On the women’s side of Zayed University here in Abu Dhabi, students in black, floor-length abayas stride past banners promoting campus services: “Is Your Career in Focus?” and “Scared Of Exams! ... This Workshop is for You.” Programs and activities dedicated to students’ success have recently become part of daily life at this conservative Emirati institution.
Across most of the world, the role of a university has been to develop students’ minds, not their characters. Lectures and labs the institution would provide. Beyond that, even lost souls were on their own.
But the idea that higher education should involve personal growth, long and dearly held in the United States and Canada, is gaining currency on other continents. Universities in many countries are now serving a broader—and needier—population than in the past. Many are seeking to recruit and orient foreign students. Often under public scrutiny, they are tracking retention rates and trying to raise them. To meet those challenges, more institutions are setting up services to support students.
The notion of student engagement has taken particular hold at Zayed, where leaders consider education vital to nation building. To prepare creative, independent alumni, the university is cultivating students’ leadership and citizenship. Similar goals have started to spread to other universities in the region.
“They look to the American model of higher education and realize that there seems to be as much emphasis on students learning those skills outside the classroom,” says Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, executive director of Naspa—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, a professional association based in Washington. Through conferences, exchange trips, and the expansion of American branch campuses, that model and its holistic student experience have become more visible internationally.
Universities across Europe and China, striving to train an innovative work force, have introduced career services. From Croatia to Australia, institutions are offering mental-health counseling. A campus in Japan now provides support for students with Asperger’s syndrome, while one in South Africa gives leadership training.
As their ranks grow, practitioners are organizing: The International Association of Student Affairs and Services, founded in 2010, now includes about 600 members from more than 50 countries.
Those efforts have come with their share of resistance and criticism. Many educators and students believe personal development isn’t the university’s responsibility. Yet larger forces at work—like rising tuition and competitive pressure to recruit the best students—may accelerate the trend of offering more than just academics.
Creating Student Life
Here at Zayed, glassy, futuristic buildings rise like a space station out of the desert. The blend of new and timeless reflects the university’s ethos. Emirati society remains highly traditional: Young men and women are educated separately, and students show great respect for authority. Meanwhile, university leaders recognize that sustaining a modern economy requires dynamic, worldly graduates.
To that end, Zayed hired Courtney Stryker, a former dean of students at Montana State University at Bozeman, to integrate a smattering of services (including an enrollment office and registrar) into a full-blown division of student life. Ms. Stryker, who spent a year of her childhood in Lebanon, had recently taken up a similar if narrower charge at United Arab Emirates University.
Enrollment here at Zayed, which was founded in 1998, is growing by a quarter to a third each year—almost all traditional-age Emirati students, commuting from home. When Ms. Stryker became executive director of student life and leadership a year and a half ago, she set about engaging the now 3,500 of them.
Still setting up shop on the glistening new campus, which opened in September, she is mindful of the sensitivities of her position.
“You come in with your experience and your theories,” she says, but hold back and try to understand the students. “The best idea because it worked so well in the West could be a complete disaster here,” she says. “You have to be a cultural anthropologist.”
So Ms. Stryker immediately started investigating. Almost all incoming students, she found, enroll in the Academic Bridge Program to improve their English, the official language of instruction. More than a third of them don’t make it through. So she planned a student-success retreat and made an ethical case for retention: “If we let them in, we at least owe them every opportunity to succeed.”
Accountability, especially to an authority figure, holds sway in Emirati society. Discovering that, she deployed her staff around the campus, to connect with students everywhere they were.
On the men’s side, Paul Abraham, the student-life division’s assistant dean, roams the sleek, luminous promenade, where male students shuffle along in white, robelike dishdashas and red-checkered kaffiyehs, or the occasional Ferrari cap. He greets one young man with an elaborate handshake and a “Salaam alaikum.” A few minutes later, a skinny student approaches, and Mr. Abraham wraps an arm around his shoulder.
Mr. Abraham, who is Canadian, explains his strategy: “I hang out here.” If students get to know and trust him, he’ll be better poised to help them through any struggles.
David Ribott, a student-success specialist, has built similar credibility. He was teaching in the bridge program when Ms. Stryker poached him (“The guys just think he is so cool,” she says). A stylish New Yorker of Hispanic descent, he eats lunch with students, chats, and drops a few strategies for coping with stress, maybe mentioning his study-skills workshops.
On the women’s side, Eman Salah El Kaleh, a senior student-success coordinator, arranges one-on-one meetings. Since last year, she has visited classes to meet students who may hesitate to stop by her office. “They are not used to the culture to voluntarily come,” she explains.
Nooreya Al Obaildli, a counselor, employs the same strategies as she advises students, often trying to build their independence. “I give them some steps, some guidance,” she says, “and I push them to do it themselves.”
Students in Charge
With the luxury of ample funds, Zayed’s student-life division has hired seven new staff members in the past two years. But even while adding administrators, the goal is to stoke students’ ideas and encourage them to take control of some programs and activities.
Several clubs have sprung up—East Asian culture is one popular theme—and a few female students recently conducted a diabetes-awareness program, presenting their findings, with faculty and staff escorts, on the men’s side. Habitat for Humanity groups have visited Cambodia and Vietnam, and this week students will help the university put on an international conference: Women as Global Leaders.
That students mature both intellectually and personally is a goal of Zayed’s president and the country’s minister of higher education and scientific research, Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mabarak Al Nahyan.
“A university education must help its graduates develop a wide knowledge of the world and their place in it,” he wrote in a statement. Zayed, which recently hosted 22 Arab ministers of higher education, hopes to become a model in the region for broad-based learning.
Exposure is the best way to develop students as citizens, says Sulaiman Al Jassim, Zayed’s vice president. Celebrity traffic through Abu Dhabi helps: Groups of students recently met Hillary Clinton and Jane Goodall. The vice president took a few minutes out of an interview with a reporter to introduce students to the artist Christo.
In planning new programs, Ms. Stryker always consults with her Emirati colleagues. “Sometimes,” she says, “you have to push just a little.”
Her decision to place a student on a search committee for a new leadership coordinator caused a stir, she says. But now a student sits on the university’s committee on student affairs. “If we’re going to serve students well,” Ms. Stryker says, “we need to have their voices at the table.”
Students’ input was critical to an honor code, which Western staff had introduced in part for accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The concept didn’t resonate, though, until the pledge was recast reverentially.
“As a student of the university that carries the name of the beloved and revered father of the nation, the late Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan (may his soul rest in eternal peace), I pledge to demonstrate the virtues of honesty, respect, and fairness,” it now reads, in part. At a ceremony each year, students sign their names in brightly colored markers around the pledge, which is then framed for display.
As president of the honor council, Fatema Bin Saleem is spreading awareness of the code and drafting a process to deal with violations. Her engagement at the university has changed her, she says: “I used to be a shy person. I would not talk.”
Now a marketing major in her fourth year, Ms. Saleem is animated, eyes bright and wide, as she describes helping plan leadership activities and encouraging classmates to get involved. Some go to class, and that’s all, she says, throwing up her hands. “I always tell them, ‘You’re losing an opportunity!’”
A student council serves to welcome guests and represent classmates’ concerns, but elections for officers don’t make sense in a monarchy. So students apply for the council, and administrators interview and select them.
Khawla Bin Khedia, a member of the student council on Zayed’s Dubai campus, credits her involvement with helping her learn collaboration and other skills. “It’s very interesting to know how other people think,” she says. “When we sit together, we come up with all kinds of different ideas.”
Other programs draw out those lessons, she says. “University isn’t only you come, study, and graduate. It’s taking part.”
New leadership activities have particular lessons in mind, like communication and teamwork. On two scorching days in January—one for men, one for women—students had the chance to take part in an outdoor program led by Allison Lara Fox, senior student-leadership-and-development coordinator. In a challenge called the spider web, they had to pass one another horizontally through a loose net without jostling the string. Later they stood blindfolded in a circle; each person reached across and grabbed the hands of two others to form a human knot. Then they had to untangle themselves.
“The students would say, ‘Well, I think this is impossible,’” Ms. Fox recalls. Then somebody would speak up: “Oh, what if we tried this? What if we tried that?”
Autonomy or Not
Should a university be tying students in human knots? Many professors and administrators around the world would say no. But challenging circumstances are pushing institutions to approach students differently.
In Europe, a longstanding effort to increase student mobility by syncing university systems across the continent has created the need for more orientation programs, counseling, and social and cultural activities. The process has also revealed employers’ desire for sharper young hires, prompting universities to offer programs on topics like time management.
The main student-services organization in Germany, Deutsches Studentenwerk, which operates independently from universities, has branched out from housing and catering to present workshops on exam anxiety, shyness, winter depression, and suicide. It is also collaborating more closely with universities, says Achim Meyer auf der Heyde, Studentenwerk’s secretary general.
Support programs are not necessarily an easy sell. “Our young people, they see themselves as autonomous,” he says. “They feel self-responsible.”
But as the organization has catered to international students, starting a program a few years ago to help Chinese students integrate, the idea of support services has caught on, he says. “The demand in personal development will increase a bit,” he says. “In the future we will have to offer more.”
After leaving Croatia and pursuing a career in psychology in the United States, Larisa Buhin Loncar returned to her native country convinced that some of the 65,000 students at the University of Zagreb could benefit from mental-health services. “Having worked at university counseling centers,” she says, “I know how important they are to students’ academic success and overall well being.”
But she had to persuade officials and students of that. “The conception in Croatia for the most part is that university is a place for higher learning,” she says. “All other problems that a person might have, they should deal with elsewhere.”
Zagreb’s university senate, with student-council representatives, initially voted against a center (“It’s sink or swim,” one professor told her). But as Ms. Buhin Loncar explained the preventive services she hoped to provide, minds started to change, slowly. The proposal she submitted for financial support in the fall of 2010 was approved by the university this past November.
Without tuition like universities in the United States or oil like the U.A.E., finding money for student support is a persistent challenge. In October, Australian administrators were relieved that lawmakers passed an amendment allowing an annual student-services fee of up to $278, in U.S. dollars, per student. In Britain, a “student centered” approach has spread as tuition has risen, with some universities now offering services including success coaches and healthy-living programs.
Cross-Border Training
As student services take off, practitioners are looking to colleagues for advice, and creating national and international networks. A program manager at a university in India, concerned about the isolation of students from diverse backgrounds and castes, recently asked for ideas from fellow members of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services, or Iasas. What could she do, she asked, to make underrepresented students feel more comfortable?
Suggestions came from a university in Uganda: Encourage leadership development, participation in cultural organizations, and recreation. Consider counseling and chaplaincy services.
Last June, the founder of Iasas got a request for help from Kandahar University, in Afghanistan. In a rebuilding phase, an Afghan higher-education official wrote, he was compiling a handbook for student services.
Demand runs high for professional development in this growing field. The Fulbright Program has offered short-term exchanges, and university systems and governments, including China’s, have organized ad hoc study tours.
Student-affairs networks are active in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Hong Kong; the British group recently held a conference on mental health, the Asia-Pacific one on global citizenship. In September, Iasas and Naspa will sponsor an international summit in Washington on student affairs and services, as the groups look to build capacity in Central and South America.
Naspa and ACPA—College Student Educators International, the two main professional associations based in the United States, have expanded their foreign programs, and Naspa’s undergraduate fellows include Raghda El Deeb, a sophomore and a tutor at the American University of Kuwait. The fellowship, she says, has introduced her to a career she hopes to pursue. “When you’re advising, you’re not just telling people what courses they should take,” she says, excitedly. “You’re trying to connect what people want through their courses.”
Counseling degrees have prepared many student-services professionals worldwide; specific student-affairs degrees, or concentrations within education programs, are rare outside the United States.
At Zayed, looking for a leadership coordinator with specialized training, Ms. Stryker hired Ms. Fox out of a master’s program in student-affairs administration at Michigan State University. For entry-level positions, however, Ms. Stryker hired two Zayed graduates and paired them with mentors in the department. As much as possible, she tries to send staff members to conferences or schedule training here for those who can’t travel.
Balqees Ahmed, an Emirati administrator in Zayed’s student-life division, is now on leave, earning a Ph.D. in leadership education in Kuala Lumpur. When she returns, she will assume a senior position, perhaps in the leadership program Ms. Fox now runs.
“To hand off a program and process,” Ms. Stryker says: “At the end of the day, that’s why we’re here.”
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