Student affairs professionals have often relied on the professional development of staff rather than innovative design approaches to fulfill the challenge of creating programs, services, and activities that serve today's global and multicultural students. In this article, Jordan Harper and Adrianna Kezar introduce Liberatory Design Thinking (LDT)…

Ximena was sure she would be appointed as the Director of Student Life at Aspirante University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution. As interim director, Ximena strove to enact servingness in her everyday practice. Her efforts to create a culturally responsive, relevant, and affirming campus environment for Latinx students were unparalleled. However,…

Increasing numbers of academically talented students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are accessing higher education. This is an underserved and understudied cohort of students, as their talents can mask their autism, or their autism can mask their talents. We conducted interviews with 11 professionals who support academically talented students…

The Student Financial Services (SFS) Benchmarking Report examines student financial services operations, including: unpaid student account balances; student accounts in collections; payment channels and methods; student refunds; third-party billing; and staffing and financial services operating budget.

This article describes the development of the Clinical Load Index (CLI), a new metric for accurately describing and comparing staffing levels across college and university counseling centers. The CLI was developed by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) with support from the Association for University and College Counseling Center…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered unprecedented disruptions in higher education, forcing swift changes to core operations, particularly within divisions of student affairs. A review of the literature reveals COVID-19 presented many unique challenges for students and student affairs professionals, including disruptions in traditional…

Scholars have documented the positive outcomes that affiliation with sorority and fraternity life (SFL) organizations affords students; yet, few studies have explored how SFL professionals enable these benefits. Using validation theory as a framework, this narrative study examined how SFL practitioners affirm members of culturally based sororities…

Higher Education Student Affairs (HESA) practitioners play important roles in supporting their campus communities, specifically students, when bias incidents occur on campus. These HESA practitioners often hold the same minoritized identities as students impacted by bias and see their work in higher education as advancing missions of inclusion and…

In this article, we discuss major themes on Black males' mental health that have emerged from this monograph. We will also discuss and emphasize how various institutional agents such as student affairs practitioners, faculty, and administrators can use this information to better support Black males in higher education. Finally, we will also…

The United States continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse, and the nation's colleges and universities' demographics are commensurate with that growth. Between 1976 and 2017, the percentage of White students enrolled in postsecondary institutions fell from 84% to 56%, while the percentage of American college students who identify…

The CAS Standards are commonly used in undergraduate-facing student affairs practice but rarely discussed in legal education. This study explores law student affairs professionals' awareness and use of the CAS Standards, finding a significant divergence from the rest of the field and suggesting that (in the current era of increased scrutiny) law…

As a Student Conduct professional, I felt a tension between the espoused educational mission of our field and the daily functions of my role, which did not seem to have anything to do with education. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the purported educational mission of Student Conduct practice in higher education by building from the…

Professional development in higher education is increasingly shifting to online formats. However, online professional development often does not lend itself well to fostering meaningful human interconnection. Taking a constructivist approach, we share findings from a qualitative research study that explored what participants found meaningful in a…

The purpose and responsibilities of student affairs professionals have ebbed and flowed throughout the more than one hundred years since the profession's origins (Hevel, 2016). In the last several decades, there has been a resurgence of emphasis on the design of environments and experiences to support student learning outside of the classroom…

Student affairs professionals have a unique position within the higher education system; they provide students with opportunities to develop as a 'whole person' outside the classroom setting. SAPs are expected to be on campus, meeting the needs of students regardless of the time of day, responding to emergencies, while also trying to find balance…