current).

“I love my job”: Ultimately, it's all about all the work (including joy, hope, core values and principles, the whole of “what keeps me going”).

Overview of the Sourcebook

The six themes about “What troubles you?” are described and discussed in Chapter 2 and the six themes about “What keeps you going?” are discussed in Chapter 3. Chapter 1 provides a general context for considering current challenges and opportunities for student affairs leaders, including a brief look backward at what has, and has not, changed. In Chapter 4, we address the similarities and differences in the data across the themes and questions and offer some propositions regarding the implications of what we learned from the respondents for current and future student affairs leadership.

We close these notes with a message of deep gratitude for the generosity of our respondents in taking time to share their experiences with us. We hope this sourcebook conveys those experiences in ways the student affairs leaders recognize.

Elizabeth J. WhittLarry D. RoperKent T. PorterfieldJill E. CarnaghiEditors

Elizabeth J. Whitt

is vice provost and dean for undergraduate education and professor in sociology at University of California, Merced

.

Larry D. Roper

is professor in the school of language, culture and society at Oregon State University and coordinator, College Student Services Administration and Social Justice Minor

.

Kent T. Porterfield

is vice president for student development at Saint Louis University

.

Jill E. Carnaghi

is assistant vice president for student development at Saint Louis University

.

1

Contexts for identifying and understanding current opportunities and challenges for student affairs leaders are described and a framework for the rest of the sourcebook is offered.

Past, Present, and Future: Contexts for Current Challenges and Opportunities for Student Affairs Leadership

Kent T. Porterfield, Elizabeth J. Whitt

“We have never faced as many difficult challenges [in higher education] as we do today.”

“So in a word, Yes. Higher education is most assuredly in crisis.”

It might (or might not) be surprising to know those statements are not part of a single assertion and were, in fact, written two decades apart. The first statement was by Robert Atwell at the time of his retirement from the American Council on Education in 1994. As he reflected on his 40-year career in American higher education, Atwell asserted that, in all that time, “we have never faced as many difficult challenges as we do today” (Atwell, 1994, p. 125). Among the difficult challenges he and others described in the 1990s were unprecedented diversity of students seeking higher education; rapid advances in, and expansion of, electronic technologies; waning public confidence in higher education, accompanied by increasing calls for accountability for institutional effectiveness and student learning outcomes; and shrinking financial resources, especially from public sources, accompanied by increases in tuition and reductions in federal support for student financial aid (American College Personnel Association [ACPA], 1994; ACPA and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators [NASPA], 1997; Andreas & Schuh, 1999). In their discussion of these and other challenges facing higher education in general and student affairs in particular, Rosalind Andreas and John Schuh said—with, perhaps, some understatement—“Few would characterize the 1990s as a ‘Golden Age’ for postsecondary education” in the United States (Andreas & Schuh, 1999, p. 1). A long list of reports calling for reforms in higher education, especially with regard to undergraduate student learning and success, supported that assertion (see American Association for Higher Education [AAHE], ACPA, & NASPA, 1998; ACPA, 1994; ACPA & NASPA, 1997; Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 1998; Johnson & Cheatham, 1999; National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges [NASULGC], 1997, 1999, 2000).

The second statement was written by Goldie Blumenstyk, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2015. She posed the question, “Is higher education in America in crisis?,” then surveyed the current landscape to reach her answer: “So in a word, Yes. Higher education is most assuredly in crisis” (Blumenstyk, 2015, p. 1). Elements of that landscape of crisis included the following:

Over the past thirty years, the price of college has gone up … Student debt is at an all-time high … Doubts about the value of college are on the rise. State support for the public sector … has yet to (and may never) return to the generous levels of the early 2000s … Collectively, colleges reflect—some say even amplify—the racial and income inequities of the nation's neighborhoods … And a restless reform movement, inspired by the promise of new technology and backed by powerful political and financial might is growing more insistent that the enterprise spend less, show better results, and become more open to new kinds of educational providers. (Blumenstyk, 2015, p. 1)

It seems safe to conclude, then, that the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century also is not a “golden age” for American higher education. As in the 1990s, contemporary calls for reform, including reform of undergraduate education, are plentiful and persistent (see American Association of Community Colleges, American Association of State Colleges and Universities [ASCU], & Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities [APLU], 2015; Arum & Roksa, 2011; Byrne, 2006; Carey, 2015; Craig, 2015; Keeling & Hersh, 2011; Lumina Foundation for Education, 2009; National Association of Student Personnel Administrators [NASPA] & ACPA, 2004; Shirky, 2014; Task Force on the Future of Student Affairs [Task Force], 2010; U.S. Department of Education, 2006; White House, 2013). In fact, we might wonder when that golden age was, as evidence of similar critiques and similar challenges can be found in higher education and student affairs literature well before the 1990s (see American Council on Education [ACE], 1937, 1949; ACPA, 1975; Appleton, Briggs, & Rhatigan, 1978; Brown, 1972; Kuh, Whitt, & Shedd, 1987; Lloyd-Jones, 1954; Mueller, 1961; Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984).

That is a topic to which we return later in this chapter, the purpose of which is to describe and discuss the context for current student affairs leaders and their roles. As we stated in the Editors’ Notes, this New Directions for Student Services sourcebook focuses on contemporary challenges and opportunities for student affairs leadership. The specific challenges and opportunities we examine were provided by a group of student affairs leaders (note: for simplicity, we refer to them hereafter as “the student affairs leaders” or “our respondents”) in Fall 2015 (see the Appendices for information about those leaders and the data they provided). To consider the meaning and implications of those individuals’ reflections and experiences for student affairs leadership at this point in time, we assume the context of those experiences—the current state of American higher education—is relevant. We also decided, however, to focus on the “student affairs” portion of the leaders’ experiences, a decision that led us to take a brief look at historical and current trends in student affairs work.

We begin this chapter with additional information about the current state of American higher education. We then shift our perspective to student affairs work and examine its development by looking at some key documents in the history of student affairs. We conclude with a brief look at two perspectives on how the student affairs profession and student affairs leaders could respond to current trends.

Current Context

As we noted above, critiques of American higher education from inside and outside the academy have sounded a consistent drumbeat of urgent needs for reform of current practices and structures for more than three decades. The content of the drumbeat has been just as consistent: increasing costs and declining funding, inadequate responses to shifting student and national demographics, new competitive economic demands, complex technological advancements, globalization, and increasing public skepticism that colleges and universities provide a quality return on investment.

There are certainly contemporary critics of higher education who raise the same concerns. For example, Clay Shirky (2014), consultant and educator on internet technologies, claims that colleges and universities are perfectly situated for a time that no longer exists: a time of rapid growth, elasticity in the price of tuition, homogenous student populations, and great institutional and system autonomy. He maintains that, as the economics of higher education changed, colleges and universities did not. Instead, we assumed an unlimited supply of students, continuing government funding levels for research, and a purely additive model of operating. As we grew beyond our resources, we made only the slightest of adjustments and spent decades trying to preserve and defend practices that have outlived the business model in which we continue to operate. In doing so, we have tested the patience of our public, as well as colleagues in the academy (Shirky, 2014). Our critics argue, and the facts are compelling, that colleges and universities in the Unites States are underserving the overwhelming number of citizens who need and desire postsecondary education, and we continue to place our bets on a system that works for fewer and fewer students. That is, the number of undergraduate students who attend college full time, live on campus, and require limited amounts of financial aid and academic support continues to dwindle.

At the same time, the importance of higher education has increased to the point that undergraduate education verges on a “requirement of a fully expressed citizenship” in contemporary society (Shapiro, 2005, p. 8). In a 2009 address to Congress, President Barack Obama asserted

[Whatever] the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma … That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. (Speech to the Joint Houses of Congress, February 24, 2009)

In 2013, President Obama announced “an ambitious new agenda” (White House Fact Sheet, August 22, 2013) to widen access to higher education by increasing affordability. This agenda was aimed at increasing institutional accountability for successful student outcomes by, among other things, establishing a ratings system that was intended to tie federal financial aid to institutional performance (e.g., graduation rates, community college transfer rates, earnings of graduates, student debt, and enrollment rates of low-income students) (Blumenstyk, 2015).

In 2015, the United States Department of Education claimed that college is no longer a luxury for the privileged, “but a necessity for individual economic opportunity and America's competitiveness in the global economy. At a time when jobs can go anywhere in the world, skills and education will determine success, for individuals and for nations” (retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/college). Nevertheless, the cost of attending college has been increasing at a significant rate for more than two decades. Consider that in 1993, the average debt per borrower in the nation's baccalaureate graduating class was below $10,000, whereas in 2015, the number is projected to be $35,000. In addition, in 1993 the percentage of students borrowing to pay for college was approximately 40%, in contrast to more than 70% in 2015. Simply put, more are borrowing and borrowing more (http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/08/congratulations-class-of-2015-youre-the-most-indebted-ever-for-now/)

The characterizations of higher education in 2015 as “most assuredly in crisis” (Blumenstyk, 2015, p. 1), and, at the same time, “the greatest driver of social mobility in America” (U.S. Department of Education, 2015, retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/college) vividly illustrate the contemporary context of student affairs leaders. Potentially competing demands—providing high quality higher education that serves both individual and national needs to more and more diverse students; increasing financial, academic, and social support for those students; expanding institutional aspirations, goals, and responsibilities as resources shrink—create increasingly