What to Do About Burnout in Student Affairs

In 2022 a report on the future of student affairs included some grim results from a survey of student-affairs professionals. One-third of respondents weren’t sure if they would stay in the field for the next five years, and a quarter didn’t know if they would recommend a career in student affairs to colleagues, according to the report, by Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. The findings confirmed what we have increasingly heard in recent years — that the stress of the post-pandemic world, the growing expectations of students and parents, and the always “on” nature of the job are leading to burnout among students-affairs professionals.

As colleges put more emphasis on student success, including retention and graduation rates, improving job satisfaction among student-affairs staff members has become vital. To gain more insight into the state of the field, I recently hosted a virtual forum, sponsored by Mongoose, with three student-affairs leaders at a range of institutions. They were Barbara LoMonaco, vice president for student life at Centre College, a private liberal-arts institution in Kentucky; Dawn Meza Soufleris, vice president for student development and campus life at Montclair State University, a public research institution in New Jersey; and Braque Talley, vice president for student affairs at Alabama A&M University, a historically Black institution. In the discussion, we spoke about what they find most difficult in today’s environment and how they manage the challenging situation for themselves and their staff members. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ian Wilhelm: Barbara, you’ve written about the importance of maintaining boundaries. Why is that so important for student-affairs leaders and their staffs to consider?

Barbara LoMonaco: We’re all attracted to this field because we are inherently other-oriented people. We love watching students grow and helping them and guiding them. But there has to be a limit to what we can give. It’s easy to put ourselves last. There’s always a fire to put out. There’s always some next thing that needs to be done. That leads us to feeling burned out and that we have lost control. I remember that I looked at my calendar and I thought, Why am I so busy? I realized it wasn’t just other people getting on my calendar. I was creating that. To get back to that internal locus of control, we have to set boundaries. We all know our institutions will take as much as we’re willing to give. By setting boundaries, we can begin to carve out time for things that rejuvenate us or even just allow us to manage the work in front of us in a more realistic way.

Wilhelm: How do you get beyond just acknowledging boundaries and taking some practical steps about where to build them, understanding that sometimes there’s going be a fire on campus to put out? For your staff, how do you remind them about boundaries and make sure that they can set them in a practical way and not just talk about them?

LoMonaco: It’s important to do it before we get to the burnout stage. I remember during the pandemic, dreaming of driving an Amazon Prime truck. I thought that would just be the best job. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The inventory I took was: Why are all my hobbies collecting dust? Why have I canceled the last two dentist appointments? It was sobering to look at the ways in which my life was eroding and I was putting myself last. We have to remember those activities that we love that are restorative, and put them on our calendars. It’s OK to take a walk or eat lunch with a friend and not sit at your desk because, gee, you really need to answer a lot of emails. You will imagine you may be disappointing somebody, but those appointments for your interests have to be made sacred.

Wilhelm: Dawn, you call this position a lifestyle position. What do you mean by that?

Dawn Meza Soufleris: For many of us, when we entered this field, we realized it was not 9 to 5. Colleges and universities are 24/7. Especially now with technology, we’re constantly walking around with a cellphone, and people are texting, and they are emailing, and they are using chat features because we want to be responsive to the student needs.

But there comes a price with that. And people in my age group who are in leadership now, it’s just like what we heard from our grandparents: “I walked uphill with holes in my shoes and a nickel in my pocket.” Now with our younger professionals we say, “I work 50 or 60 hours a week, that’s a normal thing for me. I’ve been doing that for 25 years. That’s what you should be doing too.” And many of our younger professionals are saying, “I don’t know about that.” These will never be 9-to-5 positions. But we need to think a little harder about how we find those balances and not just assume that everyone wants it to be a lifestyle-type position.

Braque Talley: One thing that helps is being very clear from the beginning: This is what I expect from you. The other thing that young professionals are looking for is feedback. They come from a generation that requires motivation. “Let me know what I do well. Let me know when I’m not making you happy.” That’s the role of a vice president or a manager. You are really just a coach. What motivates members of your team? That’s key in ensuring that you have a strong balance but also that your team members are not experiencing burnout. Read the verbal and nonverbal cues that they provide you with.

Wilhelm: The job of student affairs is about being in-person for a lot of it. Is that causing some tension because other parts of the institution can work from home? Does it make it harder to recruit and retain people?

LoMonaco: It really is challenging. I think every one of us has sat with someone interviewing for a position, and one of the first questions they ask is about what kind of remote work they can do. When we’re remote, we can get a lot done. But we also have students that walk in the door. So my strategy has been that when students are not on campus, I try to afford my team as much flexibility as possible. If they need to work remotely when students are on winter break or in the summer months, we can have flexibility in the schedule. When students are here, we can’t promise that.

Soufleris: During the pandemic, we made our student-life staff sometimes put hazmat suits on to go on floors to check in on students with Covid to deliver meals, all while we were watching the international death chart that was on the internet. How many people died today of Covid? “But please now go, residence-life staff, and put on this yellow suit and bring people food.”

I felt the community appreciated the work we did. But was it fair? Most of student affairs was in the office during Covid, and the rest of the campus was not. It’s not surprising there’s a little backlash when we start up in sort of a normal mode and IT is home doing remote work and human resources and the financial folks. It’s not surprising that our teams are asking for flexibility. We can’t always give it, but when we can give it, we should. We have to be more flexible for our staff, or we’re not going to be able to replenish the field.

Wilhelm: How do you handle the pay challenge, since these are often lower-paid positions? The job market is pretty healthy, and you’re competing with that. People are motivated to be in these types of jobs, but pay has to match that sometimes.

Soufleris: That’s one of the toughest things. I’m sure my colleagues have done what I’ve done. You go to your HR department, you go to your president, and say, “Listen, we have to look at this because we’re losing people. We are not attracting people to these roles because the pay is not in line with outside industry.” We probably all get the same response: “There are budget constraints, and labor costs are going up, and we have to pay for retirement benefits and health-care benefits.”

At some point that does get old. What I do with folks that we’re trying to recruit is to talk about benefits, because sometimes our benefits are better than industry, especially if your institution allows free tuition. I worked at one institution for 25 years, and the best benefit I had was, even if my pay was not great earlier in my career, three of my children went to school for free tuition. And when you add up those dollars, you say, Wow, that’s an incredible benefit.

Talley: I try to find ways to supplement staff members. So if there’s a role that we haven’t filled in two or three years, let’s not close that budget line. Maybe I can give someone an additional duty and give them 15 or 20 percent more in their salary. We should also be looking to promote staff. We too often look outside of our team members to find that next hotshot, the person who can push us to the next level. One way to motivate your team is to look internally first when opportunities become available. I don’t want to pass those folks up who are sometimes entry-level team members who need an opportunity.

Wilhelm: How do you communicate to higher administration when they continue to add to your workload when you’re already overextended?

Soufleris: One of the things we don’t do well as a field is know when to sunset things. There are times we have to do an inventory and recalibrate our focus. We have students that have basic-need insecurities. We have students that are trying to build soft skills that weren’t as developed as they could have been during the pandemic. The amount of mental-health issues on college campuses is at an epidemic level. We have to say what our primary focus is. Is it outreach to students? Is it mentoring? Is it making sure students feel like they belong? Our role as vice president is to bring that up to our executive councils and say, “Listen, here are the three things that we are focusing 100 percent of our attention on. Some of these other things that we normally would have done, we’re sunsetting for now, so that there is job balance.”

Talley: It starts with us as individual leaders. We have to set the tone so that team members feel comfortable enough to have that conversation with us. Sometimes folks have a strong fear of losing their job, and they hold back. We have to set an environment where it’s OK to talk to us about things that are going well, things that are not going well, things that they are doing that are outside the scope of their responsibilities or defined scope of responsibilities. I try to create an environment for that. I can’t create everything from the vice-presidency position. I like ideas to come up from our team members. My job is to go find the money, find the resources to support their ideas that make their jobs better.