No, college president is not the hardest job in the nation. It’s mostly indoor work, and generally speaking, it pays pretty well. But I saw a lot of truth in Josh Kroger’s piece in IHE last week in which he made that claim. This week I even saw some of the issues come to life.
Kroger pointed out, correctly, that colleges don’t have the luxury of a clear single purpose. As nonprofits, most of them don’t exist to maximize their endowments. They have stakeholders ranging from students to employees to employers to voters to donors to accreditors to legislatures, most of whom don’t listen to each other. They have budgets, but they aren’t about maximizing profit; there isn’t a bottom line in the same sense that there is for most businesses. Leaders -- and I’ll include folks beyond presidents in that -- have to simultaneously balance conflicting imperatives and still move forward. That’s a much more complicated decision matrix than leaders in most industries face.
As if on cue, a few days after reading that piece, I saw it come to life. I was in a meeting about scheduling, and the topic of the “college hour” came up. The college hour is a bloc of time during which we don’t run classes, to allow time for student clubs and organizations to meet and for faculty to attend department and college meetings. Ours is at the lunch hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The question at hand was whether it might make sense to move it.
The discussion was generally thoughtful, with people offering input without getting dogmatic about it. One member of the group, a professor of whom I think highly, suggested that she was “in favor of whatever works best.”
At which point I realized that the issue was the definition of “works.”
The lunch hour on Mondays and Wednesdays, when we do run classes, is “prime time.” Those classes are highly enrolled. At the branch campuses we don’t do college hour, and the Tuesday/Thursday lunch hour slots there are quite popular. From those observations, as well as anecdotal reports from students, there’s reason to believe that if we moved the college hour to, say, 2:00 in the afternoon, the newly-available class sections at midday would be popular. We can’t actually prove it without trying it, of course, but I’d bet that those classes would fill.
If the goal is to maximize student participation in clubs, then moving college hour to midday might not “work.” Presumably, students who currently stay between classes would be likelier to take two classes back-to-back and then leave. Not all, of course, but enough to matter. We know that student involvement on campus contributes to retention, so reducing that involvement could reduce retention. Don’t we want students to stick around?
If the goal is to maximize enrollment, though, then moving college hour to midday would almost certainly “work.” For a college facing a downward enrollment (and therefore budget) trend to turn students away at peak times is counterintuitive at best. It would be like a restaurant closing at the lunch hour and reopening in the early afternoon, and then wondering why it’s struggling. Students who work afternoon shifts would like the option of fitting in a second class before leaving, and we could use the FTE’s. When times were flush, maybe we could afford to ignore that, but those times are gone. Besides, we know that students who take more credits per semester are more likely to graduate. Don’t we want students to graduate?
Internal constituencies send conflicting messages, too. Two of the least popular ideas on campus are “change” and “cuts.” But what if failure to change forces the cuts to accelerate? What if change could reduce the cuts? Add time as a dimension, and it gets more complicated. “Short term discomfort for long term gain” is one thing. “Short term discomfort for modestly reduced long term pain” is quite another, politically. The latter is defensible, but harder to sell. In that case, the pain is obvious and the gain seemingly invisible, at least on a day-to-day level.
This is a microcosm of the sort of decisions that college leaders make all the time. The decision to leave it alone would be easier politically in the short term, and defensible on the high-minded grounds of student retention. The decision to change it would be economically healthier in the long term, and defensible on the high-minded grounds of increasing the likelihood of graduation. You can annoy people now with changes, or annoy them later with cuts.
The committee didn’t come to an immediate answer. The question is hard, and either answer is likely to annoy somebody. Multiply that by many, many more questions, and the task is hard. It’s indoor work, but that doesn’t make it easy.