Letters from Academia

One of the major responsibilities of college and university leaders is to look into the future and act accordingly. They are supposed to see things coming, whether good or bad. That is why they are assumed to be good thermometers about the prospects for higher education. Now a new survey gives us a glimpse about how they see the present and the future.

Published just a few weeks ago, the study, titled “2017 Survey of College and University Presidents,” shows the level of concern by U.S. higher education presidents about the future of their institutions. According to the survey, only six in 10 presidents strongly agree or agree that they are confident that their institution will be financially sustainable over the next five years. Yet, when asked about the next 10 years that confidence goes down to 52 percent.

Their main concern is enrollment. Although in the past that was only a major concern for private institutions, public institutions – because they receive less and less financial support from states – have become more and more dependent on revenue from tuition and fees. According to this study, this concern is particularly true when it comes to supporting low-income students, enrolling students who are more likely to be retained and graduate on time, and enrolling their college’s target number of undergraduates.

The survey was conducted by Gallup (a company well-known for conducting public opinion polls) on behalf of Inside Higher Ed (a digital media company better known for its electronic publication under the same name), from January 5 through February 1 of this year. This is important regarding enrollment because it means that the 706 college leaders who responded to the questionnaire did so before the projections of international student enrollment was publicized in the media.

Those projections are that for the next academic year those enrollments will decrease by 40 percent due to the anxiety created by the current U.S. government toward foreigners in general. This was predictable. International enrollment decreased by 25 percent after the 9/11 attacks, despite the fact that the U.S. government at the time did not take the aggressive attitude against foreign nationals as the one taken by the current administration. Since many colleges and universities have resorted to increasing international enrollments to make up for falling domestic students, this is really bad news.

The respondents of the surveys represented 385 public institutions, 292 private institutions and 29 institutions from the for-profit sector, showing that this particular concern goes across the board, although the concern about enrolling low-income students was particularly acute among leaders of private baccalaureate colleges.

Despite racial incidents on campuses in the past few years and an increase of hate crimes taking place since the last presidential election, the majority of campus leaders describe the state of race relations at their colleges as either “excellent” (20 percent) or “good” (63 percent) while more than three-fifths of presidents describe race relations at American colleges in general as “fair.” These results may reflect that many college presidents leading either fairly racially homogeneous campuses try to avoid the subject. . In this very survey, one in five college presidents said that following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, racial incidents have increased on their campuses.

Another very interesting result of the survey is that only 12 percent of presidents strongly agree or agree that most Americans understand the purpose of higher education, while half disagree or strongly disagree. And I say it is interesting because campus leaders tend to emphasize sports, buildings, and other amenities in their marketing efforts instead of concentrating on academics. This should be a wake up call that they need to change their tune when it comes to their publicity strategy.

This conclusion is confirmed by another finding of the survey that shows that college leaders believe that “the public thinks that college is less affordable than it is because of attention to student debt levels, that colleges are wealthier than is the case because of attention to large endowments, and that colleges have misplaced priorities because of the campus amenities many colleges now offer students,” according to the report.

These results show that leaders of public institutions should demonstrate more courage and less cowardice when pointing fingers at the real culprits of lack of financial support for their colleges: legislators and/or governors. Regarding endowments, college presidents need to do a better job explaining how endowments work, that they are not a “piggy bank” from where you can take money at will but instead represent funds tied up for specific purposes as specified by the donors. And regarding amenities, that goes without saying.

Most presidents (76 percent) are in favor of recently adopted federal policies to include gender identity among areas protected by anti-bias laws, while 63 percent believe that there should be a preponderance of evidence in evaluating sexual assault allegations. Given the continuous scandals on campuses regarding sexual assaults this may be a mild form of self-defense.

Other curious findings of this report include that most leaders of private colleges oppose their teaching assistants to unionize, and that about two-thirds of all of them “strongly agree or agree that campus protests after Trump’s election have played into an image that higher education is intolerant of conservative views.” No wonder that 7 in 10 Americans perceive that anti-intellectual sentiment is growing in the U.S. and that the majority see that the American public sees a disconnect between the academy and much of American society.

The report also says that “about one in three college presidents say they spoke out more on political issues during the 2016 presidential campaign than they usually do and that 16 percent say they wish they had spoken out more than they did.”

Hopefully this report will convince college and university leaders that many of the problems in higher education have been created by them and that they are the ones who need to do something about it.

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College Presidents Worry About Higher Ed’s Future

Nobody wants to be called a racist or a misogynist. Most people think that they are not. However, we are constantly making decisions that are influenced by unconscious biases.

Unconscious biases are defined as social stereotypes that are formed about certain groups of people by individuals from outside their own conscious awareness. Psychologists agree that everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and that these biases stem from one’s tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.

Although less evident, unconscious biases are far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and are often incompatible with one’s conscious values. Certain scenarios can activate unconscious attitudes and beliefs, especially biases that may be more prevalent when multi-tasking or working under time pressure.

Biases based on gender, race, and other factors can creep in unconsciously and cloud judgment, even when someone has the best of intentions. Higher education is not immune to these biases. Despite much talk about political correctness or of being “liberal,” as we have demonstrated in past articles in this column, there is much bias –unconscious or not – when it comes to hiring faculty and staff and to admitting students in colleges and universities.

This is a serious problem not only because we are talking about social injustice or even illegal actions, but also because we need a diverse work and study environment capable of producing better solutions to the problems we face every day.

So what can we do to at least minimize unconscious biases? Fortunately, both government agencies and many corporations have developed a number of policies and practices that help us to find a way to clear the path to a more equitable solution when it comes to dealing with people who are different from us.

Like with any other human problem, the first step that we need to take is to recognize that we have implicit biases. There are a number of studies supporting this contention. In a study published in 2007, a Harvard professor found that although ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by increases in immigration, problems arise as a result of those increases in diversity. The study found that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the United States, residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ That trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, and friends fewer. He concluded that in the long run, “successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Therefore, a special effort must be made to train different constituencies in order to overcome unconscious bias. There are several documents that can be used to that end. One was put together by The Association for Women in Science: http://www. awis.org/?Implicit_bias. Another is a document that the Mathematical Association of America that helps remind us of the right steps to take in the hiring process to help avoid bias. You can find that document at here. Finally, you can also provide members of a search committee with a self-test that can help them to discover their own biases. You can find it here. It takes about 10-15 minutes and it makes you stop and think about the associations you make in your mind.

Another important step is to give your undivided attention when evaluating candidates. Some studies have shown that you are more likely to lean on biases if you’re rushed, distracted, or tired. Therefore, you should avoid this trap by reviewing applicants when you can achieve your optimum mental focus, giving yourself plenty of time, at least 15 to 20 minutes or ideally 30 minutes per applicant.

Anther important consideration is to have a very clear idea of what you are looking for when hiring someone. The more precise your expectations, the less likely you will be to make biased decisions based on factors such as gender, ethnicity, or national origin, for example. To have an evaluation form that helps you to go over the same questions and the matches per expectations can be really useful to that end. Other measures, such as when initially reviewing applications to avoid accessing any information such as the name of the person, can reveal that person’s inherent characteristics like the ones mentioned above.

Another important step is to keep track of the results in the hiring of the organization. For example, have you hired more women or minorities than the already existing proportion in your organization? If not, why is that? What can you do differently in the future to change bad outcomes? Those are points of reflection that have to be informed by statistics.

Another important question you have to ask yourself when making a final decision is, how do I decide among two or three finalists? Have I taken into consideration whether or not underrepresented groups are qualified or not for the job? Have I taken into consideration the fact that underrepresented minorities have had fewer opportunities than others to obtain an education in an Ivy League school versus a state university? Are not women more likely to be discriminated against because their expectations for “brilliance” are different from their male counterparts?

These and many other questions are the ones that we should be asking ourselves when making final decisions. After all, we do not live in an egalitarian society where everybody has had the same opportunities in life.

Whether we got into a top school, for example, is always influenced by our families’ financial status, where we were born, and the color of our skin. Until we dispel the notion that everybody was born and educated under the same circumstances, or given the same opportunities, we will not develop a true sense of social justice.

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Does Unconscious Bias Effect Higher Ed Hiring?

We live in a time of intense scrutiny as to the effectiveness of instruction in higher education. Questions are being asked of college and university administrators about the retention and graduation rates of their students. In fact, some states have tied funding of public institutions to this data. Others are asking how well we are teaching students to get that well-paid job after graduation.

It is interesting that the fundamental question of how well we are teaching our students is rarely answered. One reason for this hesitation is that we are still struggling with just how to measure teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes. It’s no wonder that none the countless college rankings that are – like those from U.S. News & World Report – address this most important issue.

Now a new report by the American Council on Education, titled “Unpacking Relationships: Instruction and Student Outcomes,” is addressing this very matter.

It is no secret for those of us in higher education that engagement by students is key for their success. What we sometimes forget is that we are talking about a two-way street. We cannot expect them to be engaged unless faculty members do their part as well. That is why there is an increasing demand for professors to move away from the traditional approach of just lecturing from a lectern to provide students with more hands-on experiences. That is also the reason why we like to support more scholarly activities by faculty in which undergraduate students participate so they can learn by doing.

As Confucius said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

According to the report “The more engaged students are in learning environments, the more likely they are to complete, learn, and be satisfied. Further, student beliefs about their academic ability influence their success in education, and faculty interactions sit at the intersection of reinforcing or debunking student beliefs.”

The report describes learning as “a highly-complicated process dependent upon a variety of factors, teaching is an equally complicated activity focused upon creating an environment in which students can and do learn and are able to be successful.” This is important to remember especially when we hear simplistic proposals for “quick fix” solutions to the problems that higher education faces today.

No surprises there. What is really interesting about this report is that it clearly outlines the areas of “intersection between instruction and student outcomes, arguing that what faculty do and how instruction occurs matter, and matter greatly.”

The report states five factors related to success in the classroom. The first is transparency. This refers to the need to clearly outline what the expectations for the course are, as well as how they will be assessed on whether or not those goals were achieved. In other words, the students must understand from the beginning why they are being asked to study certain topics, to develop certain skills, and/or to complete certain assignments. Without this understanding students will feel disengaged, and chances are that they will either fail or drop out.

The second factor is related to pedagogical approaches. As mentioned earlier, learning that goes beyond memorization and is more hands on and active is essential. After all, we all know that what students memorize just for the exam they will forget by the week after, which also means that personalized instruction is essential. Thus, both online instruction and the use of large classrooms to teach hundreds of students at a time are less effective.

The third aspect is comprehensive assessment. In other words, grades alone do not provide enough feedback. Students have to have the opportunity to practice what they have learned in class and integrate what they have learned into the larger picture – another reason why we should avoid large classes where the interaction between the instructor and the students is minimal.

Another important aspect is self-regulation. Students must be given the opportunity to move from being passive learners to active ones by constantly participating in their own learning. Instructors need to provide opportunities for students to reflect on what they have learned.

The final factor is alignment. Faculty must carefully create the course so that goals, content, instructional design, pedagogical approaches, assignments and evaluative criteria are coherent with one another.

What all this means is that faculty must foster a learning environment, rather than just giving passive instruction. And it is in this necessity where the difficulties of implementing these ideas reside.

Despite being stereotyped as “liberals” or “progressives,” the fact of the matter is that faculty tend to be very conservative when it comes to their profession, many times being almost “allergic” to change. Sometimes we even find faculty who keep teaching the same material in the same way for decades while remaining oblivious to societal changes.

Although younger faculty tend to be more innovative and resourceful when it comes to pedagogical approaches, that is not always the case with older ones.

Because the 1986 amendments of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the law granted a temporary exemption for postsecondary institutions to enforce mandatory retirement at age 70. That temporary exception was later allowed to expire and Congress eliminated mandatory retirement in higher education as of January 1, 1994. This made the United States one of the few countries in the world to offer true lifetime employment security to tenured faculty members.

This privilege has been severely criticized in many circles where it is seen as a benefit that no other profession enjoys. If higher education institutions want to ameliorate public criticism, they must show sincere efforts to evolve into a more effective profession. After all, we do what we do for the sake of our students.

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Teaching Must Become Engaging to be Effective

In past articles of this column we have reported data that show that women in general find more barriers than their male counterparts in getting into academic careers. Further, female college professors earn on average 10 percent less in salaries than their male colleagues.

If you are a woman in academia and aspire to an administrative job in order to substantially improve your earnings and make them more in par with the males around you, you should think twice.

According to a new report released just a few days ago by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) there is a significant gender gap at the top levels of higher education leadership. Women administrators in higher education earn 80 cents on the dollar when compared to men. And despite claims by institutions of higher education that they are egalitarian and politically correct, this disparity has changed little over the last 15 years.

According to the CUPA-HR study, the gender gap has narrowed by only 3 cents since 2001, when women administrators earned 77 cents on the dollar versus men. Such a difference is largely in line with the gender pay gap for all full-time workers in the United States, which shows women earning 79 cents for every dollar men earn. In other words, just because you are a woman and work for an institution of higher education you cannot expect to be treated better than a woman anywhere else in the workplace.

Despite all the talk about increasing diversity in colleges and universities, women are not benefitting from that rhetoric. In other words, the liberal principle of equal pay for equal work seems to have become missing in action in academia.

Part of the problem is bias (unconscious or not) about the requirements for a particular job. According to this report women working in administrative positions mostly filled by men (presidents, provosts) did earn relatively more than many of their peers who work in positions largely filled by women. When those positions tend to be perceived as typical “women’s jobs,” women earned more than their male counterparts.

Women hold more than half of the available jobs in only a handful of executive positions in academia, such as human resources, libraries, public relations, institutional research and student affairs. On the other hand, male presidents outnumber female presidents by a ratio of more than two to one and male chief information officers and chief athletics administrators outnumber women by a ratio of more than four to one.

Another part of the problem is perception. Many in higher education believe that because of the rhetoric for equality, colleges and universities pay the same to both genders, which is obviously not the case. Even worse, the numbers in this report indicate that if there was ever a tendency to close the gap in pay between women and men, that momentum was lost some time ago.

According to the CUPA-HR study, although there was a tendency at closing the gender gap when it came to pay in the early 2000s, that tendency slowed down significantly and the reason may have been the recession of 2007-2009. One of the consequences was the drop in higher education funding. And since recessions tend to have a greater economic impact on women and minorities, that explains why the drive for more equality was lost.

And all this is not because there are not that many women administrators in higher ed. According to the study, in 2016 women made up approximately half of all higher education administrators across the country. Yet, there were differences by regions. Women made up a little more than half of administrators in the Northeast and slightly less than half of administrators in the Midwest, West and South.

Another difference had to do with the prestige of the position. More than 50 percent of department heads are women, but less than 30 percent of top executives are women. Again, the better paid positions were still dominated by men.

Interestingly enough, although there are fewer women in top-paying positions, the pay gender gap was generally narrower. For example, women top executives earn more than 90 cents on the dollar when compared to men, while department heads earn only about 85 cents on the dollar.

Another curious fact is that for a few specific positions – in which men usually outnumber women – women administrators earn more than their male counterparts. That is the case for chief facilities officers, where men outnumber women by a ratio of more than nine to one. Women in such positions make $1.17 for every dollar men make.

We see some great disparities for other positions. That is the case for chief financial officers, for which about 40 percent are women yet make only 77 cents for each dollar men made. Seniority also plays a role in the pay gap, with it being higher for women with more than 17 years of service. The CUPA-HR suggests that reasons for this differential include more barriers for women from older generations, ageism and a general U.S. pay gap that is wider for older women.

The size of the pay gap also has a geographic component, according to the report. The Midwest region shows the narrowest in the last 15 years, with women’s pay rising by 8 cents on the dollar men earn, from 74 cents to 82 cents. In the West, which had the highest women-to-men pay ratio in 2001 with more than 80 cents on the dollar at the time, has seen the least change.

It is time for colleges and universities to look at their own data and start moving toward more equitable pay between genders. Otherwise, higher education administration will continue to be a man’s world.

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Female Administrators Face Discrimination in Education

Cost is one of the big issues facing higher education. Diminishing government funding has spiraled the expense of attending public colleges and universities, which, in turn, has increased the debt burden on students to more than a trillion dollars.

Facing this issue has become a national concern for many politicians. State legislators and governors, as well as executives of some for-profit education companies, have been pushing distance education (mostly in the form of on-line courses) as the solution.

However, many of us who have been watching the development of these courses in our institutions have had our doubts not only about their effectiveness, but also about the claim that they will help to reduce the cost of attending college.

Now a report published just a few days ago are confirming our suspicions. The report in question, titled “WCET’s Distance Education Price and Cost,” concludes that these courses end up costing more than traditional courses. According to this study, more than half (54.2 percent) of respondents report that distance students pay more than on-campus students when tuition and fees are added. About three-quarters (75.1 percent) of institutions that participated in this study indicated that tuition was the same, but the added fees continue to result in a higher price to students of distance courses.

WCET stands for WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education) Cooperative for Education Technologies. The very fact that this organization, founded in 1989, has been advocating for years the use of distance learning among institutions of higher education makes the report even more credible.

The study was conducted in 2016 and looked at 197 survey respondents who are on the front lines of offering distance courses. The authors also conducted interviews with leaders who have researched this issue to gain their insights on the future of distance education.

Some of the basic questions asked included, “What do you know about the price and cost of distance education? What do you charge students? How much does the institution spend to create these courses?” These questions reflected the long-held assumption that the price paid by students enrolled in distance courses is less than courses taught on campus.

Further, the detailed questions asked during the survey of distance education professionals asked about the cost of 21 educational components in four categories – preparing, teaching, assessing students and supporting faculty and students – involved in creating and delivering distance courses. The results reveal that for 12 (57.1 percent) of the components, the respondents thought there was no difference in the costs between distance courses and traditional ones. Nine (42.9 percent) of the components respondents thought that distance courses cost more, and, in some cases, much more. More significantly, respondents did not identify a single component of a distance course at their institution that costs less than delivering a traditional course.

One of the conclusions the authors of this report made was, “It’s our belief that all parties involved in setting the price for distance education courses need a dose of the realities.”

To make things more complicated, now some politicians are engaged in setting ceilings on the price charged for distance courses. In Florida, the state legislature created “University of Florida Online,” which is mandated to charge a price that is 25 percent lower than on-campus offerings. The governor capped the distance education fees and even threatened to eliminate them. What this does is to introduce an artificial and distorting financial factor that sets up the whole enterprise to fail, given that it artificially imposes prices that have nothing to do with the real cost of providing those courses.

Another disrupting factor in this whole picture is the fact that when distance learning was created in the early 18th Century, its original intent was to overcome the barriers of place and time, not to control costs.

Further, part of the political agenda of expanding the use of distance education is to reduce the use of faculty, not only because most of the budget of institutions of higher education goes into personnel, but also because it is a way to weaken a system that many politicians see with suspicion – including such unique characteristics as tenure, sabbaticals, research expectations and the like. Many of these politicians see those peculiarities as a waste of resources.

Yet, this report clearly shows that on-line learning does not lower costs, but rather increases them.

To the issue of cost we need to add the fact that – as many studies have shown – distance education is not right for everybody. Only students who are already well educated and have financial means tend to do well.

Do the results of this study mean that there is no place for distance education in colleges and universities? Not necessarily. It should be an option, particularly for students who live in rural areas far away from traditional campuses or for people who already have a job and whose only opportunity to attend college is by taking online courses.

Based on both cost and effectiveness, distance education is not the panacea for the many financial woes facing higher education today, problems that have been caused by the lack of financial support for public education. Further, we need to understand once and for all that education is a human activity for which direct human contact is essential, particularly for those students who, because of their socioeconomic background (financially challenged, first-generation college students, etc.) need that direct human intervention.

It is time to look at the numbers and make well-informed decisions when it comes to the illusion that this “technological fix” is the answer to higher education.

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Distance Education More Expensive than Thought

Most people when talking about diversity think of matters revolving around race and gender, and while those are obvious and important topics, the fact of the matter is that the definition of diversity is much larger.

Today diversity is seen in two dimensions. The first one is what is called inherent diversity, the diversity that is beyond people’s control. Obviously, these issues include race and gender, but also include national origin, age, sexual orientation, disability, religious affiliation and socioeconomic status. Certainly, you can change your religious affiliation or socioeconomic status over time, but being raised in a particular religion or under certain economic conditions does give one a different perspective in life.

The second dimension may be less evident, but can be equally important when it comes to job performance. It is called acquired diversity and consists of aspects of one’s life such as cultural fluency, generational savviness, gender smarts, social media skills, cross-functional knowledge, global mindset, language skills and military experience. These are characteristics that are the result of both formal education and life experiences.

Imagine for a moment that you run an engineering firm that has four white males who all graduated from Georgia Tech, one of the top engineering schools in the country.

All those four engineers came from a middle-class family whose parents had gone to college. Now you have the opportunity to hire another engineer who happens to be a minority candidate. Yet, that candidate not only is male, but also comes from a middle-class family and is the son of college-educated parents who also graduated from Georgia Tech. Even if you choose to hire him, you are adding little diversity to your team because that new person is likely to think in very similar ways to the rest of the people already in place.

You may think that such that this really doesn’t matter. After all, you are bringing in a qualified person who most likely will get along well with other people and also brings in racial diversity. What is wrong with that?

Most people don’t realize that a lot of big progress made by humanity has come about by people who think differently from one another – not just look different. That is true even in fields that seem pretty straight from academic viewpoints, such as science. Here are some good examples.

Gregor Mendel is recognized as the father of genetics. He entered the Augustinian order because his family was too poor to afford an education for him. Because the Augustinians supplied teachers to the Austrian schools he was sent to the University of Vienna to study mathematics and physical sciences. While he obtained a very good education in both broad fields, he never trained specifically in biology. Yet, when he started to do his experiments with peas at the Brno monastery in what is today the Czech Republic, his mathematical training allowed him to visualize ratios in the characteristics that were being inherited by the plants he was cultivating. That led him to present and publish in 1865 the hereditary laws for which he is famous today.

Despite the fact that the journal in which he published his ideas was well known at that time (Transactions of the Natural History of Brno) and that he sent his papers to prominent botanists of his time, these naturalists had no training in mathematics and did not understand what he was trying to demonstrate.

It wasn’t until 1900 – 35 years after his research was published –for his work to be recognized by the scientific community. Here is a very good example of someone with an entirely different intellectual toolbox making a revolutionary contribution to science in an area that was not his.

Another similar example involves plate tectonics. Alfred Wegener was a trained meteorologist who could not avoid, while looking at a world map, noticing that the continents fit together as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Using some meteorological data, he proposed in 1912 the idea that all the continents were originally just one that had broken up in pieces, generating the shapes of today’s landmasses. His idea was ridiculed by most fellow scientists of his time, and it took more than a half century to be recognized as correct and acknowledged as one of the most important findings in geological sciences of the 20th century, and all brought by a meteorologist.

Another case is that of Emily Martin. For many decades, biologists believed that sperm competed among themselves to be first to reach the female egg. Martin was not biologist, but rather a social anthropologist who was trained to discover how culture influences our beliefs, even our scientific beliefs.

She challenged the idea of the egg being passive and the sperm being aggressive, which is part of the cultural bias we have toward gender generally. And she was correct. Later research proved that sperm are actually weak, necessitating the need for hundreds of millions of them to fertilize the egg.

The conclusion? We need people with different backgrounds – let’s call it “intellectual diversity” – to produce important breakthroughs. So, yes, many times it takes an outsider to generate progress for humanity.

Those of us in higher education should learn from history and use these examples as a precautionary tale. When hiring new faculty for our college departments we should look carefully for people who are different from those who are already at work, people who are not intellectual clones of ourselves. And that goes far beyond the obvious issues of gender and race.

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Diversity More than Race, Gender in Higher Education

One of the individuals who is usually around on campuses but many times is almost “invisible” is the president’s partner. Sometimes they take on major roles for social functions, fundraising, and public relations; others are quite inconspicuous. In some cases, they even get financial compensation for their work. In others, they have to make sacrifices for the wellbeing of their partners.

A new study helps to clarify the role of presidential partners and how they feel about their roles. “The Lives of Presidential Partners in Higher Education Institutions,” published by the University of Minnesota, provides a good understanding.

The results of this study are based on surveying 461 presidential partners nationwide. The average respondent age was 58.8 years. The median amount of time the respondents’ partners had held presidential roles was six years. The median number of time surveyed partners have been married or in a committed relationship was slightly more than 30 years. In terms of ethnicity, 87 percent reported to be white, with 6 percent African-American. Ninety-four percent of partners had a bachelor’s degree or higher, while 12 partners (about 2 percent) indicated they were in a same-sex relationship. Among the findings of that study are that 84 percent of the partners found the role satisfying, very satisfying, or extremely satisfying.

Among the things they found most rewarding were interacting with students, meeting interesting people, supporting their presidents and helping to represent their institutions nationally and locally. On the other hand, many mentioned that the major challenges they face were struggles with role clarity and the stresses of a very public existence.

Another important finding was that expectations of male and female partners can be remarkably different. Partners are overwhelmingly female. Male partners reported more frequently than females as having no responsibilities in the partner role, while females were less often employed outside the role as partner. Further, women reported that they more frequently had to reduce or quit employment when their partners became presidents. Female partners also had more responsibilities than their male counterparts, and reported higher levels of frustration. Eighty-five percent of females were very involved or extremely involved with their institutions, compared with only 30 percent of male partners. Twenty-seven percent of males reported that they were minimally involved or uninvolved, compared with 12 percent of females. Males stated that they were expected to continue their own work outside their role as the partners of university presidents and are free to skip campus participation.

A major issue seems to be lack of clarity regarding their roles. Not only do they find the transition to the partner role as a major life event, but they also reported a lack of clarity regarding expectations. According to survey respondents, “the role is seldom made clear before presidents accept their positions, few institutions have written partner policies, and presidential contracts rarely mention the partner role.” Asked to define their role in relation to institutions, 74 percent selected “informal responsibilities in an unpaid role.” This is not an unimportant factor since a quarter of partners believed that an institution’s expectations of them had influenced their president’s decision to accept, decline, or step down from a position.

Regarding perks, 71 percent of partners at public institutions and 67 percent of partners at private institutions reported that their institution had an official residence. “Having an official residence was associated with greater involvement in the partner role,” according to the report. “Eighty-seven percent of partners with official residences reported satisfaction with them. Features partners most liked about residences were their location and beauty. The feature liked least was lack of privacy.”

These are important data for many reasons. One is the increasing proportion of presidential partners that do not believe that they should quit their jobs just because their companions got a presidential position. The other is that there is also an increasing demand for partners to get involved in many functions, including fundraising, particularly given the precarious financial situation of many colleges and universities. Finally, the big question is, given that more and more is expected from them, should they not be financially compensated for their work? After all, if developing a “job description” for them is becoming a necessity, then compensation should follow.

Another important issue regards privacy and public persona. These represent significant changes in the lifestyles of partners, and many of them require coaching when it comes to communication, fundraising and how to deal with the media. No wonder that those expectations play a role on making decisions on whether or not to accept a presidential job. Given that the complexity and problems faced by institutions of higher education continue to increase, we need better professionals at the helm of these institutions and it is appalling that we can lose some good candidates for the presidency because of the stress and expectations placed on their partners.

One of the survey’s most important results was that 24 percent of partners believed an institution’s expectations for them had influenced a presidents’ decision to accept, decline or step down from a position, while just 17 percent of survey respondents said the presidents’ contract or employment letter mentioned the partner role.

Needless to say, these partners also have to learn “on the job” what it entails to be a presidential partner and make decisions such as to join this or that civic organization for the benefit of the institution. They also have to be weary of potential conflicts of interest when dealing with many actors inside and outside their institutions.

Generally, it is considered a “no-go” for the spouse to accept a paid job within the institution because it will be viewed as nepotism and will create uncomfortable situations.

It is time to start thinking about “professionalizing” the role of a college president.

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Not All Presidential Spouses are Created Equal

Since the time of the Civil Rights movement the issue of diversity has been widely discussed in academia. First it was considered that institutions of higher education should increase the participation of minorities of both faculty and students as a matter of social justice.

Then came the legal aspect of increasing diversity when the concept of affirmative action was introduced in the early 1960s. After President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order in 1961 that required not to “discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”

President Lyndon Johnson then added “sex” as one of the considerations for affirmative action in another executive order in 1967. When these approaches were legally challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court in Grutter v Bollinger (2003) ruled that educational institutions may use a narrowly tailored consideration of race as a factor when admitting students.

Despite all this, there has always been the suspicion in some quarters that diversity does nothing to improve the quality of any organization. However, a number of works published in the last few years show otherwise.

First the concept of diversity has been expanded not only to areas of age, disabilities and sexual preferences, but also when it comes to life experiences that provide different capabilities when it comes to solving an institution’s problems.

For example, a department of engineering that has four faculty members who are white, come from college-educated middle class families, and who graduated from Georgia Tech – one of the prime engineering schools in the country – gains little diversity when hiring a minority candidate with exactly the same background. A better choice, some argue, would be to hire someone who is also a minority but who comes from a lower socioeconomic class, or a first-generation college graduate from a lesser- known institution. Such a candidate would have experienced a number of life events that would allow for greater understand of, and empathy for, students with similar backgrounds.

This has led to the concept of seeing people as “toolboxes,” with life experiences providing different necessary tools. Based on our own experiences, we all have different capabilities. For example, if you are running a large building you need electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, etc. Each one of those professionals will need a different “toolbox” of experiences and capabilities to solve different problems. The more diverse those toolboxes, the more likely you are to have a team really capable of solving any kind of problem.

This phenomenon was proven mathematically in a 2004 paper that appeared in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” The authors concluded that “the diverse group almost always outperforms the group of the best by substantial margins.” Many organizations have now adopted these views in order to become more effective.

Other studies have shown that, among other things, ethnically diverse companies are 35 percent more likely to outperform their competitors, that companies with such diversity are 75 percent more likely to have a marketable idea implemented and 70 percent are more likely to see their organization capture a new market.

Because of these benefits, many companies – particularly in the tech sector – have worked hard to increase the level of diversity among their ranks. Given the complexity of the social, economic, and political problems of today, many governmental organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, have redoubled their efforts to recruit personnel from highly diverse college campuses.

But while government and industry are turning to diverse college graduates to improve their performance, colleges and universities themselves haven’t done very well in their own efforts toward diversity. Despite accusations of being too politically correct and “too liberal,” educational institutions are still places of racial and gender discrimination, and the numbers speak for themselves.

According to a study by the American Council on Education, the participation of people of color in leadership positions in institutions of higher education is decreasing – even at predominately minority-serving institutions. The American Association of University Professors surveyed the salaries of faculty members at 1,156 postsecondary institutions and found that almost all of them pay females less than males by about a margin of 10 percent. This disparity in salaries is particularly true for the upper echelon of academia: full professors. Further, women only make up 46 percent of assistant professors, 38 percent of associate professors, and 23 percent of full professors, despite the fact that 60 percent of all postdoctoral students, the main pipeline for college professors in this country, are women.

Part of the problem has been the false belief that by placing a diversity statement in job advertisements indicating that an institution follows affirmative action rules that minorities will flock with applications. In fact, except for a few individuals of color who graduate from Ivy League institutions, most of them tend to be overlooked. Another reason that we have difficulty in recognizing is the inherent bias we humans have against people who do not look like us.

In a paper authored by Harvard professor Robert Putnam in the journal “Scandinavian Political Studies,” he showed that “In ethnically diverse neighborhoods (…) trust (even of one’ own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

Until we recognize that inherent biases are part of the human condition, that racism and sexism is still alive in our society, and that to overcome those issues we need more than laws and good intentions, we will never achieve the goal of making of our institutions of higher education a true representation of the increasingly diverse society in which we live.

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There is Proof Diversity Makes Colleges Better

In higher education, it has always been said that the position of departmental chair is one of the most difficult jobs. Chairs usually take over the responsibility of managing the affairs of their academic units without previous in-depth preparation for the job and do so in a difficult position where they have to implement policies and practices from the college and university’s administration, while having to still deal with their colleagues on a daily basis.

On top of that they tend to return to the faculty as another foot soldier after their stint as chair, having to live with the decisions they had to make about colleagues without any protection from one or another form of retribution.

To make things worse, department chairs are now expected to do things unheard of years ago, such as fundraising, recruiting of students and marketing of their own departments – all in a climate of reduced budgets and other administrative support. Now a new study suggests what we have always suspected: department chairs take on their jobs without appropriate training. A recent study funded by the University Council for Educational Administration that looked at department chairs’ roles, responsibilities, stresses, job satisfaction and career trajectory, shows how badly prepared most new chairs feel when assuming their responsibilities. The 336 respondents to their survey represented all kinds of institutions and disciplines. Two-thirds came from private institutions, and most were from campuses without faculty unions.

Among the major results of the study are that the average term one serves as chair is about four years, 67 percent of chairs receive no formal training from their institutions and those who do receive training get 10 hours or fewer. The little training they do get has to do more with paper pushing types of things – such as how to prepare a budget sheet – rather than more complicated tasks such as how to deal with faculty that do not perform or how to maneuver delicate situations such as sexual harassment.

No wonder that even 67 percent of the few who receive some kind of training say that it did not prepare them adequately for their jobs. They say they wish that they had received more training in areas such as evaluation of faculty performance, maintaining a healthy work climate, obtaining and managing external funds, preparing and proposing budgets and developing long-range goals.

In most cases they had to learn those skills on their own. Most respondents to the survey say it took them between six and 18 months to feel comfortable dealing with those issues. Yet despite the adjustment period, 89 percent of chairs say they would do the job again, though few reported plans to move up in the administrative ranks. The pool from which university administrators come from keeps shrinking, making it harder to get people who are able to assume other responsibilities, such as dean and above.

Most respondents say that they decided to become chairs in order to advance their departments, rather than their own careers.

Although there are a few organizations that offer training for chairs outside their own institutions, such as the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, very few have the opportunity to contrast how the role of a chair is done outside of their own institutions. Only about half of the chairs responding to the survey said that they network with other chairs on operational, professional and strategic issues.

Other issues affecting departmental chairs include balancing work-life demands and keeping up with email in departments that – mostly due to because of budget cuts – have fewer office assistants to provide administrative assistance to the chairs.

When comparing the results of this study with a similar one which took place in 1991, some 70 percent of chairs now say they’re part of both the faculty and the administration, compared to about half of respondents in 1991.

Another alarming finding is that only about 60 percent are full professors, meaning that a large chunk of departmental chairs also have to deal with the issue of advancing their academic career for both better recognition and pay. That is down from 80 percent in the 1991 study. Even worse, only 81 percent of them had tenure at the time that they became chairs.

It is also striking that despite the fact that there is a lot of rhetoric about increasing diversity in academia, the proportion of minorities who occupy the position of chair is still miniscule. About 85 percent identify as white, 4 percent as Hispanic, 3 percent as black and 3 percent as Asian or Pacific Islander. Most chairs are between 46 and 55 years old. Most are married and about half have children at home. Twenty percent care for older parents.

In the final analysis, it is clear that most colleges and universities do not know how to provide adequate training for new chairs and that the assumption is that their roles will be learned “on the job.” It is also not always clear who should be providing that training, whether it should be the dean or the provost and what other offices of the administration of the institution should be involved in it.

We should not forget that a chair is ultimately responsible for the development, mentoring and support of new faculty members and, therefore, have their futures – and that of their institutions – in their hands.

Unless we take more seriously the task of training departmental chairs, we risk compromising not only the lives of people who work very hard and for many years to become full-time faculty members but also the future of the institution itself.

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Department Chairs Play Key Role in Education

Enrollment has become the main focus of attention for higher education administrators. For private institutions enrollment is the major source of their funding. And due to diminished support from states, it has also become the major source of financial support for most public colleges and universities. This dependence on tuition wasn’t always so great for public institutions, but is the result of a process that has been called the privatization of public higher education.

Two reports that got little attention when published recently were the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, known as Wiche. This group released its new projections of high-school graduates in all 50 states through 2031-32. After years of increases in the overall number of graduates, the commission’s report says, “the U.S. is headed into a period of stagnation,” in which colleges can no longer rely on growth.

This report projects growth in the South and West, and a continuing drop in the Midwest and Northeast. It also projects the nation’s high-school graduates becoming more diverse; with the number of white graduates decreasing sharply while the number of Hispanic graduates grows substantially.

The other report was the “Term Enrollment estimates for Fall 2016” by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, also known just as the Clearinghouse.

The major finding in that study is that in fall of 2016, the overall enrollments in U.S. Colleges and Universities decreased by 1.4 percent when compared with the previous fall. This decrease was on top of a 1.7 percent decrease for fall of 2015 and a 1.3 decrease for fall of 2014.

And the decrease was not uniform among different types of institutions. Enrollments among four-year for-profit institutions decreased by 14.5 percent, and for two-year public institutions the decrease was 2.6 percent. Four-year, private non-profit institutions decreased by 0.6 percent. Enrollments among four-year public institutions increased slightly by 0.2 percent. Taken as a whole, public sector enrollment (2-year and 4-year combined) declined by 1.0 percent this fall semester.

Among the states most affected by this decline were New Mexico (-6.3 percent), West Virginia (-5.1 percent), Hawaii and Montana (-4.4 percent), Florida and Kentucky (-4.3 percent), and Illinois (-4 percent). These are states that have been affected, in one way or another, by a combination of lower numbers of local high school graduates and lower financial support by their states.

The few bright spots in this picture are New Hampshire (+11 percent) and Utah (+8.7 percent). Both states have seen an increase of their populations with the case of Utah being spectacular: between 2010 and 2015 the population increased by 8.4 percent.

When it comes to enrollment declines by discipline, we encounter a few surprises. The ones most affected by declines are personal and culinary services (-17.8 percent), engineering technologies and engineering-related fields (-14.5 percent) and legal professions and studies (-10.9 percent). The few ones with significant increases are science technologies/technicians (+15.9 percent), liberal arts and sciences, general studies and humanities, including undeclared students (+4.7 percent), engineering (+4 percent) and natural resources and conservation (+2.5 percent).

These numbers are telling us several things. The first and more important one is that there are fewer and fewer people going to college overall. That is particularly true in states where the number of high school graduates is declining and/or the state is giving less and less support to public higher education. One way many colleges and universities have tried to deal with these declines is by encouraging an increase in the number of international students who not only help to keep up headcount, but also pay full out-of state tuition, meaning that they are bringing more money into the college coffers than in-state students.

The problem here is two-fold and has serious implications. The first one is that many public institutions still resist changing their strategies to attract more diverse students in order not to rattle legislators who are not necessarily sympathetic to such efforts. The second problem is that changes in demographics have to do with multiple factors of which the economy is the most salient, but not the only one. Sates that invest fewer dollars in economic development have historically seen a decline in their economic activities. This decline, in turn, attracts fewer people into the state.

When it comes to immigration, the year after the 9/11 attacks we saw a 25 percent decline in the number of international students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. Now that we are living in an environment of anti-immigration and xenophobic rhetoric, we can expect an even larger decline in the number of international students applying to study in the U.S., particularly those whose ethnicity or religion have been specific targets of that rhetoric. In the meantime, countries such as Canada and Australia are preparing to absorb those international students that will not come to the U.S.

Although a decline in the enrollment of for-profit institutions is a good sign since most of them provide a substandard education and are the major culprits in the increase of student debt nationwide, the fact the public sector as a whole declined by 1 percent is an indication that worse things are yet to come.

The increases in the enrollments in the sciences and in the liberal arts is interesting because to become a scientist was never heralded as a traditional profession like law or engineering for people to get well paid jobs. And the liberal arts have been subjected to a barrage of unfounded criticisms as to their value from both the right and the left within the political spectrum.

In study after study it has been demonstrated that institutions of higher education are engines of economic development. When states legislatures and governors decide to provide less support for them they are committing economic suicide. And that is done on the basis of ideological commitment and political expediency. They are making poor states even poorer while mortgaging the future by attracting fewer private enterprises that need an educated population to function in those states.

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College Enrollments Becoming Problematic