Trustee Group Responds Tepidly to Presidential-Hiring ‘Tool Kit’

Alarmed by a wave of presidential retirements that is expected to hit over the next five years, community-college advocates are rolling out new recruiting strategies that challenge assumptions about what makes an effective leader.

The latest is a “hiring tool kit” that the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program is releasing on Monday to help trustees, search consultants, and others “identify and hire presidents who can lead an institution to dramatically improved student outcomes.”

The tool kit elevates two characteristics to the top of the list of essential presidential qualities: risk taking and a passion for improving measurable student outcomes. So far though, it has gotten a lukewarm reception from the Association of Community College Trustees, a national group that conducts about 25 presidential searches a year through an in-house placement service for its members.

“While I agree that the focus on student success and completion is important, this is among a number of important criteria that boards should be looking at,” J. Noah Brown, president of the association, said in an interview on Friday. The group, which provided input for the hiring guide, had also asked for a more explicit focus on the need to hire more minority candidates.

Joshua Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program, said that focusing on candidates with strong commitments to student access and success is likely to accomplish Mr. Brown’s goal.

Asked whether the trustee board’s in-house service gives it a financial stake in the status quo, Mr. Brown said his group charges members “way below market rates” and doesn’t make a profit.

“The success and completion movement is real,” he said. “It’s catching fire around the country, and boards are focusing on it, which is appropriate.” As for the Aspen project, he said, “this could be a useful tool among many, but it isn’t the complete playbook.”

Whichever playbook they’re using, search committees are busier than ever these days. The nation’s 1,100 community colleges, which enroll more than 40 percent of the nation’s entering college students, have had hundreds of presidential vacancies at any given time in the recent past. The problem is likely to get worse.

At least 43 percent of community-college presidents are expected to retire in the next five years, and three-quarters within 10 years, according to 2012 data from the American Association of Community Colleges. The average age of a two-year-college president is 60.

Finding qualified people willing to replace them isn’t always easy, especially when many of the vice presidents and chief academic officers who might step into their shoes are also going gray.

Hard Times, High Expectations

Shrinking state appropriations, heightened expectations for student success, and deep public scrutiny are all adding to the pressure community-college leaders face, educators said last year at a national conference.

“The challenge for presidents is to lead colleges to deliver more degrees of a higher quality at a lower cost per student with a more diverse population,” Mr. Wyner said in an interview on Friday.

The tool kit his program produced is based largely on the findings of a report released last year by the Aspen Institute and Achieving the Dream.

It offers seven detailed and highly prescriptive “tools” to help set priorities; to recruit, evaluate, and interview candidates; to check references; to create score cards; and to confirm choices.

It’s full of specific language, for job advertisements and interview questions, that those in the hiring seats can use to identify candidates who are committed to student success. It also provides writing assignments in which a candidate might be asked, for instance, how he or she would react if the state legislature threatened to yank financing if the college didn’t improve a completion rate that was well below the national average.

Diploma-Mill Fears

Some educators worry that the nation’s intense focus on completion could turn colleges into “diploma mills” that churn out graduates with credentials by lowering standards or limiting access to students who might struggle.

Completion statistics are another source of controversy because graduation rates for community colleges often leave out students who transfer or attend part time.

Still, trustees should be paying more attention to students’ success rates, Mr. Brown acknowledged.

He bristled at the suggestion that their consultants, who have conducted more than 500 searches, aren’t weighing the right factors.

And he said the association, which runs its own leadership and training programs to cultivate new leaders, had no plans to use or distribute the hiring tool, as the Aspen Institute had requested. He said it might, however, consider using small pilot applications on a few searches.

Mr. Wyner, who said he would be “disappointed” if the association snubbed his tool kit, said that completion is just one of four factors that the institute uses to define success. The others are whether graduates get well-paying jobs, whether colleges seek equitable outcomes for underserved students, and whether they set expectations for and measure how much students are learning. The checklist also includes a number of traditional factors like financial and fund-raising skills, he added.

The report that accompanies the tool kit, “Hiring Exceptional Community College Presidents: Tools for Hiring Leaders Who Advance Student Access and Success,” is drawn from research supported by the Kresge Foundation.

The Aspen Institute, which hands out a prize every two years to community colleges that have strong records of helping students succeed, has studied what makes presidents of those institutions effective and then plugged those factors into its tool kit.

Boards traditionally lean toward charismatic, politically connected candidates who serve as “cheerleaders” for their institutions but who don’t often take risks, Mr. Wyner said.

By contrast, he pointed to the president of Walla Walla Community College, Steven L. VanAusdle, who promoted a successful winemaking program on its rural Washington campus that trains students for jobs in an industry that has grown from a handful of wineries to more than 170.

In doing so, he overcame opposition from groups in the conservative region that felt winemaking wasn’t an appropriate activity for college students, Mr. Wyner said.

Other presidents of two-year colleges have taken risks by closing gymnasiums to make room for tutoring or student-success centers, he said.

Hiring leaders “with a deep, relentless focus on student success” makes sense to Kay M. McClenney, a former director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. The center publishes studies that highlight strategies to help more students graduate.

“Boards tend to hire people they think are low risk for controversy,” she said. “And that creates a sense that what we’re looking for is status quo and equilibrium, rather than the tumult that comes with change.”

About 200 two-year college presidents leave every year, which would suggest they stay in their jobs only five to six years, Mr. Wyner said.

“We need leaders who are deeply committed to student success, which can take five to 10 years to accomplish,” he said. “A president with that commitment is more likely to stick around to complete the job.”