functioning but is considered by many to be largely peripheral
to an institution’s core educational mission. Over the years,
student affairs has languished in the shadows of academic
affairs and its budget is often the first slashed when funding
declines. The president, provost, and academic deans of higher
education institutions all bear a collective responsibility for
correcting this historical oversight. But so, too, do student
affairs administrators and counselors. In a nutshell, the student affairs profession has not been as proactive, directive, or
innovative as it needs to be to help students not only enter but
complete their programs of study.
I know that many counselors and financial aid and student
services staff members do go in search of students, rather than
waiting for students to seek them out. They insert themselves
in classrooms; set up shop in cafeterias; e-mail and call stu-
dents at home; collaborate carefully with faculty; staff mobile
mental health clinics to make it easier for students to access
medical services; and employ technology creatively to promote
distance learning and more flexible class schedules. Yet unfor-
tunately, consistent outreach and carefully aligned support
that meets the needs and challenges of students and their class-
rooms is still the exception rather than the norm, especially
for low-income students. Orientation sessions, mentoring
initiatives, drop-in centers, and minority-support programs
have haphazardly proliferated on college campuses, typically
with few ongoing ties to the work of the classroom and with
little rigorous evaluation. As Syracuse University Professor
Vincent Tinto has summarized, too many universities are still
meant that millions more low-income and nontraditional stu-
dents, many of them the first in their family to attend college,
are currently enrolled in institutions of higher learning. Now,
more than ever, support services are vital to retaining and
graduating low-income and nontraditional students. And now,
more than ever, completing a certificate or degree is a prereq-
uisite to landing a decent job in a global economy.
Raising Completion Rates
For most of the last quarter century, the primary role of college presidents has been to boost enrollment, expand access,
and build endowments and university prestige. By contrast,
proposals to raise college completion rates have received less
attention and entailed unpopular, nitty-gritty tasks, like con-
“The key to a college’s effectiveness is not whether
it adopts particular policies or practices, but how
well it aligns and manages all of its programs and
services to support student success.”
unwilling to “move beyond the provision of add-on services
for low-income students . . . placed at the margins of institu-
tional life.”
It is time to stop this tinkering and time to start rethink-
ing student services across the spectrum—from 21st century
bridge programs, and individualized and group support with
modern methods, to integrated classroom strategies, especially
in regard to the developmental education of academically-
underprepared college freshmen. The profound transforma-
tion of higher education over the last half-century has opened
unparalleled opportunities for student affairs staff. The classic
four-year residential college experience, once reserved pri-
marily for white middle-class, unemployed undergraduates,
has now become a diverse system of four-year and two-year
institutions in which most students commute and work. At
the same time, the enormous broadening of college access has
trolling tuition costs and shuttering unnecessary programs. No
one doubts that rising college costs are an important factor in
the woeful college completion rates of low-income students,
just a quarter of whom earn bachelor’s degrees within six years
of starting their programs. But a comprehensive 2006 study by
Thomas Bailey and his colleagues at the Community College
Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College at Columbia
University suggests that money alone is not the answer.
The CCRC analysis of 150,000 student transcripts at
Florida’s 28 community colleges found that the effectiveness
of institutions in retaining and graduating students varies
enormously—even after controlling for student characteristics. “The key to a college’s effectiveness,” CCRC reported,
“is not whether it adopts particular policies or practices, but
how well it aligns and manages all of its programs and services
to support student success.” In one case, the report noted, it
