COVID & How It Changed Higher Ed for 'Good'

The COVID-19 global pandemic was ugly. No if's, and's, or but's about it. It altered every part and parcel of human life. From how we greet each other, to how we shop, how we think about travel and recreation, how we approach work and valuing our time, even how we bake bread.

Death, social distancing, mask mandates, economic devastation and supply chain disruptions, and further sociopolitical divides fill our social media feeds. Wars on science, truth, facts, and logic are now commonplace. AND, TWO YEARS IN, IT ISN'T OVER, as Omicron keeps reminding us. But, it occurred to me during the course of another round of interviews leading to eventual rejections (of course - lol - but that's for another blog post), was it all ugly? Were the impacts and ripples all bad? Did, at least, a modicum of good come out of this mess for higher education?

For those institutions, administrators, educators, professionals, staff, faculty, and other stakeholders that leaned into change and embraced specific success imperatives, like assessment, flexibility, innovation, and a values-oriented mindset, I would argue that yes... the pandemic made hugely good impacts for those institutions. For others, those institutions that shied away from change and pushed back against those core imperatives, #COVID definitely still changed #HigherEducation for 'good.'

An Opportunity Provided...

At no other time throughout the history of our profession were student affairs educators afforded an opportunity to inventory, assess and evaluate, preserve, enhance, or transform, and jettison our laundry list of offerings than at our current crossroads of COVID. Those long-standing, seemingly-untouchable, institutionally-codified programs, services, facilities, interventions, positions, and other resource draws. Demands that either require our attention or prevent us from doing other student-centered, student-preferred, or student-requested things. Because let's face it: higher education, specifically student affairs, is fantastic at adding layers, but really terrible at removing layers.

Reconceptualize CHANCE into CHANGE

COVID offered a natural reset button. At the onset of the pandemic, when shutdowns and transitions to virtual environments started impacting our campuses, nearly all student affairs officers naturally approached their portfolios of offerings in one of two ways: powering them down temporarily or nimbly transitioning to online platforms. In the Office of Student Activities at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in March 2020, in a matter of one week, we unplanned twenty major on-campus events and built a calendar of forty virtual events with no operation or programming budget, with no previous experience in virtual programming, and with no organic or purpose-built technology platforms for events, all from scratch. Those institutions and educators that found success throughout the pandemic share common threads like that example: stories of evidence-based decision-making, student-centeredness, flexibility, nimbleness, innovation, collaboration, resourcefulness, and centering work on values, backed by reporting from NACA, NASPA, ACPA, and other professional organizations.

The Value of Assessment

Assessment, evaluation, and research are oftentimes dirty words in student affairs. It usually means more work for you, something you don't quite understand, or you're about to get the axe.

Comin' in hot

But, the pandemic taught us that vital #Assessment #Evaluation and #Research work helps inform our work, fill in gaps, improve our offerings and outcomes, uphold promises to stakeholders and community members, and give us the evidence to #TellOurStory. A.E.R. also helps us make better decisions, and in a climate where every decision seems to be one fraught with unintended impacts and terrible consequences, student affairs educators and institutions need every bit of data (as well as the tools and the people to best understand the data) they can get. Pointedly, throughout the pandemic, the student affairs teams that committed to ongoing, meaningful assessment work built a library of data that better informed their thinking and decision-making, while helping them navigate nuance, minefields, and pitfalls.

Ah! Unknown variables! Red alert!

Think of assessment as the best navigational sensors equipped on the USS Enterprise (nerd alert) and the problems that student affairs face are akin to the nebula of matter and asteroids surrounding Altamid in the J.J. Abrams alternate storyline. Only those data generated by meaningful assessment can help institutions navigate such complex, nebulous questions of engagement, retention, satisfaction, utilization, admission rates, healthy choice-making, etc. Some exemplars include use of self-reflective assessments, such as S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and P.E.T. (preserve, enhance, transform) analyses, satisfaction and preference surveys, staff evaluation forms, pre- and post-intervention outcome surveys, utilization tracking, environmental and culture scans, media scan analyses, and more.

Starting with Why: True Student-Centeredness

So often, in student affairs, we're inundated with buzzwords. And, as long as we say those buzzwords aloud and print those buzzwords in marketing materials, that checks the box and we've done the work, right? Diversity? Well, we're diverse! We say we're diverse during orientation and on our marketing materials, we have one student of every visible identity! Boom! Diverse - check! Collaboration? Well, we collaborate! We say we collaborate during meetings and on our event posters, we list every organization that we advise in our office even though they had no input in the event nor did they commit any resources to making the event happen. Boom!

Systemic inequity since 1875.

Collaborate - check! Student-centeredness? Well, we're student-centered. We say we're student-centered during presidential speeches and in our press releases! Boom! Student-centered - check! True student-centeredness leans into our internal Simon Sinek and starting with why. Why do we do what we do? Not necessarily in the philosophic sense (although we SHOULD do that), but rather in the very practical: why do particular processes, policies, programs, people, etc. exist on our campuses? Do they exist in service to our students, or do they exist in hindrance of our students? Do they make our students' lives easier and support their ongoing persistence and success, or do they make our students' lives harder and prevent their advancement at the institution and keep them from finding success here or in their next experiences? Our core mission should center in service to our students and their success, development, and learning. If particular processes, policies, programs, people, etc. exist as a detriment to that mission, true student-centeredness would advocate for the removal of barriers while transforming existing pieces of the institution to better meet its student-centered mission.

Florida International University's Model for Student-Centered Learning, all rights reserved

Again, the global pandemic stressed the importance of starting with why and keeping students at the center of our mission, since virtual environments provided an opportunity for students to quickly pivot to other institutions that better met their needs and preferences. The institutions that made it harder for students to find what they needed quickly saw their numbers get murky, and the institutions that made it easier quickly took advantage of such. Additions of support services, counseling, and virtual engagement were met with praise, while resistance to such offerings was met with hostility. To that end, institutions and educators that invested in true student-centeredness also invested resources in kind, generated data to best understand student needs, and opened further communication channels to gather greater student input and buy-in. Students became partners in the success of the institution, no longer just idle participants, along for the ride. These successful institutions approached their student-centeredness comprehensively, never piece-by-piece and never perfunctorily.

Flexible & Nimble Approaches

Higher education, in so many ways, is just like the RMS Titanic. Spoiler alert: it didn't. end. well.

Full. Steam. Ahead.

We have the iceberg warnings from the North Atlantic weather service; we have the reports from other ships that SAW icebergs in the area. We have the experts, perched in the crow's nest with a 30,000-ft vantage point, screaming warnings: "Iceberg! Right ahead!" But what does higher ed decide to do? Much like Captain Smith, ignore the warnings and bore full steam ahead. And much like the Titanic, higher ed crashes hard into the iceberg. We here in Pennsylvania feel this reality all the time. Out of the State System of Higher Education's fourteen institutions, only one has been able to grow its enrollment over the past decade, and only one other has been able to remain flat. Other institutions have seen enrollment declines in the neighborhood of 60% or more; talk about slamming into the iceberg. #HigherEd has to get better at responding to trends and changes and doing so quicker; we have to get better at responding to environments and new problems and contexts flexibly. We have to understand the language of pivoting. The institutions that employed nimble and flexible responses to the COVID-19 global pandemic, and tossed aside needless bureaucracies created throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, found successes easily. The institutions that dug their heels in and resisted change found difficulties.

Go about your business; nothing to see here.

Innovate, Collaborate, and Being Resourceful

When institutional leadership and administrators permitted their student affairs educators to think broadly and differently, to break out of the confines of decades past, institutions thrived!

Bribes to skip icebreakers accepted

Typically, student affairs folx are creatives: we're so much more than group activities and icebreakers, but damn we are good at them. And that creativity, when applied to the rest of our work, helps us approach problem-solving innovatively, collaboratively, and resourcefully. So that instead of needing to purchase a new, expensive platform to run virtual events, my office at IUP created a virtual programming environment utilizing existing software and hardware. PowerPoint wasn't just a boring piece of presentation software, it was a host platform for IUP Deal or No Deal, IUP Masked Singer, and a Crafted Trivia Series. Zoom wasn't just a standard piece of meeting software, it was a streaming platform for our AJR Concert, Josh Peck Comedy Show, and An Evening with Bill Nye. Smartsheet wasn't just a boring piece of data collection software, it was an easy registration tool for DIY craft events, paint-n-sips, and IUP Price Is Right and other game shows. Our successes earned us recognition at the state level, and four other campuses participated in our programming with their students since they weren't offering anything close to what we were. Those multi-campus connections were key to building success during the pandemic, but leveraging on-campus connections to support initiatives throughout the pandemic was an additional hallmark of success for institutions, defining true collaboration. When there is shared commitment, shared space for brainstorming and planning, shared responsibility for work load and tasks, shared burden of cost and resources, and shared sponsorship, true collaboration has been achieved and only strengthens the possibility of success for the program, service, or intervention. Cogent examples include: institutional programming models and refraining from overlapped programming, thematic approaches to offerings and interventions, holistic learning and developmental outcomes, support and engagement wayfinding teams, cross-divisional representation on planning committees and crisis management teams, etc.

Speaking of Values...

Finally, institutions that refocused energy on their core values, particularly values that centered on high-quality offerings and interventions, student leadership and holistic learning outcomes, and diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, rediscovered themselves throughout COVID. Some of this value-building happened intentionally through #StrategicPlanning or #Visioning.

How tight do your values fit?

And some of this work happened quite organically... that by committing to some of the other aforementioned success imperatives, these values were clarified and fortified. That vital assessment work helped transform low-performing programs and services into high-quality ones. That student-centered missions required strengthened student leadership development and for student affairs offerings to meet student learning and development outcomes. That flexibility and innovation were required when responding to unforeseen national sociopolitical impacts upon the academy (such as what we witnessed throughout the 2020 presidential election, reframing nationwide conversations around free speech on college campuses and institutions balancing the needs of protecting student safety and permitting student assembly, or the period of civil unrest in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, amplifying the need for ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion work within student affairs and spaces for minoritized and marginalized identities on our campuses to express frustrations and address systemic and systematic inequities and power structures rooted in white supremacy). Those campuses whose values did not emphasize high-quality interventions, did not stress student leadership development, did not map offerings to learning outcomes, or only leaned into surface level statements of diversity, equity, and inclusion, found difficulty connecting with their #GenZ students, and lost out to other campuses. If there is one thing that we know for sure about our current generation of college students, it is that they are unabashedly values-oriented. And if an institution cannot clearly state what it believes, those Gen Z college students will have little difficulty clearly stating on their transfer paperwork why they are departing for somewhere else. COVID provided us and them the opportunity to cull our collective #Values.

...An Opportunity Squandered

Yet, many leaders within student affairs divisions and president's or chancellor's offices at the beginnings of the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years started using language such as, "it's time to get back to normal," or "we can't let fear drive our decision-making." But, the worst response of them all was the ubiquitous, "but we've always done it this way." <shudder> The opportunity to rethink, reassess, and reformat what we do, for whom we do it, and how we get it done was squandered the moment those words escaped leadership's (term used loosely) lips.

Higher Education at the Ultimate Crossroads

By thinking of COVID as an annoying blip rather than as a cataclysmic, but opportunistic shift, educators align themselves with maintaining the status quo and forcing students to adapt to the system versus removing systemic barriers to holistic student success, learning, and development and altering the system to better adapt to newer generations of learners. These institutions and these educators will attempt to stop the rolling in of the tide, but they will soon find themselves either inundated with water or wiped away completely. Hopefully, neither is the case, and change-oriented voices will resonate across their campus communities. For now is not a time for nostalgia or woe-is-me-ism. Now is a time to embrace an opportunity for change that comes once in a profession. Student affairs: let's meet this challenge head-on. Let's commit to evidence-based decision-making, student-centeredness, flexibility, nimbleness, innovation, collaboration, resourcefulness, and centering work on values, and #LetsChangeHigherEdForGood.

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Zachary N. Clark, M.A., is a change agent, a disrupter, and a barrier-buster; a student-centered, collaborator; a seasoned student affairs educator; a professional development whiz; an assessment, evaluation, & research nerd; a diversity, equity, & inclusion advocate; and a talented event planner & promoter. He's been active in higher education and consulting for 14 years, and is based out of Pittsburgh, PA. Connect with him here via LinkedIn. He is actively job searching within higher education and in corporate / adjacent environments.

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