by D’Najah Pendergrass Thomas
If the student affairs profession was the star of a superhero movie, the argument could be made that our present reality reflects the point in the film where our heroes find themselves with their backs up against the wall. Beaten and battered by the villains (take your pick from COVID, budget cuts, justice fatigue, or several other candidates), things look dire. Because it’s a fantasy, though, we know they will regroup and emerge victorious.
In reality, there isn’t one secret weapon that will win the day. Instead, it’s going to require deep reconsiderations of what the work entails, who is doing it, how they are compensated, and what can be expected of staff if student affairs and higher education are to rise up and meet the needs of future generations of students while also recruiting and retaining the necessary diverse and skilled talent.
In the first part of this conversation, our panel explored the need to recruit, retain, and advance skilled talent in the field and to establish new strategies for assessing candidates. The panel consists of members of ACUHO-I’s Future of the Profession taskforce: Ann Gansemer-Topf, director of graduate education for the School of Education and associate professor of higher education at Iowa State University; Aja Holmes, assistant dean of students and director of community living at the University of San Francisco; Melvin Jackson, assistant vice provost for faculty engagement, Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity at North Carolina State University; and Devin Schehrer, assistant director for education and development at Missouri State University. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Schehrer: I think this is extra tricky right now because there is an exhaustion that is very real. This is where I believe there’s also a disconnect because employers, institutions, and recruiters are looking for folks that can come in and fix things, save us, relieve pressure, and hit the ground running. That’s not necessarily where the candidate pool is, and, if I’m being honest, it’s not fair to assume they should be. I think we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.
Gansemer-Topf: This isn’t answering it directly, but it is something I consider. We know, or hope, that someone got into student affairs because they had a great mentor and had these great connections. There was this hope that there would be meaning, that this would be meaningful work. Then, maybe, they could work a little bit extra, maybe give up a little because, at the end of the day, they felt good about it. Now we are in a place where people are saying, “I’ve been here for two years, and I’ve not had great conversations with mentors or supervisors or anyone for that matter.” Why would someone go into student affairs? So we have to re-create those meaningful connections, and I don’t know how we do that, but hopefully our institutions will.
I remember talking with students in 2020 who were leaving the field and saying how not many of them could identify a person who had acted as a meaningful connection. That was a red flag for me, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this connection is not happening because of COVID and some other related factors.” I am now wondering how we re-create that meaningful piece because I agree with Jackson that staff want to be valued.
When it comes to value, if you don’t convey the amazing thing that happens when you connect with people and then actually show a student how to be successful, then the value for staff comes down to how their time is being used, what is required of them, and how much they get paid for it. We know they value and find meaning in family and other hobbies. If the work doesn’t give the same amount of meaning, they are going to those other things that do. I was fortunate because I think about my residence hall years and the people I’m still connected with like hall directors and RAs. I randomly run into ex-students now and actually even their kids, and that’s a meaningful connection that continues to give meaning and joy.
Holmes: Yes! We must ask ourselves who those student leaders are in whom we can see the student affairs light, and we must then guide them into knowing that this is a viable field. We have to show them that they can have a great life even if they’ve never been able to explain to their family what they actually do. We must intentionally think about how we take their experiences with us and channel them into a journey that gets them off of our campus to somewhere else to branch out, learn more about this work, and get started as a professional, even if they then want to come back to work here someday.
Jackson: I love all of this, and I agree for the most part; I want them to be fantastic in this field, but at the same time I don’t want to bait and switch a person, because I can only control what I can control. If you work for me, I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of. I can vouch for you and your work being valued in this unit at this institution. But when they go elsewhere, can I be sure that they are going to be valued? I think about it from a fraternity and sorority life perspective, when you think about bigs and littles and the lineage. I’ve hit that point in my career when I fear for some of these predatory institutions that are not focused on making sure these young professionals are taken care of so they don’t become so hurt that they end up with a horrible picture working in higher education. I have become dismayed at some of the horror stories. They were treated poorly, but if they would or could have just pivoted and been over here, they would have been taken care of. Who guides someone through navigating this? I don’t want to send someone to the wolves at a place where the employer is not going to invest in them.
Holmes: Right! I’m going to send them to a place where I know I can literally get on the phone or I can send a direct message and say, “hey.” I’m not going to send them to anyone who isn’t going to do the work for them and with them, because my name is attached to them. At the same time, it’s also attached to where I’m sending them to make sure they get a great experience.
Jackson: Exactly. I know we’re not going to be rich. None of us went into higher education to be rich; we came into this field because we wanted to be fulfilled in other ways and have a sustainable living. The intrinsic value is their desire to serve, to help, to develop and care. I don’t want to send young professionals into a career where neither value fulfillment nor sustainable living is possible.
Gansemer-Topf: I’ll say it again: connections and networking. I do not think we stress this enough. Where is our model or infrastructure for helping students reach out and start networking now and as entry-level professionals, because that is critical?
Gansemer-Topf: I want to know where the counterstories are. Where are the stories about the wonderful day and the meaning-making? I was just thinking about this today because it’s July, and I feel like I’m a little nicer now than I will be in October when I’m stressed. I have to make a mental note to myself because I think when I keep saying how busy I am, I wonder what I am modeling to the students who may want to be a faculty member. What are the counterstories that say this is meaningful? It’s busy AND there’s much that is also fulfilling and enjoyable too.
Schehrer: If we are thriving and valued and feeling like we are at our best selves because our systems and structures, departments, and institutions are at their best selves, then we sustain our field in a very natural and organic and healthy sort of way. And maybe that’s where some of our associations can get involved, by looking at what those moments are that serve as a pause from the stress and chaos, create meaning, and provide the kind of connection and networking that helps us feel that energy and spark. I’m not certain that’s always happening at the state, institutional, department, and individual positional levels.
I know we’ve talked a lot as well about an in-person versus a virtual experience for conferences and events. That has been a variable that’s in play. The feeling of in-person gathering has been missed as a result of COVID, so the physical distance between us all and then the extra tasks and problem-solving leave us feeling drained. Some sort of a lift-up that gets us into the inspirational space and rekindles the hope that started all of this for us is something associations should be attentive to, but the “how” of that, for me, is very abstract.
Holmes: We need colleges and universities to do the work to make sure they are creating an engaged and welcoming environment. That way, they do not have folks who come and then want to leave immediately. I think associations can set professional, ethical, and moral standards like “In order to use our services and our products and things of that nature, there’s a certain set of things that you need to go through, that you need to be able to understand, and that you need to provide.” Basically, we should not look at a campus that wants to be part of this association and see a horrible work environment where people are repeatedly leaving the field. It might look like a certified signing-off or something that says you’ve been certified as a great employer or a great place to work. We recognize all these best places to go for universities, but what if we were to work towards recognizing institutions as great places to work?
Jackson: I need advocacy. I am currently disenfranchised by some of our professional organizations that don’t see the individual. They look so intently from the 30,000-foot view that they can’t see the one individual who’s at a small school in the Midwest and is struggling because their organization does not value the work they do. I need our organizations to stand up and lead the charge to showcase and demonstrate the impact, worth, and value of student affairs and higher education. And they should not do it from the perspective of student affairs being totally distinct from faculty and academic affairs. Absolutely not. The versatility of what we do makes our employees capable of moving into any field, from nuclear engineering to business to private sector healthcare, and they do well.
I also need organizations to pay attention to the lived experience of their professionals. We have young professionals filling the coffers of our organization while those individuals in leadership oftentimes are two generations past. They are so far removed from understanding what our students and young professionals are working towards. I’m about to rent a room to a young professional who is starting their first job post-Master’s because they can’t afford rent for an apartment in the area (it’s $1,700 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina). Of course, they can stay with me for three months, but I need our professional organizations to do more in terms of advocacy to help our folks live.
Gansemer-Topf: I think we also need to acknowledge the downside of student affairs. The reality is that the finances are tough. So, if I’m a new professional, how do I make it work, and what are the resources available to me? Also, I think we assume that if a person is not a first-generation student, they have figured out how to sustain a career and a living, but I don’t know how many of those conversations are actively and intentionally happening across the board.
Holmes: The other part is that we need to talk about the fact that, beyond live-in positions, we now know people don’t want to work a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. desk job. Some candidates wonder, “Where are these remote jobs? How come I can’t do this job remotely after I did it for two years?” For example, one of my staff is about to, for some family reasons, go to Hawaii and work for two weeks. There was no real reason for me to say no, so I didn’t. I know that our hours are going to be different, but we will work it out. Flexibility is what they’re looking at because we spent two years showing that we can still work and productivity doesn’t stop. Let’s get on board collectively to guide the field to be flexible, implement the good lessons learned during the pandemic, and be okay redefining what it really, honestly takes to do this work and be successful.
Jackson: One of our values is being culturally relevant, and that’s a plus and negative. It’s a plus because we want to make sure that folks feel like they’re involved and included in that they get equitable opportunities. It’s a minus because of respectability politics in that we do things at times because we want to be hip and in the loop. We say we want to be social-justice oriented. We want to be ahead of the wave but are not necessarily so committed that we can actually understand what the wave is and how it potentially could crash on us. So sometimes we end up doing just that: crashing.
We have to be culturally relevant from a multi-dimensional perspective. While we may be systemically failing, we have individuals who are leading the charge in so many avenues, and I see so many of them leaving to go work in other people-oriented fields and being deeply valued for their work. For the most part we are culturally oriented and able to see the entire person at the intersection of their identities. That is an asset in so many other sectors.
Gansemer-Topf: A question dawned on me when you said that. Why are other industries and professions valuing the experiences that student affairs practitioners have when we, as a profession, do not do the same thing in our institutions and even in our student affairs pieces? I just said it before, and it’s really hitting me that this is ridiculous: questioning if we as job seekers have the skills needed to do the work. This is not about questioning whether or not we bring something to our society that is valued by our communities. It is being made clear by other industries that we do, so why the heck do we need other people to do that? We have got to recognize and appreciate the value of our workforce.
So then I have to ask, have the values changed? They’re complicated right now, but I would still hope that it’s about student learning and student success. I would still hope it’s about seeing learning success for all students and understanding that the structures, racism, and other factors play a role in why we have inequities while trying to uphold these values. What is difficult is that those values tend to be espoused by entities other than student affairs practitioners. Those entities impact us not even passively because they (government and legislators) are very legitimately saying what is and is not important, specifically when it comes to equity and social justice. But even the ways in which our institutions are working would very much suggest that students are not the core value anymore, and so I think we need to navigate how we function in a way that embodies and upholds the values we already have. Not that we need new ones. Just like it’s easier to get together with your family when you’re all in agreement on values and the systemic social conditions being impacted by them, it’s much harder when you differ. Our field right now is no different.
D’Najah Pendergrass Thomas is The Placement Exchange director. She previously worked in residence life for Wake Forest University and Duke University.
