Student affairs and services must not lose sight of transformation

Recently we have seen an increased focus on student affairs and services, and rightly so as it is a key role player in supporting students and institutions in their efforts to cope with changes brought on by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We see across the globe that student affairs and services, or SAS, is an essential role player in collaborative efforts to support student and institutional success.

These efforts range from Deutsches Studentenwerk’s involvement in negotiations around BAföG federal financial assistance for students in Germany, and the impressive work on financial and residential options for students in France of the regional student organisation CROUS, to the Australia and New Zealand Student Services Association’s work on unique support for LGBTI and disability during the current challenges.

Other examples are webinars that advance skills to respond effectively to student needs, hosted by the International Association of Student Affairs and Services or IASAS and the American College Personnel Association, and the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa’s upcoming special issue on COVID-19 advancing our knowledge about SAS’s engagement with pandemic-related issues. These are but a few of many efforts worldwide.

This is a very welcome and, for higher education, advantageous change. The core mission of student affairs and services is to advance social justice by promoting conditions for students’ equitable opportunities to access, live and learn at higher education institutions.

The increased focus on SAS is likely to strengthen higher education in general and mitigate the detrimental effects of the pandemic on teaching, learning and development.

The risks

However, there are a few risks associated with these changes in SAS, and higher education institutions need to consider these so that unintended consequences are avoided.

The risk of essentialising SAS functions into reductionistic, narrow responses is one such concern. Delivering functions and services in remote ways distils the functions and while this may have economic advantages, it narrows the impact by neglecting the context of living and learning. The targeted support for students is indeed helpful, but the concern is that we neglect those systemic-contextual factors that impair student success.

The role of student affairs and services in transforming the living and learning environment is essential, and, while SAS at present increasingly offers targeted online support, the contextual barriers may be left unchallenged. The transformation of higher education contexts needs to remain our focus. Keeping a wider lens and viewing the system as a gestalt needs to be the overarching framework.

The second major concern is that the shift to online support, while presently necessary, should not remain our first option as it is a de-personalised engagement and disembodied modality. Sure, we reach more students and probably faster, but we also risk deepening the sense of alienation so many students already experience.

A third concern is that many of the learning experiences that shape graduates into active ‘glocal’ citizens are best facilitated in face-to-face real-time and real-space ways. Appreciating difference, living and learning within diversity, leading transformative change, and inclusive learning and living practices are developed in embodied ways, less so via online webinars hunched over keyboards.

SAS scope on a continuum

Student affairs and services has seen an immense expansion in scope, role and function across the world since the widespread recognition that higher education underpins national and regional political and economic stability and promotes equity, social justice and human flourishing.

SAS has evolved differently in different parts of the world and yet follows the general trajectory, from in loco parentis, service provision and extra- and co-curricular programmes to a model that is integrated into the life of higher education, where it aims to create equitable conditions for student success.

The emphasis on massification and universification of higher education has brought with it a focus on graduate success, on the development of students as ‘glocal’ citizens for national development and democracy, and on research and innovation as well as on higher education’s engagement with and impact on the community and its contract with society.

The scope is on a continuum, from academic support to personal-social development, from pure services delivery to student engagement, from crisis support to personal-social-academic development, from financial to residential services, from international to marketing functions, and so on.

SAS ranges from stand-alone to integrated structure, from central to de-centralised management, shaped by organically evolving needs, by institutional strategy or by design. The recent book Student Affairs and Services in Higher Education: Global foundations, issues, and best practices, third edition, elaborates comprehensively on the myriad functions that SAS offers in diverse higher education contexts, in Section XV (pp 242-352).

The function of SAS goes beyond the university

Overall, functions can be grouped into at least two clusters: 1) aligned to the core function of the university or college, or 2) aligned to the national-institutional system of higher education in the social-political contexts in which the university is embedded.

The first cluster is mainly about direct support of the academic project, impact on institutional processes and direct engagement with students. This may include support for the research and innovation, academic, personal and social functioning of students.

The second cluster focuses beyond the institution on national and regional transformation and development agendas. For instance, in South Africa and Botswana, higher education is closely aligned to a National Reconstruction and Development Programme, making higher education’s contract with society explicit.

In the first cluster, the role and function of SAS is to: 1) impact on the higher education living and learning context, 2) provide academic-social-personal support, and 3) equip students to have agency around advancing social justice through their impacts on communities.

SAS ensures a measure of equity and fairness on campuses in our massified higher education systems by: promoting engagement; enabling compatible living and learning contexts; providing health care and counselling; offering housing and residence life programmes; facilitating social, learning and personal safe spaces; implementing co-curricular programmes for students to learn beyond the discipline so as to develop as complex, healthy, whole persons; and by mapping learning and career pathways and supporting students to overcome their unique challenges along the way.

While we are currently bolstering the first cluster of functions – the direct support for students – we must not neglect our contract with society.

This second cluster of functions of student affairs and services – the contract with society to advance social justice aims for all – is the less explicit and yet equally important function of SAS. We must not lose sight of this in the current zeitgeist of crisis modality.

Note: In Student Affairs and Services in Higher Education: Global Foundations, Issues, and Best Practices, 3rd ed, 2020, Section XV (pp 242-352), the various functions of SAS are described in detail (not all functions are carried out in every institution and/or country. It depends on the specific historical and cultural context as to whether or not they are employed). Each function can be accessed electronically by going to the table of contents and clicking on the function of interest. To contact authors of specific functions, go to Annex 1 (pp 600-619). Click here for the link to the entire book.

Birgit Schreiber is senior associate editor of the IASAS-DSW book on student affairs and services; a member of the Africa Centre for Transregional Research at the Alberts-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg, Germany; and editorial executive of the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa. Adriana Pérez Encinas is a lecturer in business organisations at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and assistant editor of the IASAS-DSW book on student affairs and services.