Jon Fansmith: Hello, and welcome to dotEDU, the higher education policy podcast from the American Council on Education. A little bit later in the episode, we’re going to be joined by Kevin Kruger, who is the outgoing president of NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. Somebody we all know well and hold in very high esteem. An amazing colleague, and the outgoing, I should say, president of NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. But before we get to that, I am as always your host, Jon Fansmith, here at ACE, and joined as almost always by my co-hosts, Sarah Spreitzer and Mushtaq Gunja. Hey, guys.
Sarah Spreitzer: Hey, Jon. So that doesn’t mean that you hold me and Mushtaq in esteem? You gave all that praise to Kevin.
Jon Fansmith: I’ve been immensely clear that I do not hold either of you in any esteem whatsoever. Mushtaq, periodically. Sarah, you never.
Sarah Spreitzer: Good to know. Yeah, that’s what I figured.
Mushtaq Gunja: Happy summer, you two. This is a good way to start the podcast.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: It is. bickering for the... I guess this proves that we are ready for summer vacation. We need to get away from each other for a little bit.
Mushtaq Gunja: I know what’s going on. Sarah Spreitzer’s in the office, as are you, Jon, but Sarah’s in the part of the office that faces west and gets incredibly hot in the afternoons in early summer. So, Sarah, I understand.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. It’s awesome. And this is the best week right now in DC because I think Congress is trying to do everything during this one week. So this will be the most exciting week of the entire congressional year.
Jon Fansmith: And Sarah, why...? Should we clarify for our listeners why exactly Congress is trying to do everything this week?
Sarah Spreitzer: I don’t know. Why are they? I guess it can bleed into next week too. But-
Jon Fansmith: Next week, maybe, but they’re just trying to get everything done so they can stop legislating and full-time campaign. Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, that’s true. They’re really only... They go out in August, and they’re back in September, and then that’s it. They’re out October, and then November is going to be here before we even know it.
Jon Fansmith: And back in September, I think there’s, what, four working days scheduled across the month? That’s probably an exaggeration, but not by much.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: There’s not a lot of actual legislating time left after we get through the middle of June.
Mushtaq Gunja: So, Jon and Sarah, maybe this is a better question for dotEDU Live, but does that mean really that anything that doesn’t get done next week really will not get done before the election?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, I don’t think anything’s going to pass. I think it’s moving things forward. They had a plan to try and pass appropriations bills in the House and the Senate to just have markers. Out there they’re trying to get the National Defense Authorization Act, Jon’s favorite bill, to a place where they have a version in the Senate, they have a version in the House, maybe they could start soft conferencing it. So nothing’s going to pass, but I think that they want to hit certain marks before they’re out of town. At least that’s my sense.
Jon Fansmith: I think Sarah’s got it right. There’s a few things that are must-pass every year, and they’re going to have to either deal with them or give an extension to them, like appropriations. But for all intents and purposes, if you’re thinking the policy side, everything, if it doesn’t make it to this point, barring some sort of emergency impetus to move something, it dies pretty quickly.
But Mushtaq, there are other things going on outside of Congress that are accelerating into high gear, right here at ACE, as a matter of fact, that you are in charge of. That you want to share with people?
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. So one of the things that’s nice about the work in the Carnegie project is that it is not tied to congressional schedules. And so they’re quiet; we’re kicking it into high gear, as you said. A couple of weeks ago, we announced a draft framework for our Social and Economic Mobility Classification.
So, as I think hopefully most people who are listening know, we are making some pretty significant changes to the Carnegie Classifications. We announced some revisions that we plan to make to the basic classification, including some changes to that R1, R2 methodology.
And a couple of weeks ago we announced what we are thinking for this new classification we’re creating around social and economic mobility. And we did a webinar last week, maybe two weeks ago. It’s up on our website, carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu. Maybe we should link to it in the show notes; that would be smart. And so hopefully everybody that didn’t get a chance to come to the webinar might be able to get a sense of how we’re thinking about this work that will be released in spring of ‘25. So about nine months- Oh my God, 9, 10 months from now. It’s coming up soon.
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh my God. So Mushtaq, I know this backwards and forwards, as you know. But just for the audience, can you talk a bit about what you mean by social and economic mobility, and what are our institutions doing in that area?
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. So Sarah, as you well know, there are no shortage of social and economic mobility rankings that are out there. I mean, there’s actually one that seems to come out every other week or so. And we made the intentional decision not to enter that rankings game. Instead, we really are hoping that this social and economic mobility classification will incorporate three concepts.
First, we want to group like institutions together for the purpose of comparison and evaluation. So most of the rankings that are out there rank institutions from one to 4,000 or one to 1,300, something like that. We are going to try to put institutions in groups, likely based on the new Basic Classification. So we’ll have much smaller groups for purposes of comparison.
And then those purposes of comparison, we wanted to boil down into something that was a little bit understandable, comprehensible for institutions and for the third parties that use these classifications. So we are going to be measuring two basic concepts. First, a measure around access, and then second, a measure around outcomes.
So we think access and outcomes are the important pillars of social and economic mobility. I think actually most of the rankings do too, but we’re teasing apart those two ideas, I think are really important to us. So we’ve been playing around with exactly what our access measures are going to be. We put out a framework that suggested that potentially we might use percent of students that are Pell-eligible and then talk a little bit about racial diversity as our two access measures. And then on outcomes, we’ve been thinking about using median student earnings, data that we would derive from the scorecard.
So that’s the way that we’ve been thinking about this work. Group like institutions together, evaluate them based on the access that they’re providing to the communities that they serve, and then think a little bit about their outcomes and earnings too.
Jon Fansmith: And Mushtaq, I think probably every one of our listeners has had you or your colleague Sara or folks from the Carnegie on their campus or met with them in some capacity. I mean, you have truly done Herculean work in terms of talking to folks. And I guess, I’m not quite as versed as Sarah is, I’ll be honest. She keeps up with every aspect. But maybe just curious, you’ve had so many interactions as you’ve gone through this work. I know the time and attention you’ve given it. Anything surprise you as you went through this? Did you have a plan and you basically worked forward to the conclusion of this? Or is there some twists and turns, some unexpected outcomes as you were talking to people and running numbers and looking at what you might do?
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, I love that question. Thank you. And we’re not at the end of the journey, so I think that we keep learning more and more. But I will say that when we came into this project, I think we had a thought on the problem that we were going to solve. Frankly, I think what we thought was that we would take one of those existing rankings that were out there and add exactly the right measure, maybe do the math slightly differently, and come up with the best... We would gild that lily and it’d be perfect.
And I think actually as we entered the space, I think we learned a couple things. One, the existing work that’s out there on social and economic mobility is pretty interesting and I think provides some value to the field. And I think instead of trying to replace some of that work and try to make ours the one ring that rules them all, I think we thought instead, we would try to figure out a way to be sort of complementary to some of that work. And so I think what we are aiming to do is just something slightly different.
The other thing I guess I would say I’ve been surprised by is how important context is, and especially location. So when you think about Pell percentage, as an example. Is a campus that is enrolling 35 percent Pell-eligible students, is that good? Is that not as good? Well, that depends in great part in the location of the institution and where the students are coming from. 35 percent might be wonderful in a state that has a lot of wealth; it might not be quite enough in a state that’s a little bit poorer.
And I think one of the observations I’ve had is that there isn’t enough context adjustments that are happening. And I think because of it, I think some of our institutions have found the existing social and economic mobility rankings maybe a little unfair. So we’re hoping to be able to do some of those adjustments, and that is both extremely complicated work and incredibly fun because I learn something new every day. If you go and look at some of the state-level data, there’s just tons of really interesting stuff there. So thank you for the question, Jon. That’s great.
Jon Fansmith: And I’ll say, and you do know this because I’ve talked with you about this a few times, this is the thing that most excites me most. Most excites me most? Terrible phrasing there. About the work that you’re doing is we talk so much in federal policy about, well, where do we set standards? What does a good institution look like? Whether you’re talking about outcomes or anything else, and it’s always these kind of national averages or what’s the median or what’s the mean for this program or that.
And it should not be revolutionary; it’s pretty common across lots of other ways of analyzing data to say you have to understand the data within a particular context in which it arises. And that is actually kind of revolutionary in the federal policy space, at least in the education policy space. So it’s a great way to just elevate a methodology that’s so important in terms of actually explaining what you might see at a particular institution or program. So a great learning experience. And thank you always for doing this great work.
We are going to continue learning when we come back after the break with our good friend Kevin Kruger. It will be a stimulating conversation you won’t want to miss. So hang with us through the break. We’ll be right back.
And welcome back. As we mentioned at the top, we are joined by, as I described him, the outgoing president of NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, Kevin Kruger. And Kevin, you are outgoing. I buried the lede there because you’ll be retiring at the end of June after 12 years as NASPA’s president. And—do I have this right?—30 years at NASPA overall?
Kevin Kruger: Correct. Yeah, I kind of timed it a little bit so that my last day is my 30-year anniversary of starting at NASPA in 1994. So a little bit of a nice bookend there.
Jon Fansmith: Oh, that’s amazing.
Kevin Kruger: Yeah, been doing the CEO work for the last 12 years.
Jon Fansmith: That’s great. And I know certainly we at ACE, all of us in higher ed have benefited from having you in that role, and frankly, just knowing you as a person and as a colleague and the work you’ve done on behalf, not just of your members, but higher ed more broadly. So-
Kevin Kruger: Thanks for that. I appreciate it.
Jon Fansmith: We haven’t had the opportunity to just thank you, and congratulations again on this big new step in your life.
And I’m going to take total advantage of this transition, the fact that now you’re basically untethered, you’re going to be out of the job at the end of the month. You can say whatever you want without fear. And say to you something that we have been talking a lot about on this podcast and at ACE, and I know NASPA has too, that this is an unusual time in higher education right now. In many ways, it probably feels like a more challenging moment than many of us have experienced in our careers in higher ed. And given your perspective, given the place you find yourself now, but especially given your expertise and the numerous accomplishments, I just wanted to pick your brain a little and say, how are you looking at this? How do you see this playing out? What is this you’re seeing from the field? And share your thoughts with our listeners about what you thought.
Kevin Kruger: I think every generation has their times when they might say, “This is as bad as it’s ever been.” I think this one is at the top of the list. Just judging from the conversations I have with both college presidents and vice presidents for student affairs. They are just exhausted, assaulted from multiple directions. Some are in harm’s way. I mean, I have a number of staff who are at senior levels who have been physically injured on the protest line. This one feels pretty rough.
It’s interesting; I think a lot about this because this is not the first period of activism we’ve had in our higher ed history, obviously. Activism is born out of colleges and universities in general; this is a place where it foments. I started in this work in the late ‘70s, and my early mentors had just come through the protests and activism around civil rights and the Vietnam War. And I can remember the vice president of student affairs at Maryland who was my early mentor, Bud Thomas, talking about standing on Route 1 in College Park, sort of being on the front line of this mass of people who were trying to take over Route 1 without any of the infrastructure and support that we have now. Nor, in some degree, the philosophy about how we work with students and how do we engage in dialogue and that kind of thing.
In a lot of ways, the birth of student affairs, while it was earlier than that, but it really came of age during those ‘60s and ‘70s and when college presidents had asked their senior staff in student affairs to play a role there. Was that worse? I don’t know. But it does feel like we are in the center of something that is pretty unique right now.
And I would say, there are probably four or five other issues that are kind of at their peak right now that make the work of student affairs, I think, particularly challenging and difficult in some ways. So I do a lot of speaking and say, “Is this the most transformational time in higher ed?” It does feel like we’ve got a lot of forces coming together to conclude that.
And just one more point on this. I think the luxury we had in the ‘60s and ‘70s, if there was a luxury, or even during the divestment period in the ‘80s where we saw a lot of protests, were done without social media. And the fact that now everybody has a camera and a video camera, and they’re all running, so that everything in the heat of the moment, in between two lines of protesters, that gets recorded and I think it makes that even more mentally challenging than before.
I think the other thing I just would add is that we would like, and when I say we, I mean presidents, faculty, students, that despite the maybe divergent political views you might see on a campus, we would like to see that we are on the... Some of us are on the same side of students in some ways. We are advancing their success in college. We have the same goals in mind. We sometimes may even consider ourselves standing arm in arm with them. That’s over. It doesn’t feel that way anymore. It now feels like we are being pushed from both sides of whatever argument is out there. And so the joy you might have gotten or the satisfaction from the relationships and the, “Hey, I did good work today.” I think some of that has been removed.
Jon Fansmith: I might even, to your point, I wholly agree with it about the pushed and pulled from both sides. In some ways we’ve been talking about pushed and pulled from six or seven or eight sides, given all the different constituencies that feel they have a voice or a role to play in these things. I know my colleagues have some other questions too, but I’d also like to note, you mentioned that US, the Route 1 closure, and I learned just a few weeks ago that former ACE colleague and former Department of Ed employee, Dan Madzelan, proudly shared a story of being one of the people to sit down on Route 1. So we’ve got a couple different higher ed connections coming back, tracing back to that incident. So worth noting. And Dan, if you’re out there listening, giving you your five minutes right now. So anyway.
Mushtaq Gunja: One of the things I think about, Kevin, I’m on the Georgetown Law campus quite a bit. I get to teach there. We have a wonderful, wonderful dean of students there. And when I talk to him, I’m just struck by the number of things that are in his portfolio, from disability services, to more mental health treatment more broadly, to residential work and some academic success. And I wonder... That feels different to me than the scope of the work, maybe, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And I wonder if you see that across the higher ed landscape, the scope of what our students need and what the deans of students and folks in student affairs thinking about broadening over time.
Kevin Kruger: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question for the future. So yes, absolutely. There’s been a pretty substantial expansion of the ways in which we provide services to students. And I always think about what’s the pact between families, students, and the institution? And that pact has expanded in its scope. And the downside of that is those expectations keep increasing. The needs keep increasing.
But then there’s pressure from the outside saying, “We can’t afford all that. We’re spending way too much money on administration.” Or “The administrative costs of institutions have gone up per student dollar.” So we’re at kind of a nexus. What are we going to do about that? I think this opens up the conversation about what is the responsibility of a college or university to provide? What kinds of services to support students? So two examples.
One is, we have neurodivergent students on campus today at numbers that are substantially higher than they were a decade ago. And that’s for two reasons. One is those neurodivergent students, and when I say neurodivergent for your audience, I’m talking about ADHD, autism, a variety of other kinds of issues, learning disabilities. Many of those students wouldn’t even graduated high school 10 years ago. So they weren’t even eligible to come to college.
Now with the kind of support that you have on K through 12, these students are now coming to... They’re here, and they’re in our environments, and they require more services. Isn’t that a great thing, that we can provide support and graduate students who are neurodivergent in ways that we couldn’t before? But that is also an expensive thing to do. These require services that are costly.
Let’s take mental health. We have this explosion of mental health services. I just saw today in a journal article that the number of students who are suffering from PTSD, diagnosable PTSD, as a result of COVID has doubled in the last four years. Now it was probably small, but still it’s measurable. And so treating PTSD is not a simple one, two session kind of thing. This is a multi-session clinical intervention that can actually help those students resolve and reduce some of those PTSD symptoms. But it’s going to take some resources.
The question I think we have to ask ourselves is, what’s the limit? How much service should we provide or can we provide and are obligated to provide? And some of it’s... Morally we want to provide all of it. But fiscally, can we afford that? And if the choice is between having an English department and having expansive mental health services, I mean, that’s the choices that we’re trying to sort out. And probably it’s not, English is probably the wrong example, probably more like it’s anthropology. If you look at the programs being cut at these small liberal arts campuses, those are tough choices to make.
And I wonder if we have to renegotiate, society has to renegotiate, what is it that colleges should provide or obligated to provide, and what should be the burden of the family in some ways. Or maybe external agencies, maybe states to provide more support for these students who take up so much resources.
One more thing on this, if you look at the data from the Penn State CCMH Study every year they do, the majority of students who seek mental health support have one session. That’s probably a surprise to most people. But if you look at how the resources of that counseling center are used, the majority of the resources are used for students who have many, many more sessions. Five, 10, 15 sessions. That’s where most of the resources go. You might think every student is in a mental health crisis. For the majority of students, it’s an exam or some homesickness, something that can be resolved really in some cases one session.
So if you have all that weighted on the multi-session kind of interventions, is that a sustainable way forward? But if you’re saying that—I know a lot of your audience is college presidents—If you’re a college president, you can’t not provide those services because the enterprise cost of not providing them, if that student were to go into crisis and something terrible would happen to them as a result of not getting a service, that’s a lot worse than the cost of providing it. So I think these are the kind of things we’re trying to battle. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Sarah Spreitzer: So Kevin, I was actually going to ask you about the landscape in serving the mental health needs of students and how you’ve seen that change. And you brought some really, really good points. And this was at the top of our minds going through COVID, and now coming out we’re seeing this as a continuing issue on our campuses. Are there key takeaways you think that we can use for the next crisis or even the current crisis that we’re having that’s impacting our students’ mental health?
Kevin Kruger: So let me back up for a second. Before 2019 or so, what we knew is that only about 5 percent of counseling centers were using telecounseling. 5 percent. COVID hits, and suddenly everything shut down. And so what has happened is this explosion of opportunities for both in-house counselors, people working at the college or university to do telecounseling within the licensing agreements they have within the state, or a whole range of for-profit companies that have entered the market to provide either after hours or alternatives to in-person clinical work. So in my mind, that’s a really good thing. Now, I know there’s been some articles recently in The Chronicle about, well, we don’t know if it actually works or not. But we’ll come back to that question.
But in terms of access to services, I think the future for mental health support is, provide the kind of low-level needs the students have as inexpensively as possible. And these online providers may be one way of doing that. And really save the in-depth clinical work for the students who have the really serious psychological issues: trauma, substance abuse, variety of things, depression, severe depression, suicide ideation, those kinds of things. I think that COVID accelerated this thing that was going to happen anyway.
The other thing I would just add is, which I think this is a fantastic difference in where we are today than five years ago, think about how many adult learners we have. International students who maybe have stigma about going to the counseling center. But adult learners for sure who aren’t on our campus more than the time that they take the class but still may have those mental health challenges. So I think we can serve more students by virtue of the modalities we have available to us now. I think that’s tremendous. Yeah, there’s a cost to these things, obviously, but I think that that is a big change in where we are.
I think we’ve made a lot of progress, say in the last decade, with programs like Active Minds and The Jed Foundation about destigmatizing mental health support. So students are... Look, if you just follow any social media platform that has young people in it, they talk about their mental health problems a lot. So we’ve made a lot of progress in destigmatizing that. I remember my daughter who now has graduated college and she’s working. But while she was in college, she had some anxiety issues, like a lot of young women do. And when I talked to her about it, she said, “Well, all my friends have anxiety. We’re all on medication and we’re all in counseling.” My point is-
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean... Yeah.
Kevin Kruger: They talk about it with each other, which is a good thing. This is not a bad thing. But I think we still... International students, there still a lot stigma around it. There’s still a lot of cultural issues. I think we can do a better job around that. And I think then the other thing is keeping up with what’s happening. Just the idea that PTSD is a trauma that students today experienced with COVID; we need to make sure our clinical interventions address that. We’re seeing an increase in eating disorders again that we haven’t seen since maybe the ‘80s and ‘90s. PTSD of course plays a role in that. And so I think just staying up with the evolution of those issues is also important.
One thing I’ll say that’s been really promising, again, to an audience of college presidents, is every president I’ve talked to understands this. I mean, this is not a... Maybe 10 years ago it might’ve been buried a little bit. And every president understands two things. One is students are bringing more issues, and their staff and faculty are bringing more issues. And I think that there is an understanding that the campus ecosystem has to have an investment in solutions around that, even when they are sometimes more expensive than we would like. But this has become sort of a, not a nice to have but a have to have in colleges today.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, just on that point, sorry, Sarah, to jump in, but we would survey our college and university presidents about top issues of concern. And prior to the pandemic, it was student mental health was number one by a large margin, and number two was staff mental health. And then we entered the pandemic, and guess, what? Number one was student mental health followed by staff mental health, and then a large margin, anything else. All the concerns you had through the pandemic and then following the pandemic, whole new set of concerns? Well, no, student mental health and staff mental health remained top of mind.
Kevin Kruger: Yeah. Just to add to that Jon, I think United Educators every year, they put out the top 10 enterprise risk management issues. A while, say six years ago, was Title IX, no surprise. Now Title IX is down, maybe number 10. Mental health showed up for the first time ever in the most recent survey. So it hadn’t been in the previous years. Now it’s I think number five. So it’s an indication, I think, that from an insurance standpoint, that they’re looking at the risks that institutions have for getting this right. I mean, one student who seeks help and is turned away by a waiting list or whatever it is and then, unfortunately, attempts and dies by suicide is a terrible tragedy for that student and family but an incredible tragedy for that institution. And comes with it a lot of enterprise risk management. So I think that this does raise the specter of why it’s so critical.
Sarah Spreitzer: And Kevin, obviously it’s such a big issue. You mentioned it being at the top of our presidents’ minds. But it’s not just on student affairs, right?
Kevin Kruger: No.
Sarah Spreitzer: But would you argue, I mean, student affairs should be really central to the conversations going on on campus. And do you see the student affairs officers being involved in the conversations?
Kevin Kruger: Yeah, I think that’s a great question, because this is, overused expression, but it takes a village, right? I mean, if you look at students who have attempted suicide or die by suicide, a very small number of them were actually in clinical therapy. Most students who actually attempt or die by suicide never saw a counselor. So that’s just one example. What does that tell you? It tells you we’re not necessarily always reaching students in the way we want to or getting them into the kind of therapies that would work.
So student affairs is one small little slice. Faculty have to be a part of the solution. And faculty are afraid of this, right? They’re afraid to have a conversation. “Hey, how are you doing?” Or “I saw something in this essay you wrote.” They’re afraid to engage students sometimes because they feel not equipped to have a mental health conversation. We don’t need faculty to have mental health conversations; we need them to have conversations. Connect with the student. And if a referral is appropriate, of course, that’s the way to go. For the listeners, The Jed Foundation has a great free resource about how you engage faculty in the mental health solutions for the campus.
Because I think faculty see students more than anybody else. So having faculty engaged is super important. And one data point, I think it was the Mary Christie Foundation did a study and found that faculty, junior faculty who have been on campus one to three years, and of course contingent faculty, much smaller number of them had an understanding of the resources available to support mental health on campus. Established tenured faculty, they pretty much knew what was going on. They’ve probably been to faculty orientation 20 times, so they know that. But I think for presidents in the room, I’d say we need to be making sure that our contingent faculty and our junior faculty have a real clear sense of not just the resources but also maybe the skillset about how to have these conversations and in ways that feel comfortable for faculty. That’s a really important piece, I think, of this puzzle.
Mushtaq Gunja: That’s great advice, Kevin. And speaking of advice to presidents, you touched on the campus protests that have happened over the last few months, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for the student affairs professionals who often are caught in the middle between where the students are, where the administration is. You do have an audience of quite a few college presidents here. Is there something you’d want to tell them about where student affairs professionals are and some advice you might want to give them vis-a-vis the protests?
Kevin Kruger: Yeah, I mean, two things I would say. One is, I do think it’s important to make a distinction between what we saw in the last couple of months, which are encampments, and students and then non-students on both sides of the barriers. A lot of non-students involved. You look at the arrests on campuses, 50 percent or more are non-students. So I think we need to make a distinction between the incidents around these encampments and that, which is in some degree sort of part of the political arena we live in, and the conversations that students are having outside of that.
So if you talk to any, I’m sure most of these presidents would know, the real in-depth, hard conversations are happening not in the screaming that takes place across two barriers but in the residence halls and student union and classrooms sometimes.
And I think that if I was a president, I would want to make sure that I was investing in established programs around deliberative dialogue and how we basically develop the muscle in students to have these difficult conversations. This is the future of our society. If you can’t have students on different political ideologies have reasonable conversations, difficult, but on campus, what hope do we have to have them to settle those conversations in the halls of Congress?
And there’s a lot of work being done in the area. If you talk to people on campus about what’s going on on campus, they will tell you about incredible conversations that are happening outside of the protest, in the halls, like I said, and in different places where some of them are spontaneous and some of them are intentional. We create these opportunities. We just need to do more of that. We need to do more of helping...
You go to college of, let’s say a four-year degree. You can certainly make the same case for a two-year degree. You ought to come out with a discipline, but you also ought to come out with that muscle about how you have hard conversations about difference that doesn’t involve screaming and throwing and name-calling. But that’s the potential we have.
And I think that that is happening, but I think we have to also be intentional about that. We have to make sure that the people who are the staff or the faculty or the people who are in those conversations or encouraging them have the skillset to be able to manage those kind of conversations. I mean, I think that’s not... Everybody doesn’t have that. It is a trainable skill. So that’s one thing I’d say.
Second thing I’d say to presidents is, and I think most presidents do know this, but understand how insane it is to be put on the front line of one of these protests. And I’ve seen multiple videos online and I’ve seen my, not mine because they’re not mine, but I see student affairs staff, assistant vice presidents, some deans of students, sometimes the vice president in tactical gear, like they’ve got a Kevlar vest on. Because they get things thrown at them and they’ve been physically assaulted, and they’re trying to manage this unbelievably complex environment. With police assistance, not the only ones out there, but they’re on the front line.
So if I was a president, I’d say to you, understand how hard that is and how exhausted your staff are for being asked to do that. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, go staff graduation and take champagne bottles out of people’s graduation gowns.” That’s bad enough. But be on a frontline protest where people are screaming and there’s no simple answers, and the issues are unbelievably complex? That’s hard work. It’s the work that we should be doing. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be doing it, but understand how hard it is and the kind of psychic damage that can occur in that kind of thing. Because people who become vice presidents of student affairs or deans of students, they didn’t go through this kind of training. This is real on-the-job training, and it’s hard work.
And again, no one thinks that they’re going to have to put a Kevlar vest on to go do your job in the morning. But then again, as an aside, 2021, nobody thought that we would’ve to put PPE on and deliver meals to students in quarantine residence halls either. That wasn’t part of our training either, but an important thing that we did to keep the campuses open.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And Kevin, there’s... I mean, look, I could pick your brain about things that are happening on campuses across a huge range of things. But I will say one thing I really did want to get your perspective on because we have been certainly following it very closely at ACE, as you know, and working with our colleague associations on this, but we have seen in the last couple of years a trend of, really at the state level so far, not so much at the federal level, but legislative efforts to ban DEI offices, in some cases to even ban the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” I guess in combination with each other or independently of each other. It’s hard to keep track of where all the attacks are coming from. As a representative of student personnel administrators and also given your perspective, what do you think about this? As open-ended as that, what do you see? Where do you think it’s going? Is there something legitimate driving this, or is there something maybe more concerning in terms of what are the motives behind this effort that we are seeing play out across so many different states?
Kevin Kruger: I guess, let me start by just saying I think it’s one of the saddest things I’ve seen in higher ed in my tenure. Because it’s overlaid, of course, by this huge political divide we have in our country. And then the energy we get around things like saying things like the woke campus and that kind of stuff. Just put that aside for a moment. What is sad for me, and I think the loss here is not that this individual lost their job or they can’t call this office, this kind of thing, is what are we losing?
We’re losing sight of the thing they were created for in the first place. And that is, we have tremendous inequities in our society and in our colleges and universities. And it’s a way of creating climates and a culture on campus and support on campus that allows some students who have been historically disenfranchised or marginalized to succeed in college in a supportive environment and graduate. Which we’re stripping that away as if these problems didn’t exist, as if we still didn’t have huge gaps in attainment for black students, Latinx students, indigenous students, low-income students, first-generation students. So I’m sad about it because we do this work because of the students. And this affects students and their abilities to be successful through institutions. So I worry about that a lot.
Secondarily, I worry about the people in my field. Many came into this work. So, you know this, you’ve seen the CUPA-HR data, and I’ll just repeat it. Student affairs is by far the most diverse sector of higher education. I mean, by far. More diversity on racial, ethnic lines, gender identity, sexual orientation, you name it. Many people in student affairs came into that work because they wanted to do the work of supporting students, supporting an equity agenda on campus and supporting the very students that I think are at risk here. And so now we’re telling them, you can’t do that work anymore. Not only you can’t do it, it’s illegal.
And so it’s interesting from my field, we actually now have two student affairs professions. We have a student affairs work that you do in campuses where DEI either exists or it’s just part of the fabric of what you do. Because it doesn’t matter whether you have an office or not; it’s still part of the work that you do. And then we have another profession, that has just emerged over the last 18 months, where that work is not permitted and is illegal and you can’t talk about it, you can’t name it, you can’t fund it. Again, the office is one thing, but it’s the work that’s the issue.
So I think we’re trying to come to grips with what does that mean in terms of the work of student affairs? Can you still do equity work? Can you still do work that is trying to address some of these historical inequities on these campuses? And the answer is probably no. Because you can’t... I’m not advocating we should hide it because I think the University of Texas or Texas, we certainly saw people who were renaming it. And these legislators are smart. No one’s going to be fooled by that. So the work isn’t going to happen.
I think it’s going to be interesting as a nation. And we look back on this period five years from now and 10 years ago, if we see substantial decreases in attainment of Black students and Hispanic students and Latinx students, and we see changes, I mean decreases here, what have we done? And I think that it’s scary to think about the impact of potentially of this generation.
But we’ve weaponized DEI and it’s been weaponized and it’s now being... I see no short-term, Jon you know more about this than I do, no short-term resolve of this other than young people coming of age to vote, getting active enough and interested in their democracy that they will vote, and wanting a different world than the one that they live in right now in some of these states.
But I think it’s awful. It’s mean, it’s mean-spirited, and it doesn’t account for doing the best thing we want to do for our students. That’s what I find to be the most depressing about it. It ignores the reality of how it affects our students.
Sarah Spreitzer: Kevin, given all of these challenges, do you still have people wanting to go into student affairs? And looking at your long career in student affairs, what would you tell people who are thinking about going into student affairs? Do we in higher education need to encourage more people to do this very difficult job? And what would you advise people?
Kevin Kruger: So it’s a great question. And I’m going to tell you that there are graduate, we call them graduate preparation programs. There’s master’s-level and PhD-level programs. There’s like 250 of them across the country. And one of the clear pathways to working in student affairs and higher ed is you get a master’s in higher ed and some of the preparation, then you get your first job. Enrollment in these programs is down everywhere. Even the top programs. Down, not like 10 percent, down like 30, 40 percent.
These programs are struggling. Why are they struggling? Two reasons. One is during COVID, every student affairs folks were home. So they didn’t have the kind of contacts with students to say, “Hey, student leader, hey, president of the SGA, president of fraternities, person, why don’t you think about higher ed as a career?” And that shoulder tapping didn’t exist. So we saw a drop-off there.
But now what we’re seeing is a much larger problem. And I think presidents should and I think mostly are aware of, is we have a workforce problem. We have, across higher ed, we have more people in higher ed now working in higher ed who want to leave higher ed or leave their jobs. CUPA-HR data showed that as well.
And what we found, we get no prize for this, but student affairs is at the top. We have the highest percentage of staff who are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next 12 months. And when you ask them why are they thinking of leaving? They don’t feel valued, they feel overworked, underpaid, and they want more remote opportunities. I mean, that’s a controversial issue we can come back to.
But we did allow in higher ed, to some degree, salaries of student affairs professionals, particularly young and mid-level professionals, to languish over the last 10 years, 20 years. And we did that because the trade-off was like, this is value-centered work. It’s like it’s the love of the work. And there’s other professions like this. Teaching is another example, but the love of the work was supposed to overcome the poor pay. This generation doesn’t think that. If you look at the student affairs Facebook pages, they’re constantly voicing their dissatisfaction with having a master’s degree, five years’ experience, and making $40,000. It’s not a living wage for most people. So the real challenge is we’ve got to repair the workforce before you repair the pipeline. Because if you don’t like your job and you’re thinking of leaving, you’re not going to recommend it to somebody else.
Now, having said that, to go back to your question, it’s great work. It is noble work. You are making a difference. There’s very few things in life that you can do that you can change the trajectory of a person’s life and their family’s. This is unbelievable. There’s a lot of reward that comes from this work. And yeah, it doesn’t pay as much as if you went to work for Google, but it is incredibly rewarding.
And then what I would say is that, even given the complexities of what we do, even more so today, we can make a difference in people’s lives. We do a lot of work with first-generation students, and a first-generation student who graduates college, we’ve changed the trajectory of their life, their children’s life, their sibling’s life, and maybe even their parents’ life. It changes the entire family trajectory in terms of how they will rise from a social mobility standpoint. That alone is unbelievable. I mean, in terms of that kind of impact.
So I think we want people to come into this work because they believe in the potential of helping other people and helping students. And it’s noble work; it’s important work. And I think we will get through this period, but I think there’s going to be, we were in a little bit of a repair post-COVID environment with not just student affairs staff, but this goes to all staff, a lot of administrative staff on campuses. And I think we’ve got a little repair work to do.
Jon Fansmith: Kevin, that is a wonderful place to wrap this up today because I’ll say, at times we can talk about these things and there might be a little bit of, we see a lot of clouds and we’re not seeing a lot of sun. And I think putting it in the context of why this work is important, and it’s worth, certainly to our listeners and to everybody else we’re interacting with, reminding them that there’s a reason we do this and it’s not money and it’s not other things, it’s because you seek to have that opportunity to really change people’s lives for the better. And certainly your members are out there doing that under incredible challenge and stress and difficulty, but serving such a valuable and important role. And let’s end by highlighting just how valuable that work is.
And certainly, thank you again for being such a great advocate for your members, for higher education as a whole. So glad we were able to get you on before your last day at NASPA. Know you’re going to be capably succeeded in that role, but you’ll certainly be missed as well. And you’re always welcome to come back and hang out with us for a little bit and share your thoughts. We’d love to keep picking your brain on these and other issues. But thanks so much for joining us today.
Kevin Kruger: Thanks for the good conversation. Appreciate it.
Jon Fansmith: Thank you for joining us on dotEDU. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is important to us and it helps other policy wonks discover our show. Don’t forget to follow ACE on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes and other higher education content. You can find us on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And of course, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us at podcast@acenet.edu. We love hearing from our listeners and, who knows, your input might inspire a future episode.