Is student affairs too decentralized to best help students succeed?

Jeff was an 18-year-old first-year student struggling to manage his first semester in college. He sought out advice from the university and was encouraged to meet with staff in several departments.

1. His advisor said he was taking too many hard classes and needed to drop a class and add an easier class
2. The career counselor suggested pre-med might not be the best career field and that he should explore others
3. The academic support center signed Jeff up for weekly tutoring to improve his test scores
4. His residence assistant thought Jeff should attend more social events and join a fraternity for more fun
5. The counseling center counselor suggested that Jeff might benefit from exploring the pressures of high achievement-oriented expectations he often self-imposed

Jeff was overwhelmed with options to help his situation – drop a class, change his career direction, attend tutoring, engage in more social activities, and talk more about the stress he put on himself.

Jeff’s stress reached a breaking point and he confided to an assistant dean about his challenges. This person knew each of the helpful people with whom Jeff had met, and in listening to Jeff, she mentioned that Jeff might want to reengage his love of sports since they had brough him much joy before college. She suggested a group on campus that she knew was socially and emotionally supportive while also providing an outlet for Jeff’s love of sports.

Jeff ended up attending, and ultimately joining, a religious organization that also participated in many intramurals. There, Jeff discovered a supportive group of friends who affirmed Jeff’s strengths and helped him more confidently address the other challenges in his life.

In this parable, we have intelligent and experienced professionals providing quality advice rooted in their career fields. Their advice is not wrong, and in many cases, it could actually help, but it lacks the holistic perspective that might best help Jeff.

This story highlights the specialization that currently exists in helping students succeed in college. As someone with a background in the scientific method and leadership roles in student success for 30 years at 10 universities, I have realized that my colleagues often extend to students the tools they have in their hands to fix student problems. Sometimes, that tool is not the best solution for the student’s needs.

Challenges with offering holistic student support

At one of my former institutions, Baylor University, we spent 7 years studying around 100 variables and thousands of data points using robust statistical methods. We developed a predictive analysis that was more successful in identifying student dropouts than any of the many higher education software solutions at the time. The prevailing (and one of the most expensive) products available even acknowledged their inability to be as effective as we were at predicting student success.

One of our major findings that we discovered was that if a student reported on a short survey in the first month after they started college, that they did not feel like they belonged at our college, they were five times more likely than any other variable to not be at our college the following August. After years of collecting data and narrowing it down to variables which had the most impact on student persistence, we were ecstatic to know that sense of belonging was so important.

The challenge, however, occurred when we went to the student support units that we hoped would act on this result. They were not as interested in helping students increase their sense of belonging. Instead, they reminded us that this was not a part of their job descriptions nor their daily work. The departments we reached out to reminded us that their staff workloads were already maxed out and they did not have time for this.

In spite of robust and convincing results that the university needed to address students’ sense of belonging, we were facing departmental resistance because they were unable to put aside their existing work to focus on a more holistic issue. You may identify with these departments. Most departments are expected to assess their outcomes linked to their specific unit’s goals. Unfortunately, this approach lacks the perspective that comes from stepping back and realizing that when we look at students more holistically, our ability to better address their needs is ultimately more impactful.

Are student affairs professionals able and ready to put aside their professional “disciplines” if it better supports students? Could you imagine changing existing roles, if not existing departments, to focus more on overarching student success? If you were given all the salary lines and operational funds for your student support units, how would you rebuild an organization that has the ability to offer specialized guidance but also seeks to see and serve our students holistically?

Short-term solutions:

• Consider cross-training advisors to provide some basic support in advising areas outside their specialty. Reward this cross-training with professional recognition, if not financial support.
• Consider placing academic, career and co-curricular advisors in physical proximity to each other in the hopes that incidental and intentional collisions regularly occur.
• Consider reporting hierarchies – typically academic, career, and co-curricular advising report to 2, if not 3, different divisions.
• When staff depart, consider revising job descriptions to specifically and intentionally integrate holistic advising.
• Encourage software providers to integrate various advising platforms in a manner that increases interactivity and comprehensive perspectives on students.