When someone stops by Bethany College, claiming that they’re just passing through, Scott D. Miller knows they’re lying. This West Virginia college, where he has been president since 2007, is only 39 miles from Pittsburgh, but it’s a long 39 miles, down one of three winding country roads. (There was a fourth road some years ago, but when a bridge on that route washed out in a rainstorm, state officials didn’t bother replacing it.)
In this town of about 1,000 people, a visitor finds two businesses aside from the college: a general store, which sells everything from air filters to filet mignon, and a college watering hole that seems to sell beer and not much else. Even more than 170 years after the college’s founding, the remote mountainside is just the sort of place that the clergyman Alexander Campbell had in mind when he created Bethany.
“There’s this quote that Campbell had in the 1830s, before he founded the college,” Mr. Miller says, “where he talked about wanting a location that was secluded, free from distraction.”
These days Bethany is trying to drum up a little distraction, to bring students in and keep them around: In the past several years, the college has revived an equestrian program, expanded its athletics programs (adding sports like lacrosse and field hockey), started a marching band, offered a broader range of campus jobs for students, and added various student activities. For those who get a little too distracted, Bethany also put a significant sum into a new academic-counseling center.
The programs come out of a bucket of money known as “student services,” a category that can include athletics, student organizations, admissions, financial-aid administration, and various kinds of counseling. On a ledger of expenditures, the new emphasis is plain to see: In 2007, Bethany was spending about $3,800 per full-time-equivalent student on such services; in 2008, after Mr. Miller arrived, it was spending $5,800 per student.
Mr. Miller, taking over after years of financial instability at the college, decided that giving students more amenities and activities was a way to help stabilize enrollment. A student’s 168-hour week, he notes, consists of 18 hours in the classroom and 50 spent sleeping. “For the extra 100 hours a week, it’s up to us to provide an educational experience.”
Other colleges might not be as remote as Bethany, but they are trying the same things, as indicated by a new report from the American Institutes for Research. The report, covering college spending from 2001 to 2011, shows that increases in student services outpaced those in other categories at most types of colleges—a trend that has held for years in studies conducted by the institutes’ Delta Cost Project, which looks at college finances. Although student-services spending can be modest compared with other categories, it has grown 20 to 30 percent at many colleges, outpacing any other category.
What’s driving growth in that area? Many speculate that it’s a facet of the amenities race—comforts and resources that go along with swanky dorms, cornucopian dining halls, and the infamous climbing walls (spending on which falls under a different category). Some say it represents colleges’ commitment to a new population of students who need more help getting through college—first-generation students, or those with learning disabilities, depression, or anxiety. Some financial experts look at data from recent years and conclude that colleges are spending more on enrollment resources.
It’s surely some combination of all of those priorities. But in the end, the growth in student services is certainly a sign of an intensifying competition among colleges. And even if the amenities, activities, and support cost many thousands of dollars per student, especially at elite institutions, they represent a college cost that students and their parents have asked for—either explicitly or through their decisions in enrollment.
Colleges are, more than ever, measuring their offerings and services against what peer institutions might provide, Mr. Miller says. The race is hardest on rural, less-selective colleges, he argues, which have to provide more support and more amenities to differentiate themselves.
“Competition is more intense now than I have seen in my 23 years as a college president,” he says. “Colleges have to be more student-centered.”
If that’s true, surely most colleges are feeling the heat. The American Institutes for Research report shows that only public baccalaureate colleges and community colleges did not increase their spending on student services over the 10-year period. For the rest—public research and master’s colleges, and all private institutions—the spending went up considerably.
For example, at private baccalaureate colleges, average spending on student services increased more than 21 percent per full-time-equivalent student, while spending on instruction went up only 5.5 percent, and on operations and maintenance by 9 percent. Spending on research, public service, and institutional support declined. At public master’s institutions, student-services spending increased 15 percent, while that on instruction went up 6 percent, and in most other categories went down. Public research institutions spent 16 percent more on student services. At private master’s institutions the increase was 24 percent, and at private research universities nearly 30 percent.
Spending on student services also grew faster at nearly all institutions compared with instruction and “overhead” expenses like academic support and maintenance.
Donna Desrochers, an author of the report and a researcher at the institutes, points out that the data line up with a report by the group on administrator hiring, released in February. It said that new administrator hires—particularly in student services—were what drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-education work force from 2000 to 2012. Student-services positions also commanded the expansion of wages and salaries, as pay in other areas was either flat or declining.
Analyses of the increases should come with a caveat: Around 2006, a number of colleges began reporting athletics expenditures under student services for the first time—they had previously reported that spending under another category. Many institutions where spending on student services spiked explained to The Chronicle that they had previously categorized athletics under instruction, in most cases because coaches also taught classes.
However, says Ms. Desrochers, even if you examine subsequent expenditures, increases in student-services spending are still higher than in other areas. What she doesn’t know is where, exactly, the money is going. Her data, from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, don’t provide figures at that granular a level.
“If colleges are making investments in services that help students learn and graduate, that is a good investment,” she says. (She is less positive about spending in athletics, because she doesn’t believe it helps retention.) “The difficult part is that it is a broad category, and it’s hard to determine what the money is being spent on.”
For the details, one has to go to people who handle college finances or work in student services—and even there, the answers might come in broad brushstrokes.
Patricia A. Whitely, vice president for student affairs at the University of Miami and chair of the board of National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, can point to a handful of areas where Miami’s student services have expanded, and she hears the same from peers across the country. Start with mental-health counseling: Use of those services goes up 3 to 4 percent per year, and Miami has hired not only counselors but also social workers. Students show up at college with depression, hyperactivity disorders, Asperger’s syndrome, or a history of therapy that goes back years—without the sense of shame that may have accompanied those conditions in the past.
“It’s not a big deal to seek counseling,” Ms. Whitely says. “It’s all good news. But we have had to ramp up our support so they can persist, retain, and graduate.”
The growing numbers of first-generation students present their own challenges, and many colleges are putting more effort into programming for them. Compliance with regulations is another factor—Miami has added two staff members in the past three years to help deal with Title IX regulations, not to mention staff added to deal with Title IV, the Clery Act, and other laws.
The university has also added activities of various kinds. “In 1995 we had 18 sports clubs at Miami. We have 48 now. Think about that,” Ms. Whitely says. In the mid-1990s, the university had about 190 student organizations; it has 274 now. Forty are devoted to community service, she says, because today’s college students “have been doing that since they were in fifth grade.”
Her office handles educational programs in substance abuse and sexual assault. The university has added other programming to help build a sense of community on the campus and to keep students out of trouble in the city—late-night dining on the campus, till 2 a.m., is one such option, she notes. “Students are coming to us and saying, ‘We want this.’”
At any institution, spending levels and priorities depend on a college’s choice and scale of services. Empire State College, a branch of the State University of New York for adult and online learning, went from spending $306 per full-time-equivalent student in 2001 to $1,004 in 2011, adjusted for inflation, according to the American Institutes for Research. In recent years, the college has established an office to handle disability, wellness, and other student-services issues; a call center for student queries; a health-services fee; and a major expansion of tutoring services.
Private colleges—particularly elite ones—spend much more per student. Colgate University’s spending on student services went from $3,200 per student in 2001 to $8,000 in 2011. Colgate is one of the institutions that transferred athletics spending from instruction to student services, which explains some of the jump. But Suzy M. Nelson, dean of the college, who supervises student affairs, ticks off some of the same cost drivers that Ms. Whitely does: expanded efforts in student life, career counseling, and regulation compliance. Colgate spent $24.8-million on student services in 2013. A little more than half of that went to sports programs, and $3.4-million to admissions. Of the remaining $8.7-million, 12 percent went to career planning, a portion that has grown slightly over time. The biggest growth has been in the 27-percent chunk that includes various deans’ offices, seminars, drug and alcohol committees, a multicultural-affairs office, volunteer programs, and fall orientation.
Wellness is a big focus at a college that attracts high-achieving students—Colgate sees about 20 percent of its students in the counseling center, and health and counseling absorb 23 percent of the budget.
“Since 1988, the likelihood of college students’ suffering depression has doubled, suicidal ideation has tripled, and sexual assault has quadrupled,” Ms. Nelson says. “I can add to that alcohol abuse, sleep deprivation, anxiety disorders—any number of things that we may not have seen 10 to 20 years ago, at least in quantity.”
She is clear that student services involves more than mitigating problems or checking off boxes on federal forms. The operation is a vital partner in creating the college experience. Ms. Nelson cites research by Richard J. Light, a Harvard University education professor, who asked people to recall a defining experience in college. The vast majority of them pointed to something outside of the classroom.
“If we cut out all of that stuff, it wouldn’t be as expensive, but what I am suggesting is that this actually is the educational experience—in class and out of class,” she says. “It’s less learning from an expert and more about what you integrate and synthesize yourself. That is the goal.”
The increasing emphasis on services and amenities began in the mid-1980s, says John Thelin, a historian of higher education at the University of Kentucky. Colleges had just come through an enrollment slump starting in the late 1970s, during which even careful observers of the industry predicted that many institutions would close. As a result, they started going after more middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, “from families where they just presume that you have certain amenities,” Mr. Thelin says. Admissions offices, which had been passive in the 1950s and 60s, started staffing up and sending emissaries to high schools near and far.
Some believe that professors once helped provide academic counseling and extracurricular activities that were eventually professionalized under student-services administrations, but Mr. Thelin says that’s a nostalgic view. Regardless, he has began to notice that his former graduate students who went into student services have given their work more of a professional veneer.
“They started describing student services not as extracurricular but co-curricular,” he says. “I think the idea was to legitimize and ensure the survival of some of the things they were offering.”
Compare campus life today with the “spartan experience” it was in the 1950s, Mr. Thelin says. Colleges did not have elaborate counseling programs to help students get through—in fact, professors promoted a sink-or-swim environment, and attrition rates were high, even at selective colleges.
Go back even further, and the whole notion of a ready-made college experience for incoming students would have been totally foreign. College administrations coordinated academic instruction, and that was about it.
“If you go back to the 1890s and early 1900s, it was widely agreed that the interesting part of the college experience was the student clubs—athletics, society, and debating clubs—and a lot of that stuff was done by students and for students, and it was done outside of official institutional budgets,” Mr. Thelin says. Students had to figure out where to live and eat on their own. “That’s how eating co-ops were started at Princeton. They originally were very pragmatic arrangements—rent a place to eat, hire a cook, throw in your share. It was an innovative and resilient student culture.”
For Bethany, enriching the campus experience was a matter of survival. When Mr. Miller was hired, seven years ago, he asked a consulting group of former college presidents to visit and provide guidance on what the college needed to survive. A main recommendation focused on giving students more support and amenities.
“The small town and the rural location is one of the major contributors on the attrition side,” says Mr. Miller. “So it’s up to us to be more responsive to our consumers and our marketplace, to provide greater activities outside of the classroom.”
On a tour of the campus, Mr. Miller points out new hangouts for students, the equestrian fields, and new sports facilities, where some of the college’s annual $5-million in student-services money might be spent.
The most expensive additions to Bethany’s programming are not necessarily fun stuff. The college now devotes $400,000 a year to jobs for students who don’t qualify for Federal Work-Study. It puts $326,000 per year into an academic-counseling program for both mainstream students and those with learning disabilities. And, with $155,000 a year, it has beefed up a center for enrollment management, admissions, and financial aid.
When seen on a tour, the results of those expenditures don’t seem particularly opulent, especially by the standards of what one finds at elite universities these days. (A new workout room for students, for example, consists of a collection of equipment arranged in a low-ceilinged room of an underutilized building.)
What the college gets for the investment is unclear. Officials point to data showing that Bethany has some of the best graduation rates among its 34 peers in the Appalachian College Association. But according to Ipeds data, its graduation rates have been falling, from a six-year-graduation rate of 70 percent in 2006, to 68 percent in 2009, to 48 percent in 2012. Mr. Miller says the decline is mostly due to a stagnant economy and students who are stretched financially.
While Mr. Miller is certain that Bethany needed the student-services investments to remain competitive, he seems ambivalent about the competition with other colleges. The Internet, he says, has changed the game during his career—students check out what each of their potential choices has to offer, and colleges look at what the institution across town is advertising.
In building and adding programs to remain attractive, “some schools will see the bubble burst and not be able to keep pace,” Mr. Miller says. Bethany got a windfall a few years ago, when it leased out a natural-gas well on a patch of the college’s 1,300 acres, ensuring a steady flow of money for the next 30 to 40 years. Still, Mr. Miller says, the college depends on enrollment, and it has to be responsive. “Students walk and talk with their checkbooks.”
Perhaps students are both more demanding and more fragile today. Perhaps colleges are more committed to their students. Perhaps it’s part of a trend that has turned college into a luxury-resort experience, a consumer-oriented product. Maybe it’s a complicated mixture of all of those motivations.
Part of it is on the colleges, says Steve Schneider, a counselor at Sheboygan South High School, in Wisconsin, who was a finalist for a national school-counselor-of-the-year award in 2014.
The college search starts with the student focusing on what he or she wants to do and which college has the right academic program. Then the college brochures start showing up, describing the amenities and services each place provides. “It isn’t until students start to enter into that portion of this process when they begin to realize, ‘Hang on a second, maybe there is a school that can provide something that is more cool, or something I don’t know I need until I know they have it,’ " Mr. Schneider says.
Colleges position themselves to offer a unique angle, and since math, history, literature, and science are not typically unique, it’s the extracurricular experience that has to be. First-generation students are particularly susceptible, he says, because their parents can’t guide them regarding which amenities and support services are vital and which are just frills.
Many colleges, the counselor says, are fishing for students who might need a little more time before they are ready for the college experience. Statistics on graduation rates attest to that.
Colleges attracting those students “ignore the reality that a lot of kids are uncomfortable with college because they probably shouldn’t be going,” Mr. Schneider says. The amenities and services are, in that case, just a salve: “If we know you’re not going to be comfortable educationally, because that’s going to be a real struggle for you, we are going to make sure that you are comfortable in other ways.”
But students and their parents are clearly a factor as well. This is the era of the “super kid,” says Ms. Nelson, from Colgate. “Every kid is going to take ballet lessons and do three sports and be in the play—all of these things that were not typical of years ago. That drives the expectations of the students who come here and the expectations of the parents who send their kids here.”
And parents are very involved in their kids’ lives. “Some would argue that students are becoming less and less resilient because of the way that they are parented and because their childhood is extended into late adolescence,” Ms. Nelson says. Maybe collegebound kids in the good old days were more self-reliant, but they were also predominantly male and predominantly elite. The landscape has changed, and colleges have had to change with it. “Students are able to perform really well,” she says, “when they know that they are adequately supported personally and professionally.”
