Overworked & underfunded: faced with evaporating budgets and depleted resources, Student Affairs pros fight to meet students' increasingly complex needs and ever-mounting expectations - Student Affairs

University Business, March, 2004 by Alana Klein

Mary Beth Snyder, vice president of Student Affairs at Oakland University (MI), has become an expert at redistributing money. Confronted with dwindling revenue sources and growing enrollment pressure, Snyder and her staff have had to re-evaluate Oakland's services, determining which are vital to the student body and which are disposable. Her current dilemma is finding a way to accommodate students' increased demand for better, more up-to-date technology. "We haven't been able to incorporate technology in the ways that we should be in order to keep ahead of the curve," she says. Higher Internet speed connection in residence halls, upgraded Web site service, and online instruction education are just a few of the services Snyder would like to see offered. One way to offset the costs, she says, would be to build technology fees into students' housing and room-and-board costs. Even though the financial burden would fall on students, Snyder says, "It is our job to adapt to our students' ever-changing needs and interests. That is what they expect."

Across the county, meeting students' high expectations comes at great cost. What's more, accommodating the ongoing demand for new and improved amenities, facilities, and technology will continue to pose a financial strain not only for IHEs but also for the students who often foot the bill for these added expenses. "I'd love to give every student a laptop when he walks in the front door, but we simply can't afford that. We're moving incrementally," Snyder says. She is not alone.

Richard Mullendore

VP Student Affairs

University of Georgia

Athens, GA

Student Population: 33,800

"Managing the difference between the expectations of our students, parents, faculty, administrators, legislators, and community members, and our ability to serve them, is our primary challenge. The expectation today is that students should be treated like customers. But sometimes, the customer is not always right. Our second challenge is that of budget reductions. Unfilled staff positions and no salary increases place considerable strain on staff and impact employee morale. To counteract this, we maintain positive altitudes and are more visible than ever to our staff. And we spend more time raising private dollars. I spend 20 percent of my time working with prospective donors, and I have a full-time development officer. Third, though we take our role as educators and partners in the learning process seriously, the lack of funds is having a very real impact on that process. Four years ago, when we had adequate funding, I was able to be a lot more creative than I are now. We built high-tech classrooms, computer labs, and faculty residences, but now we can't afford to continue to do that; we've been stopped cold. So we're trying to design programs that complement what's going on in the classroom. Implementing tutoring programs and placing academic advisers in residence halls is one idea. If you can take these services to a residence hall where 950 students live, the chances of them using these services ate greatly increased. But importantly, today's students have greater personal needs than in previous generations, especially in the area of mental/emotional health. We need to ensure that more resources--including psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, staff members, and appropriate facilities--are available to keep our students healthy and sale."

Mary Beth Snyder

VP Student Affairs

Oakland University

Rochester, MI

Student Population: 17,000

"Our major challenge is to provide students with both personal and academic support services in an environment of dwindling resources and growing enrollment pressure. We're faced with deteriorating facilities designed decades ago that don't suit the current size of our student body. On top of that, because of lack of funding and resources, we haven't been able to incorporate technology in the ways we should be, to keep ahead of the curve. We've had trouble keeping up with the demand for a high-speed Internet connection in residence halls, for instance, and we ate always challenged to maintain and upgrade our Web site service. We'd also like to better assist faculty and students by supporting online instruction in the classroom. But it's now a challenge of reallocating existing resources, and we've become experts at it, Like everybody else in student affairs. We've had to build technology lees into housing and room-and-board costs. Still, we ask ourselves: How can we be flexible enough to adapt to an ever-changing student population? We noticed, for instance, that our students were staying up later at night than before. So, we started to allow them 24-hour access to buildings, made food services available later, and kept computer labs open Longer. Another fundamental issue is that as tuition increases climb so rapidly, there is a certain segment of the population--low-income students--that cannot afford to go to college. When it comes to financial aid, how do you deal with low-income families who are taking on a tot of debt, especially when, for cultural reasons, some families will not take on such debts? To combat this, we have financial aid advisers working with families, and on the national level our lobbyists ate trying to elongate payback policies. We also recently decided to prohibit credit card companies from hawking credit cards to students, since that is another source of student debt. Through seminars, we have been able to educate students about the dangers of credit card use and how to establish good credit."