Google “student affairs” and “burnout” and you get 91,000 total hits; nearly 8,000 in “scholarly articles,” 3,650 published since 2017.[1] This is neither a new nor “back-water” topic in higher education.
Working in higher education for 30-years—as a student affairs (SA) professional for 20-years and professor of behavioral health counseling for another 10—and as a behavioral health practitioner for almost 20 years before that, the formal and informal attention this topic receives comes as no surprise. As a higher ed insider, my general thoughts on the topic start with a belief that burnout among SA professionals or what some refer to as compassion fatigue (CF), is not unlike the quality of life (QOL) issues that affect student satisfaction with their collegiate experience. These student QOL concerns are known to the administration as is their association with retention and recruitment, hence their efforts to address them. The same cannot be said, however, regarding its awareness of the association between burnout in SA professionals and their retention—when perceived workplace satisfaction is low, retention is low. Unfortunately, senior administration in higher education appears oblivious to these similar phenomena.
Recruiting and training qualified SA professionals is a costly proposition for institutions of higher education (IHE). Experienced SA professionals are an important factor in the calculous of improving & maintaining positive student perceptions of QOL on campus. Although recognizing student perceptions of QOL as issues of significant institutional concern rather than personal maladjustment, the administration does not appear to view employee burnout and CF similarly. By perceiving burnout and CF as individual employee issues, the administration signals a lack of awareness that these matters, like the negative perceptions of QOL by students, are more related to the environment in which employees work than to the employees themselves (Moss, 2019)[2].
As the result of the difference in perception of these two similar issues, the administration has failed to recognize its role in producing the very issues responsible for SA burnout and CF. Instead, it believes that stress management and wellness-oriented training are enough to prevent these personal problems experienced by SA professionals. Put succinctly, although the administration recognizes that student concerns regarding QOL is an institutional issue for which it has responsibility, it views burnout and CF as the responsibility of SA employees to address individually.
Although stress management and wellness-oriented training are helpful/useful, they are, at best, Band-Aids placed on a problem that is administration's to solve. By this, I suggest that institutional responsibility stems from its role in at least fostering if not creating the very burnout and CF when generating the workplace stress that leads to SA burnout and CF via heavy workloads, job insecurity, frustrating work routines, and the expectation that ALL issues outside the classroom are essentially student affairs responsibility to handle. Worse yet, the administration may believe that it has addressed these issues by its hiring of SA professionals to do the heavy lifting. Consequently, the lowest-paid professional staff members find themselves saddled with some of the more time-consuming and emotionally taxing responsibilities that occur on a college campus. Is it any wonder that SA pros burn out or experience CF?
So, what do we do now? Perhaps we start by reflecting on Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi’s observation that discovery consists in seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
What do you think?
[1] As of Dec 2021
[2] (2019) Moss, Jennifer. Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2019/12/burnout-is-about-your-workplace-not-your-people
