Student Services

A Handbook for the Profession

John H. Schuh, Susan R. Jones, Vasti Torres, John H. Schuh, Susan R. Jones, Vasti Torres

• Verlag: Jossey-Bass
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119051343
• Auflage: 6
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Studentenleben

The bestselling student affairs text, updated for today's evolving campus

Student Services is the classic comprehensive text for graduate students in student affairs, written by top scholars and practitioners in the field. Accessible and theoretically grounded, this book reflects the realities of contemporary practice in student affairs. This new sixth edition has been updated throughout to align with current scholarship, and expanded with four new chapters on student development, crisis management, programming, and applications. Twenty new authors join the roster of expert contributors, bringing new perspective on critical issues such as ethical standards, campus culture, psychosocial development, student retention, assessment and evaluation, and much more. End-of-chapter questions help reinforce the material presented, and unique coverage of critical theoretical perspectives, counseling and helping skills, advising, leadership, environmental theories, and other useful topics make this book a foundational resource for those preparing for a student affairs career.

The student affairs staff has the responsibility for a vast array of services and support roles for students on every type of campus. This book provides a thorough overview of the field's many facets, with invaluable real-world insight from leading practitioners.

• Understand the theoretical bases of development, learning, identity, and change
• Delve into the organizational frameworks vital to any institution
• Learn the historical context of higher education and the student affairs role
• Master essential competencies including professionalism, supervision, crisis management, and more

As colleges and universities offer more and more services to an increasingly diverse student population, the responsibility for these programs falls to student affairs educators. The role requires a broad skill set, and conceptual grounding in a number of disciplines. Student Services provides the most complete overview of the foundations, philosophies, ethics, and theories that guide today's student affairs professional.

PART ONE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The purpose of this book is to provide basic information about student services to graduate students, young (in terms of experience) professionals, those new to the profession, and seasoned members of the academy who are not familiar with student affairs. We think it is important to offer a foundation for how student affairs practice has grown and developed to where it is today, as well as to develop a philosophical basis for our professional practice. As is the case with other aspects of higher education, the process of development for student affairs has taken decades, and it will continue to do so as long as there are people on college campuses whose primary focus has to do with the student experience outside the institution's curriculum.

Accordingly, this part of the book begins with a historical overview of American higher education. Chapter 1 by John R. Thelin and Marybeth Gasman highlights the periods of higher education development, from colonial times when the first colleges were founded, to the beginning of the development of state universities, to the passage of the Morrill Act and the resulting rise of land-grant universities, to colleges that were founded to serve African Americans, and so on. They continue through several more periods to where higher education in the United States stands today—the envy of the world in many respects but not without serious problems, including access to higher education, the cost of attendance, disappointing graduation rates, and so on. This historical foundation is important to keep in mind in that although higher education faces serious problems today, it has almost always had challenges to be managed, sometimes because of internal conflict and other times resulting from political, social, or economic external forces.

From an overview of the history of higher education we move to the history of student affairs, guided by Robert Schwartz and Dafina-Lazarus Stewart in chapter 2. Formal student affairs practice began in the twentieth century, picking up momentum just before and after World War II with the publication of the Student Personnel Point of View in 1937, which was updated in 1949. During the twentieth century professional organizations were founded, graduate curricula were developed, and a literature base for our professional practice was published. Our authors guide us through the growing pains experienced by student affairs and then focus on the consumer movement and passage of federal legislation that affected higher education as a new century approached. The chapter also addresses current issues and identifies future challenges and considerations for student affairs practice.

Chapter 3 defines, describes, and analyzes the profession's philosophy. Robert D. Reason and Ellen M. Broido identify the enduring principles and values of student affairs and then discuss the current influences on our professional philosophies and values. They conclude that multiple documents have provided strength for our professional heritage in student affairs practice.

As a set, these chapters provide a foundation for understanding the historical and philosophical bases of our work. We think that such an understanding is necessary before moving on to our professional and theoretical foundations as well as the more practical aspects of our work. Our authors have done a splendid job of guiding us along this path, and we invite you to learn from them.

CHAPTER 1
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

John R. Thelin and Marybeth Gasman

During a visit to the Midwest in 1910, an editor researching the growth of American colleges and universities noted that “the University of Chicago does not look its age. It looks much older. This is because it has been put through an artificial aging process, reminding one of the ways furniture is given an ‘antique oak finish’” (Slosson, 1910, p. 429). Indeed, American universities’ fondness for Gothic spires and Georgian-revival brick quadrangles reveals an essential feature about higher education in the United States: the American public expects its colleges and universities to be historic institutions with monumental architecture that invokes a sense of continuity and heritage. In fact, a historical profile of US higher education is in large part a story of structures, not just bricks and mortar but also the legal and administrative frameworks—products of US social and political history—that have made colleges and universities enduring institutions.

Our concern is with higher education’s history, not its archaeology, so we need a theme to bring these skeletal structures to life. James Garfield, later president of the United States, praised his own alma mater’s president by proclaiming, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 243). His tribute reminds us that despite the proliferation of magnificent buildings and elaborate facilities in American colleges and universities, ultimately the history of colleges and universities in this country is about teaching and learning. Although their relationship has continually evolved, students and faculty members remain the central characters in the higher education drama, without which the structures are nothing but inanimate stage props. Whether in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, or—now—early in the twenty-first century, the American tradition in higher education has espoused a strong commitment to undergraduate education. As historian Larry Cuban of Stanford University concluded in his study of universities in the twentieth century, it often has been a story of “how research trumped teaching” (Cuban, 1999). This is not—and need not—always be the outcome. From time to time highly publicized commentaries have urged higher education leaders to reclaim the American education heritage by rediscovering the importance of “putting student learners first” (Wingspread Group on Higher Education, 1993, p. 1).

Structures and Students

A good way to chart the history of higher education in the United States is to keep in mind that quantitative changes have signaled qualitative changes. For example, from 1700 to 1900, less than 5 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two enrolled in college. Between World Wars I and II, this figure increased to about 20 percent, rising to 33 percent in 1960, and dramatically expanding to more than 50 percent in the 1970s. These numbers accurately forecast the transformation of American higher education from an elite to a mass activity, a trend that continued during the final decades of the twentieth century when the prospect for universal access to postsecondary education emerged as part of the American agenda (Trow, 1970). According to one estimate, in 2015 more than twenty million students enrolled in postsecondary education in the United States.

To attempt to grasp the 370-year history of American higher education in a single glimpse is unwieldy and unwise. Therefore, the following pages first consider the legacy of the English influence on colonial colleges and then shift to how America wrestled with the question of creating a distinctive “American way” in higher education during the new national period. Next, the discussion highlights the emergence of the “university” model from 1880 to about 1914, with the reminder that other institutional forms also flourished during this period. After considering higher education in the three decades between World Wars I and II, the historical analysis moves to the problems of abundance and prosperity in the 1960s, whereas the decades from 1970 to 1990 are analyzed as an era bringing further adjustment and accountability. Finally, analysis of some of the demographic and structural trends since 1990 to the present provides a way to make sense from the transition into the twenty-first century. Having completed this narrative account, the chapter then aims to bring coherence to the history of American higher education by considering the implications for professional practices and policies brought on by trends in research and scholarship within a variety of related disciplines.

The Colonial Period: Sorting Out the English Legacy

Although the ideal of an intense undergraduate education by which young adults are prepared for leadership and service is a distinctively American tradition, it owes much to the example set by the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These institutions earned a reputation for their unique practice of arranging several residential colleges within a university structure, all located in a pastoral setting. This model, commonly known as the “Oxbridge” model, departed from the patterns of academic life and instruction found in the urban universities of the late middle ages on the European continent. At Paris, Salerno, Heidelberg, and Bologna, scholars banded together for protection and to set standards for teaching, pay, and tuition—but they gave little attention to building a permanent campus or supervising student life (Haskins, 1923). In sharp contrast, by the seventeenth century Oxford and Cambridge had developed a formal system of endowed colleges that combined living and learning within quadrangles. This model consisted of an architecturally distinct, landscaped site for an elaborate organizational culture and pedagogy designed to build character rather than produce expert scholars. The college was an isolated “total” institution whose responsibilities included guiding the social and academic dimensions of undergraduate life. The Oxbridge model not only combined these elements but also integrated them within a coherent philosophy of residential education. This approach eventually influenced college builders in the New World.

Rudolph (1962) called this adopted educational tradition the “collegiate way” (p. 87). Even when the realities of the American wilderness set in or when college officials ran out of money for building, the “collegiate way” persisted as an aspiration in the colonial and, later, national culture. The most telling legacy of the early college founders is their combination of optimism and caution in their quest to create what historian James Axtell (1974) has called the “school on a hill.” The American colonists built colleges because they believed in and wished to transplant and perfect the English idea of an undergraduate education as a civilizing experience that ensured a progression of responsible leaders for church and state. The importance of colleges to colonial life is suggested by their proliferation and protection—starting with Harvard, founded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, and followed by The College of William & Mary in Virginia in 1693, Yale in Connecticut in 1701, and six more colleges by the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775.

Tensions between students and faculty characterized colonial college life. Indeed, the residential college was as much a recipe for conflicts as for harmony. Numerous consumer complaints ranging from bad food in the dining commons to dissatisfaction with the curriculum often sparked student riots and revolts. Although relatively homogeneous in its restriction to white, Christian young men, the study body still institutionalized the nuances of social class. College rosters listed students by social rank. Furthermore, following the Oxford tradition, academic robes reflected socioeconomic position, delineating the “commoners” (those who dined at college commons) from the “servitors” (those who waited on tables).

Religion, of course, was an important part of the fabric of American culture, including in its colleges. Religious concerns and sectarian competition often fueled the creation of new colonial colleges. A majority of these institutions developed denominational ties, and most college presidents were men of the cloth. However, emphasis on Christian values and discipline (more specifically, Protestant values) did not preclude preparation for secular and civil life. As relatively young students matriculated, colleges embraced the role of in loco parentis, with the faculty members and president offering supervision of student conduct and moral development. Although colonial colleges did educate future ministers, that purpose was only one of many among the undergraduate bachelor of arts curriculum (Handlin & Handlin, 1974). Few written records are available to help reconstruct the...