College Jobs, Never Easy, Have Become Pressure
Cookers
By Jennifer Howard
W. Kent Barnds loves his job. But with all the
pressures facing higher education these days, it’s not getting any easier.
Mr. Barnds is vice president for enrollment,
communication, and planning at Augustana College, in Illinois. He’s been there
10 years but has worked in higher education since he graduated from college, in
the early 1990s.
A lot has changed in those two-plus decades,
and Mr. Barnds’s job has expanded remarkably. Like other administrators and
faculty and staff members on campuses around the country, he is learning to
live in a world of tighter budgets, swelling regulations, and ever more
assessment and competition.
"The pressure’s greater on enrollment
officers for a whole host of reasons, but we’re not alone," he says.
"There’s increased pressure on every senior leader on a college
campus."
The squeeze to do more, often with less, has
been felt throughout higher education. The proportion of tenure-track jobs
continues to dwindle, the precariousness of choosing the professorial life
reflected in the statistic that some 76 percent of faculty members now work as
adjuncts. In the sciences, researchers have been learning to deal with little to no growth in federal
support for a decade now; the budget of the National Institutes of Health has
fallen about 25 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2003. Their colleagues
in the humanities, meanwhile, feel the weight of increased expectations.
Kathryn A. Conrad, an associate professor of
English at the University of Kansas, values the freedom to teach and research
that her job gives her but worries about how to balance all the demands on her
time. "I want to make a difference in the classroom, in my service, and in
my writing, but it is far too easy to become bogged down in paperwork and
meetings that don’t have a lasting impact," she says via email.
According to Ms. Conrad, many faculty members
now feel obliged to take on administrative tasks involving assessment,
recruitment, or university task forces. "Most of these initiatives are
well intentioned, but there is only so much time, and no new resources to accomplish
them," she says. At the same time, many faculty members feel they have
less say over curricular and other core questions than they did in the past.
The squeeze to do more, often with less, has
been felt throughout higher education.
Administrators, too — in admissions, financial
aid, legal affairs, and athletics, as well as at the level of president and
provost — face a growing burden, even when their jobs are secure. One bright
side: Along with the added pressures come opportunities, at least for some, to
become more involved in top-level planning and to help sharpen or reimagine the
driving mission of their institutions.
At Augustana, Mr. Barnds has felt a
substantial increase in job intensity since the recession of 2008.
"There’s less margin for error," he says. "Family income really
hasn’t rebounded. People aren’t broadening their horizons." If more
students want or need to stick closer to home, that can cut into the pool of
potential applicants, particularly for an institution with a small or local
profile. Those students who do apply come prepared to do more negotiating over
financial assistance, he says.
Adding to the pressure, it seems everyone —
other administrators and faculty members, as well as trustees and development
officers — is now paying closer attention to enrollment numbers than ever
before. "You can’t walk across a campus without people asking you, ‘How
are the numbers?’" Mr. Barnds says. For some enrollment managers, that
leads to burnout. He has responded by embracing new roles: communications and
marketing, giving advice about the college’s website, and strategic planning.
"I certainly feel I’m involved at a
different level than I would have been 10 years ago," Mr. Barnds says.
"There’s a lot more give and take necessary."
Being able to make that kind of big-picture,
strategic contribution is not just a rhetorical or intellectual exercise but a
matter of survival in a tough market, according to David W. Strauss and Richard
A. Hesel. They’re principals with Baltimore-based Art & Science Group, a
consulting outfit that provides market research and strategy advice to
colleges.
"There’s a class system among
institutions," Mr. Strauss says. A handful of elites control their own
destinies, while those at the bottom are most susceptible to market pressure.
Meanwhile, "middle-class" institutions get squeezed, with public
flagships as well as smaller private colleges feeling the pinch. That affects
almost everybody on campus, from top administrators to junior faculty members.
"When the government of a state decides
it’s going to take $350 million out of your budget, that hurts," Mr.
Strauss says. "You have the public and political sectors beginning to
impinge philosophically on the institution."
For some public universities, like those in
Wisconsin and North Carolina, budget and
political pressures have been a matter of high-stakes public drama lately. In
the case of Wisconsin, the faculty’s say in governing the university and even
the fundamental principle of tenure have been called into question.
Even at institutions where the situation isn’t
so dire, budget constrictions have set off waves of strategic rethinking and
adjustments, adding new complexities to already complex jobs.
In Maryland, the state uses a formula to
calculate how much money to give to its community colleges; the percentage used
in that formula declined from 23.6 percent in the 2010 fiscal year to 20.6
percent six years later, says Thomas E. Knapp, vice president for
administrative services at Prince George’s Community College. That doesn’t
sound like a drastic drop, but it means that the colleges collectively have
millions less to work with than they probably would have had the percentage at
least held steady, Mr. Knapp says. His institution also receives less local
support today, with the county contributing 29.7 percent of the college’s
operating budget, down from 33.5 percent six years ago.
It’s not getting cheaper to run a college,
either. Just keeping hardware and software more or less up to date eats up a
lot of money. "Raising tuition and fees on students is the last card we
want to play in building a budget," Mr. Knapp says. "So in turn
you’re having to make sacrifices in other areas."
The challenge for Charlene M. Dukes, Prince
George’s president, and her staff is how to make the new numbers work without
losing sight of the main goal. "We’re all focused on college completion,
college success," she says. "Even as we’re looking at that, we’re
resetting priorities within the institution." That includes not always
filling jobs that come open, scrutinizing academic offerings and student
services to determine what students need and use most, and strengthening
partnerships with businesses to help equip students for the work force.
Keeping up with technology has become a
central issue for the college, Ms. Dukes says, as wired classrooms become the
norm and students clamor for more computer-lab time. Tuition and fees have
risen slightly, and federal and state regulations eat up more time than they
used to. "Financial-aid regulations are pressing for all of us," she
says.
Financial-aid officers everywhere have seen
their job definitions expand — sometimes uncomfortably, says Justin Draeger,
president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Student
Financial Aid Administrators. More and more they’re drawn into enrollment
planning — determining the makeup of their student population — and away from
their traditional focus on need-based aid. The desire to be more hands-on in
shaping enrollment has spread from private colleges to public ones, according
to Mr. Draeger. "The strategies that have the most impact hinge on how a
school utilizes its financial resources in the form of tuition discounts and
scholarships, which inevitably involves the financial-aid office," he
says. For financial-aid officers, "it’s creating more potential
conflict."
"The reality of the job today is you’re
also the CEO of a significant-size operation."
Mr. Draeger sounds a note heard throughout
academe: As federal and state regulations have grown more complex, creating a
culture of assessment and accountability, administrators have had to work harder
on multiple fronts to meet the increased demands of their jobs. Because
colleges do not want to lose federal student-aid eligibility, "we’re
seeing financial-aid officers take on a much heavier role in compliance,"
he says. (See related story.)
Once students arrive on campus, they become
the concern of people like Allen W. Groves, associate vice president and dean
of students at the University of Virginia, a job he’s held since 2007. Mr.
Groves’s predecessor was known as "the walking dean," always out and
about among the students, he says. That kind of interaction is much harder to
pull off now.
"I have worked very hard to make myself
accessible to students," Mr. Groves says. "But the reality of the job
today is you’re also the CEO of a significant-size operation." His team
includes seven associate deans, five assistant deans, and a number of program
and area coordinators. "You’re managing a lot of very sensitive
issues," he says.
Some of those issues — including Rolling Stone’s now-discredited account of an alleged gang rape at a
fraternity house — have been painfully public for the
university in recent months. Beyond the headlines, the regulatory environment
has become much more intense in the past few years, Mr. Groves says. He rattles
off a list of regulations that his office must be expert in: Title IX, the
federal gender-equity law that’s been at the center of numerous campus assault complaints and controversies lately; the Federal
Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa; and the Clery Act, which requires colleges
to report crimes on campus.
That’s a sea change from what the job involved
a decade ago. "And I don’t think the regulatory climate is going to
change," he says. Mr. Groves’s office also deals with free-speech issues,
and he serves on the university’s threat-assessment team and its
athletics-oversight committee. While those are important, he says, "it
severely restricts the time you have to sit down with an individual
student."
Students also remain the focus of Jon Fagg’s
job as senior associate athletic director at the University of Arkansas, but
his job has expanded and become more holistic. The son of a college coach, Mr.
Fagg remembers when players were expected simply to follow directions.
"Today’s student-athletes want to be part of the process," he says. "We
talk about preparing them for the rest of their lives."
That means being aware of what students have
to deal with off the playing field, at home as well as in the classroom:
learning disabilities, special dietary needs, academic and personal struggles.
"It has really evolved into the era of student well-being," he says.
"That’s a term we use a lot at Arkansas."
As a compliance officer responsible for making
sure the university follows the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s
rules, Mr. Fagg thinks a lot about regulations. For him, that’s eased up a
little as the association has revamped those rules. "The
NCAA rule book for a while had been bogged down in some minute details, for
instance defining how many institutional logos could be on a postcard we send
to a prospect," he says. Being freed from some of those details is
liberating, but it also raises expectations, he says, since he and his colleagues
often don’t have an easy (if sometimes arbitrary) rule to follow.
At Northwestern University, Thomas G. Cline,
vice president and general counsel for almost 14 years, is also feeling an
uptick in pressure. "The number of demands on our time has
skyrocketed," he says. A surge in Title IX and sexual-assault cases takes
up a lot of staff time, along with the usual legal activity — employment
claims, real-estate actions, even lawsuits challenging grades — that
universities get drawn into. (See related story.)
"No. 1 on everybody’s list is this issue
of compliance," Mr. Cline says. The agencies making the rules don’t always
make them clear. "We get precious little guidance, and there are a lot of
competing pressures," he says. "It’s a pretty daunting task."
Not daunting enough to make him want to quit —
he says he loves the variety and working for one client whose mission he
believes in. Nor does he have trouble finding job candidates for his legal
team. It helps that university lawyers have good support networks, he says.
For instance, he and a group of fellow lawyers
from the Midwestern consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation
meet regularly to talk about issues of common concern. When something bad happens,
he gets calls of support from colleagues.
"We all know these issues run across the country, and it’s
just a question of who’s going to have one pop up at any given time," he
says. "There are times when it seems pretty overwhelming, but then you catch
your breath and you go on, because it’s a great job."
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